Information Architecture | Rebecca Thomas Designs

Knowledge Management is a Cultural Activity

Jun 162010

When June started, I had roughly 600 tags identifying everything from blog posts to notes to links to book reviews across nearly ten different sites. You could say I had a really fine-tuned control over all of my digital artifacts. You could also say that 600 tags was probably overkill, especially since an artifact was rarely ever tagged correctly. I’m slowly working on fixing both the number of tags I use and how they’re employed in the hopes I can actually use my system in a way that both makes sense to me and allows me to retrieve information.

As I was trying to get a feel for how my multitude of tags was implemented, I noticed that a lot of my knowledge and information management posts fell under the anthropology tag (or category, as the case is on this site). At first, I tried to figure out what I was thinking when I classified knowledge management and information management both as anthropology. Surely, they would be better suited to some other tag (that doesn’t exist on nearly half the sites involved).

The more I thought about it, the more I thought that I might not be so crazy after all. Taxonomies, folksonomies, and classification systems are created according to rules set down by the utilizing culture. I spent high school helping to keep both the collections and the acquisitions card catalogs in my high school’s library up to date. I got that task because I had learned how libraries organize information. In grad school, I had to learn whole new systems of classification as I learned about collections management. My current views on setting up a classification system for anything is governed by nearly ten years of library and museum experience.

Had I worked in other fields, had I experienced different cultures, I’m sure my ideas on classification would be different because they would have been shaped differently. I love reading about card sorting in information architecture (and may just resort to it to finish sorting out my own tags) because it shows how differently groups of people will group information because of their own needs and experience.

We all handle knowledge and information, and we all interact with them differently. Call me crazy, but I think that does actually qualify knowledge management and information architecture as cultural activities.

Daily Tweets

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Jan 092009

11:38 I’ve finished my crash course in information architecture. I had a good handle on the basics, and I’ve realized my IA style is bottom-up. #

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Has information scent replaced the three-click rule?

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Nov 062007

It feels like it wasn’t all that long ago when everyone was screaming that if a user couldn’t find what they wanted in three clicks, then they’d leave your site, never to return. It led to some, if you’ll forgive the expression, pretty shallow sites.

It’s possible that a couple of years ago, people had a hard time staying focused for longer than that. These days, everyone is stuck in “information overload” mode, and people are more willing to actively search for what they need.

It’s now slowly being suggested that instead of confining the user to a limited number of clicks, creating an information pathway that makes sense, an “information scent”, for the user will prove more helpful.

Information architects have been singing the praises of information scent for some time now, but it’s interesting to see other disciplines slowly looking to it as a viable design structure.

Taxonomies in information management

anthropology, web design View Comments

May 102006

It often amazes me how many terms I have grown up with from other areas of my life keep wandering into education. The first, and I’m finally making my peace with it (after a fashion) is the term “artifact”. I actually had to go to a dictionary to find out the full meaning of the word in order to accommodate this seemingly out of place use of the term.

The one I’m now wrestling with is “taxonomy”, a method of classifying. It’s been on my mind off and on for the past few months thanks to tagging and talk of folksonomies (or personomies). All of these odd terms that seem to have appeared because people felt that there was no term that truly fit the activity being described.

I’m still sorting out all of it in my own mind, but this article on defining taxonomy does a great job of comprehensively explaining the somewhat simple job a taxonomy can fulfill in the development of an information architecture structure.

Scaffolding

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Mar 242006

Mathemagenic shared some interesting links last week.

One of those was this post that compares information architecture to scaffolding. It’s not scaffolding the way we educators tend to think about scaffolding. It’s not talking about accessing prior knowledge and building on it. In this case, it’s talking about scaffolding from a building point of view. How scaffolds allow things to be built, to be supported and strengthened. It’s really an intriguing analogy in the context of social learning.

It then discusses knowledge management in this context. Really…fascinating discussion.

Five instructional design principles

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May 312005

This is yet another post that got lost in the jungles of my bloglines account. Very nice article on five basic instructional design principles. The points are made neatly and well.

I often look at instructional design and wonder if that would be a good place for me, but I’m afraid of losing the right to teach in the process. I love developing curricula. I used to be quite good at creating good, viable curriculum on any topic you handed me on very short deadlines. I miss those days.

I’ve been giving some thought to my education lately. I still aspire to the ranks of masters and phd, but I still haven’t quite convinced myself of where I want to end up, so I am still out of school. Perhaps I ought to consider a trip to UW and talk with some of their departments this summer.

Information literacy skills

anthropology, education View Comments

May 192005

As I may have mentioned before, I am developing an interest in information architecture and information literacy. With all of the information easily accessible out in the world today, I think both are very important. Credibility is a very hot, and very easily misapplied, commodity these days, and we have to be prepared to consider the credibility of every source.

The Joint Information Systems Community (JISC) has developed a list of information literacy skills (i-skills) that are important to foster in students (and the rest of us) including: “the ability to ‘identify, assess, retrieve, evaluate, adapt, organise and communicate information within an iterative context of review and reflection’.” It’s not terribly different from the skills we commonly teach in reading courses as we prepare students to discern whether something they’re reading is fact or opinion, nonfiction or fiction.

The ability to read critically is a very necessary skill in this age of information overload.

Found via the Information Literacy Weblog

This Week’s Exploration: Wiki

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May 072004

This one’s going to be shaky. I’ve only spent a little time looking into this one so far.

A number of people have told me recently that they wish they had a dictionary that was specific to me whenever they talk to me. I have many varied interests, and have had multiple interests my whole life, but I’ve never had so many so interested in understanding all of it.

I started trying to figure out the best way to go about creating such a thing. A number of people I know are fascinated with the wiki phenomenon, so I decided to poke through it to see what it was all about. From what I’m gathering, Wikipedia itself is an online encyclopedia that allows its users to update articles in an effort to create a very thorough resource. It even allows links to related entries to be created in an article. It’s a great way to allow a term to be defined without losing the storytelling quality of the initial article. The Wikipedia is even searchable, always a nice feature.

I am looking at this as a possible solution. There are some very nice resources on how to create your own wiki. However, they require a knowledge that I don’t have right now, knowledge of PHP. As I have been rather half-heartedly trying to learn HTML and CSS (and, apparently without realizing it, XHTML), I’m almost afraid to add anything else to the mix. I’m fairly certain I could do it, I’m just not sure if I have the time for it right now.

Right now, it’s just one more thing to think about while I’m trying to decide how to go about this. If any readers have a suggestion, feel free to leave a comment.