conclusion

Conclusion
This page http://tagunity.wikispaces.com/conclusion DRAFT 1160356108 400 words

How could we begin to understand how community members, their practices, shared vocabularies and artefacts in relation to the tags/folksonomies they might create using tools or environments the support social tagging //**and**// social networking? A finding of this literature review suggest CoP members and their technological-artefacts could be examined as multiple-dynamic-interlinked systems of activities, where people and their actions create meanings and roles for each other, the technologies they use, and the notions of community's relation to these technologies. This could, perhaps be seen as an organic and interwoven evolutionary process of change, involving a distributed network of both human and not human actors.

Practice based theories bring focus onto the social aspects of knowledge creation and sharing. e.g. "Activity theory introduces the crucial distinction between collective activity systems and individual actions," (Engeström 1999, abstract).

> TODO: Argue the rationale for using practice based theories to research the relationship between social tagging (as a practice), and knowledge sharing (as an outcome of a shared practice within a communty).

> TODO: Discuss Taguinity as a space, an artefact in a further discussion on PBTs, CMS, knowledge sharing, and content creation and content classificaiton.

//Assumptions// e.g. a matter of scale, delicious has many users, yet a CoP may comprise a relatively small number of people who know each other relatively well. 1160199711

//Three problems with mutually compatible solutions// One way of understanding the overlaps and interrelations presented in Tagunity is to consider formal ontologies, communities of practice (CoPs), and social tagging as three approaches to the creation of meaning for the purpose of content creation to support knowledge sharing. Each of the three approaches has weaknesses, when considered in isolation. Formal ontologies, like taxonomies are not at all social, they can be too rigid, expensive to create and maintain, and too complex for ordinary users to understand. Communities of practice may be highly unstructured, and lack the collective motivation to formally create shared resources and central knowledge repositories, or "artefacts" or shared content. Finally, tools and environments that permit users to create their own social-tags, folksonomies or informal classifications may lack the structure and formality, and contain too many semantic ambiguities for … [expand]? 1156631609

An important question remains, however, as to the relation between members of communities that are primarily face-to-face, and the proportion of community members who are motivated to create shared representations of their knowledge and vocabularies online. Should the creation and maintenance of shared vocabularies be judged by the folksonomies created by a motivated minority, or is their a danger that practice in the real world is too distinct from its online representation that further research is not warranted?