Embodied Conceptualizations: Social Tagging and E-Learning

Social tagging systems celebrate enormous growth rates on the World Wide Web. In this article, we want to look at social tagging from an educational perspective, particularly its use for educational environments. We identify the processes underlying social tagging from an embodied-interaction perspective. We will support the thesis that emerging folksonomies are at the base of meaningful interaction processes between user and system. Moreover, they represent embodied conceptualizations whose potential effectiveness in e-learning we will discuss. We will provide an example of e-learning software for children (Amici, implemented by one of the authors) in which social tagging is used to support sharing in a programming environment to showcase how the embodiment of conceptualization is achieved through tagging in the system.