[olpc-help] Do kids really "get" tagging and Journal searching?

[dpbsmith]

I (an adult in the U. S. brainwashed by using a Mac since 1984) find the Journal difficult to use. Do little kids really get the knack of tagging and searching?

It appears to me that to find things in the Journal you really need to tag things--the XO activities don't seem to do much in the way of assigning good titles automatically, and don't seem to tag things automatically at all. It all feels very left-brained, literate, and language oriented. Like using a Mac with no spatially oriented Finder, only Spotlight.

I feel some cognitive dissonance between the core principle (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Core_principles#Child_Ownership) that
> The XO is designed for the use of children of ages 6 to 12—covering the years of the elementary school—but nothing precludes its use earlier or later in life. Children don’t need to write or read in order to play with the XO and we know that playing is the basis of human learning.

and the statements that

> Despite the flatness of the Journal, finding past entries shouldn't prove difficult thanks to a tagging structure built from the ground up for the laptops. By associating relevant descriptive words with each journal entry, searching for an entry becomes as easy as describing it. These descriptions will manifest in two ways, tagging and metadata. The former provide a straightforward manner for the children to describe and organize their stuff, while the latter provides a more technical means by which activities can associate relevant data and tags with all Journal entries they create.
> 
> Tagging will become a fundamental process for all types of data and activities on the laptops. Fortunately, children have a natural inclination to describe their world and the things they see and do. This actually aids kids in learning, as they will enjoy describing the drawing they've made, the stories they've written, or the composition they produced, and can learn new vocabulary in doing so. Of course, the kid-like desire to describe things doesn't detract from the usefulness of this tag-based system as they grow older.

Do you find that 6-12 year old kids are able to tag Journal entries and search for them?