m-learning | Skilful Minds

Call them Visual Tags (v-Tags), not 2D Barcodes

August 13, 2008

For those who think discussions of semantic value and meaning are pointless, with no relationship to technology adoption, you may want to skip this post.

We first discussed visual tags in 2006. Many people today refer to them as 2d barcodes. However, a crucial difference exists between what things are like and what they in fact are. Calling visual tags (v-Tags) 2d barcodes is like calling YouTube a video database, Flickr a photo database, or Del.icio.us a favorites list. Literally, the description is accurate. Functionally, it is meaningless. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by Larry Irons

Mobile Learning and Visual Tags

August 4, 2008

eLearning Guild QR Visual Tag

We first discussed visual tags a couple of years ago as Web 2.0 technology initially emerged in mobile devices such as cell phones. Referring to two visual tagging techniques available at the time, we noted:

Shotcode and Semacode make mobile information seeking over the web work like scanning a bar code to determine the price of an item. They make offline media interactive. It is pure pull, unless you consider the offline advertising “pushy”. The metadata necessary for accessing relevant information is largely in the context, the embodied situation of the user.

Take a look at the following video for an overview of how visual tagging works, in this example it is for advertising services.