Basic organizing schemes (periodic table of elements, supermarkets, clothing stores, schools) are all built around physical organization schemes: Venn diagrams, hierarchies.
Hierarchy: Kingdom, Phylum,...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jAGOibTMuU&feature=relatedr>
Periodictable of visualization methods
http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html
Periodictable of the elements http://periodic.lanl.gov/default.htm
“The periodic table of the elements…organizes the elements by the number of protons in the nucleus…all the way over in the right-hand column, the pink column, are noble gases. Now noble gas is an odd category, because helium is no more a gas than mercury is a liquid. Helium is not fundamentally a gas, it's just a gas at most temperatures, but the people studying it at the time didn't know that, because they weren't able to make it cold enough to see that helium, like everything else, has different states of matter. Lacking the right measurements, they assumed that gaseousness was an essential aspect - literally, part of the essence - of those elements. Even in a nearly perfect categorization scheme, there are these kinds of …errors.”
Shirky, Clay. “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags” Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet. 2005.
Accessed 13 Mar. 2008
<http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html>.<br>
One item can have many facets/ tags and how this is an improvement over the physical library solution (the genre label sticker.) View Pandora Internet Radio and discuss how the music genome project's classification scheme affects the ability of the webapp to predict what songs we like. Click on Now Playing and then on the Song tab to see the facets that describe each song. Compare this to last.fm, which groups by similar artists http://www.last.fm/music/Coldplay/ similar
Organize homework assignments
Use an Excel Spreadsheet or Google Spreadsheet. Enter list of homework assignments, add variables. Show students how to sort by variables like due date or complexity. Then for each assignment addd a new variable to "weight" each assignment by importance/priority (discuss how this might be different for each student… you may need to raise my math grade, perhaps you can’t afford to be late turning in an assignment as you would then get an extra Spanish homework, etc.) Organizing in this way helps remove the emotion from the business of ordering and classifying.
Discuss the importance of consistency within labels.
Faceted Classification http://www.kmconnection.com/DOC100100.htm
Facets = clearly defined, MUTUALLY exclusive, characteristics. '..indiv facets can be retrieved alone or in any desired combination." You don't need to know a category name. Flexible = easy to add new facets. Don't even need to know the name of the object. 'Purity' less imp. than immedicate effectiveness.
Classification Theory http://www.digitallantern.net/school/classification.htm
