Week 4 - Wrapping Up and Looking Forward

 I had a great week for this course. I finally am starting to see a real connection between the course material and real-life activities of people in my field. This week's topics, crowdsourcing and folksonomies, really sparked my interest. I've always been fascinated by the natural evolution of language and how people use their words to represent concepts. To that end I've always felt that language should evolve with the people who use it, and have taken a descriptive approach rather than a prescriptive approach. The child care profession in which I work is dominated by standards and benchmarks that are largely determined by boards and institutions that don't often take child care professionals' experience into account. The creation of a folksonomy by child care providers and other education professionals is hugely important for resource and knowledge sharing and the emergence of a network of practice. 

Tying that in to the Babytok Project I learned about this week, I see a huge role for social media in helping create these folksonomies and networks. TikTok can be a vehicle for child care professionals to share their tags, boost their messages, and connect with like-minded professionals. Collaborating on knowledge with other members of the network helps build relationships, link theory and practice, and visualize the connection between terms and concepts. Additionally, working in child care can be oddly isolating. Having a community working in the same field, using the same folksonomy, and sharing recognizable tags can help alleviate that feeling of isolation. The two-pronged message of the Babytok videos, infant-toddler communication strategies and reminders about the importance of the role of care provider, will go a long way in shaping the future of professional development and networking in the child care field.

Overall this has been a really fun week! 😎