Perspectives on Tag Clouds for Supporting Reflection in Self-organised Learning

Tags are popular for organising information in social software based on the personal views of the participants on the information. Tags provide valuable attention meta-data on a person’s interests because the participants actively relate resources to concepts by using tags. This paper analyses three designs for tag-clouds that are integrated in the ReScope framework for reflection support. ReScope provides a widget for visualising personal tag-clouds of the tags that were used with social bookmarking services. The presented designs focus on processing and representing attention meta-data on the levels of recency, of collaboration, and of social connectedness from the perspective of situated learning. The present paper analyses how the designs are related to the underlying presumptions for supporting reflection using the different representations of attention meta-data.