One of the important ways that we launched the workshops in YouthLAB is through the creation of tag clouds. If you don’t know what a tag cloud is - just check out our own home page - the big list of words to the right is the Tag Cloud for YouthLAB. Click on any of these words and you will go to a list of websites that we have bookmarked.

In YouthLAB, our tag cloud essentially links us directly to our curricular resources. For example, click on [maps] and you will see all the url links to maps that we reference for our own personal YouthLAB migrations map using a Google tool. In fact, the YouthLAB tag cloud encapsulates our identity as a collective by linking us to our questions, our reference points and our collective methodologies for assembling knowledge and constructing meaning.

We formed this tag cloud using an on-line social bookmarking tool called Del.icio.us. See our how to guide under the category Tutorial!

In order to introduce the conceptual power of social bookmarking, we decided to create non-digital tag clouds on our first day. Here is how it worked. We began by discussing tags and their multiple meanings (labels, graffiti, games etc). We asked -”Are labels positive or negative?” Most will quickly say BOTH. So we ask youth to write in their journals what are negative tags, labels, put downs, categories, stereotypes, words that disrespect, degrade or denigrate - particularly ones that they themselves or people close to them have been victimized by. Then they were instructed to select two of these words and write them on cards in bold black ink and slap them to a wall.

Continuing on, we now ask a different set of questions and tell them that we will now create a very different tag cloud. We continued the same process but asking different questions: 1) define your community - what words, images, sounds, smells, foods, ideas, thoughts come to mind; 2) what knowledge do you desire, what do you want to know more about; 3) what do your value, what issues are important to you, what do you care most about.

At this point we have two very distinct tag clouds clustered onto the walls - one is hateful and the other is more complex. When we asked the youth to describe the difference between the two - at first they see negative and positive. But we point out that some of the words on Tag Cloud 2 are not considered “positive” by all. They identify “Rum” for example and “Tourism”. Through a series of questions, they see that Tag Cloud 1 constitutes a set of labels and identifiers inscribed onto them from outside forces. In Tag Cloud 2, the words are “self-authored”, representing the complex and multiple aspects of who they are, where they come from and what they dream of becoming. We may not agree and we may not be free of conflict and controversy - but we define our own questions and pursuits.

Participants then go on-line to explore del.icio.us and contribute to the tag cloud . It becomes a kind of wiki adding to the collective identity, inquiry and intelligence of the group. Throughout the workshop, they will be expected to contribute to the YouthLAB Tag Cloud and with each post, youth will gain greater engagement, ownership and authorship within the project.

Self-authorship can them become something which is routinized with the workshop as democratic practice, as responsible journalism that cites its sources and as an actively evolving means of self-inquiry.