One of the questions we had about the SparTag.us social tagging system developed in our group was whether tagging systems support some form of transfer of knowledge from people who tag and the people who use those tags. Les Nelson, Chris Held, Lichan Hong, Ed Chi and myself worked on a somewhat complicated study that in which individual users had to make sense of a technical domain (“enterprise 2.0 mashups”).

Users were studied in a laboratory setting over the course of several days of work and the procedure involved all sorts of tests (including 2 essays), but let me focus on a core piece of the study. The Figure at left captures this part of the experimental design: There was a pretests of users’ knowledge about “enterprise 2.0 mashups”, then they worked in one of three conditions, then they got a posttest.

The condition of interest was one in which people worked with a version of SparTag.us that had been preloaded with tags by a  fictitious “expert.” In reality the tags had been carefully selected and vetted by experts. In one of the control conditions users worked with SparTag.us without any expert tags, and in the other control condition they just used Google and Microsoft Office applications.

The Figure at the top of this post shows the main result. When we calculate the percentage learning gain using the pre- and posttests we found that having access to the “expert” tags produced significant improvement over the control conditions (there was no difference between the controls).

Summary

When people are exposed to expert tags in SparTag.us they gain domain expertise relative. This is a kind of expertise transfer mediated by a social tagging system.