Ontology, Folksonomy and Grounded Theory

So grinding through a few concepts here. Established that GTM can be used in support of critical pedagogy as long as you steer clear of the impulse to use GTM as an elite process. Evetts, Mieg, and Felt,(2006)

One of the mechanisms of the elite scientific process is the definition of terms, vocabulary and ontology. Lamp and Milton,(2007) talk about the relationship between GTM and the process used to generate ontologies.

Glaser was concerned that GT not become an exclusively academic exercise serving only the proprietary interests of a particular discipline. Of course, Glaser is fairly proprietary about GTM and is certainly representative of an academic elite.

Ontologies can be compared and contrasted to Folksonomies. Wikipedia discusses this. "Folksonomy has little to do with taxonomy—the latter refers to an ontological, hierarchical way of categorizing, while folksonomy establishes categories (each tag is a category) that are theoretically "equal" to each other"

Great quote from Clay Shirky "It is a rich irony that the word "ontology", which has to do with making clear and explicit statements about entities in a particular domain, has so many conflicting definitions."

Here is the tie back to critical pedagogy. I suspect that Illich would see folksonomies as tools for conviviality in that they support the reclaiming of the learning function outside of an academic environment.

Signed up this morning for an web app called Knoodl. This is a service dedicated to the generation of ontologies or vocabularies as they describe them. They make much use of communities and wikis. After I figure it out I'm going to try to create an ontology for KYD and maybe for GTM generally using some of the ideas from Lamp and Milton.

Evetts, J., Mieg, H., & Felt, U. (2006). Professionalization, scientific expertise, and elitism – a sociological perspective. In Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (pp. 105-127). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Lamp, J., & Milton, S. (2007). Grounded theory as foundations for methods in applied ontology. In Proceedings of QualIT. New Zealand: Victoria University of Wellington. Retrieved December 16, 2008, from http://lamp.infosys.deakin.edu.au/journals/index.php?page=categories.