Teaching students how to organize information
Cliff March 20th, 2007
What better way to teach information organization than to have students do it themselves? We started out with disorganization, which students had to find individual items from:
Next, we put the items in alphabetical order by title. At this point I explained what articles are in the English language, and why including them can be a problem. Here we have the snail puppet filed under “S” for “snail puppet”, not “T” for “the snail puppet.”
Then we tried to locate an item by editor, and found that it was difficult, since the items were arranged by title. An explanation of the purpose of the OPAC ensued. Then we discussed the nature of subject headings, as some items (such as Feminism and Addiction) had more than one subject. Then we started the fun of tagging the Holy Bible to create our own folksonomy:
Each student created up to 10 tags, and placed identical tags near each other. By the end, we had a quite diverse tag cloud!
Only three tags appeared more than once: God, Jesus and disciples. The rest were all original tags (some of them quite creative!). Since the Holy Bible is both well known and widely interpreted, I was sure that we would get a diverse range of tags. If we had chosen a different item to tag, I’m sure we would have gotten a less diverse tag cloud.
I also asked students how they organized their own information (such as books and DVDs), explained the differences between taxonomy, ontology and folksonomy, and we discussed the benefits and drawbacks to each form of information organization. Altogether the class took about 45 minutes, and the students were engaged right up to the end.
If you think this was a good (or bad) idea, let me know by leaving a comment. Or better yet, write a half a page for my phoney job search before next Monday. Please, do it for the children!