After the blur of last night’s class and the jolt of this morning’s coffee, I actually think I am managing to muster a clear thought. It goes something like this…
I spend a lot of time thinking about (and reading research on) how experts see the world; how they think, what they think about, and why they think about things that seem so “distant from” from what they are actually working on – when solving problems. I believe the notion of making thought processing explicit through tagging could really add value to understanding experts, how they associate seemingly dispirit information and draw analogies.
Part of the problem in this area of research has to do with experts’ inability to explicitly tell you the associations they are making; sometimes they don’t even know they are doing it. Watching the tags of experts would allow us to travel the mindset of those people, and analyze (like google, Klout, and Amazon) what their NEXT thought, idea, preference or association might be. I can see a lot of professional industrial application for this, especially as our workforce ages and the Millennial masses move in to replace the Baby Boomers. How can we assist them in being successful? I am wondering if tagging can help us with this…
Really interesting thought! tagging and experts. would like to hear more! In my project asking people to tag academic papers. I feel the reasons for the “disaster” of non-experts tagging are (1) lack of expertise (2) lack of motivation (they don’t care what the hack these papers are talking about…). I didn’t think about to capture the thought process of experts.
I think you’re on to something, this is an idea worth exploring. Start small: Do tags capture experts’ thought processes? You could compare how experts and non-experts tag the same set of items and draw some initial conclusions.
What you can and cannot do with this, is another story. I am not sure about the prediction idea, but the fundamental idea here has merit and may be worth exploring.
[...] a neat idea from GenXRecon – demonstrating how, if you make ideas yours by applying them to your own interests, you may [...]