on teaching hierarchy and organization …

In a post at the Blue Skunk Blog a while ago, Doug Johnson discussed having a “folder mind-set in a tagging world …” I think that I’m a folder mind-set guy, but I’m not too sure why that is.

Based on the way that I make decisions in the rest of my life, I think that by nature I’m not really very organized and methodical. I don’t like to plan what I’m going to do on weekends or for vacations. If I feel like going to a movie, I go to a movie. If I feel like lying on the sofa and watching tv, that’s what I do. I ended up with two post-graduate degrees without planning either of them. I didn’t know how to teach my second graders how to spell so I took a few classes. I wanted to know how to improve my kids’ reading comprehension so I took a few more. Before I knew it, I had enough credits to finish a degree. Library school was the same way. I wanted to know how to each kids how to research so I took a few classes. Before long, I had a degree. My degrees just seemed to happen organically and I think that, that is a reflection on my basic nature.

When I’m working online or on a computer, however, I’m a folder organizing crazy man. I use Bloglines rather than Google Reader because it is easy to group like feeds into folders. I use Yahoo Mail rather than GMail for precisely the same reason.

I kind of suspect that if I was a seventh grader in the world today, I’d be the kid dumping every single document ever created and every single e-mail ever saved into one huge jumble somewhere and trying to tag them so I could retrieve them at a later time, but I am a folder guy because of a lot of years of training and being taught to think in terms of hierarchies and broader and narrower topics.

Do kids of today have to know about hierarchy? I’d say yes, but am I just being old fashioned? Doesn’t understanding hierarchy and the relationship between things that are broader or narrower help you understand a concept better? I’d suppose that, those are concepts that would still be taught in other areas, but wouldn’t we lose something if we didn’t teach it specifically when kids are trying to access the information in other sources?

on tag, you’re it … !

I’ve been keeping a personal blog for a few years now, but I’ve been a bad librarian/archivist with my blogging. In the three years that I’ve blogged, I’ve never taken the time to add tags to anything. Now, I’m very much a natural language keyword searching kind ‘o guy. I’m a bit like my middle school students in that I’ll almost always start my searching with natural language keywords then move on to subject searching and controlled vocabulary if I need to.

Yesterday, I finally figured out why one should add tags to one’s posts. Last year I wrote a series of posts about the people that inhabit the building where my condo in Hawaii is located. Thankfully, just about everyone in the building is really great and friendly, but there were two women who for some reason decided from moment one when I met them that they hated me. Now, I’m not into stereotypes, BUT (and you must have known that there was a BUT coming here) … These women happened to be quite “handsome” indeed.

I’ve digressed, but to make my question relevant I’m going to digress even further …

These two women fascinated me because they had two cars and just one assigned stall so for an entire summer, they left one car parked in a stall on the street fronting the building. The weird thing is that they would rotate their use of the cars and when they were going to use the car on the street they’d move their second car from the building lot onto the street in order to hold the space. Here’s the thing, THEY NEVER DROVE BOTH CARS AT THE SAME TIME yet one of the cars was BRAND NEW. It still had dealer plates on it. Why would you buy a second car just to leave it on the street???

Well, to make my ridiculously long story shorter, the angry (but handsome) women have since moved out. I was trying to find my archived posts because I wanted to write about the fact that they’re gone, when I realized that it was like finding a needle in a haystack and that it would have been a breeze had I given my posts an appropriate set of tags: angry, women, street parking, man hating lesbians? … You get the idea.

The problem with all of the this uncontrolled vocabulary tagging stuff though, is how the heck do ya’ll remember your tags? I suspect that I killed a few too many brain cells during my, euphemistically speaking, “experimental college years” so my memory is basically like nectar in a sieve. Therefore, here’s the long winded bottom line.

How you keep track of your tags?