I enjoy teaching about taxonomies. The feedback I get from
my students or workshop participants helps me improve my methods of
communication, teaching, and consulting, and I learn about the varied
implementations of taxonomies. The courses evolve and improve over time. I teach online courses, conference workshops,
and corporate onsite workshops. I’ve been making enhancements to the latter
offering and this week led a two-day onsite
workshop at a major company on the West Coast.
Accommodating a varied audience
The participants in my “introductory” workshops, whether at
conferences or at their corporate offices, have varied knowledge and experience
with taxonomies. Some are complete beginners and are curious to learn about
taxonomies and what they can do. Others have been tasked to build a taxonomy
with little instruction and are looking for best practices and guidelines. Some
of have read my book but have not had the opportunity to put what they have
read into practice, so the workshop’s exercises are very helpful. Finally, some
participants are experienced taxonomists seeking to fill in the gaps in their
knowledge.
The absolute beginners may feel overwhelmed at the amount of
information on taxonomies presented in one of my workshops, but I feel it’s
important to provide enough instruction to enable people to actually create
basic taxonomies (while ideally still getting feedback from someone more
experienced). Also, I expect people to combine instruction from my workshop
with other methods of learning taxonomies, such as reading my book, taking my
online course, attending conference session on taxonomies, or getting advice
from a taxonomist in their organization. While I would like to offer a more
advanced workshops, it’s difficult to find enough experienced practicing
taxonomists at the same location. (At a conference is possible, but sometimes
conference organizers equate advanced taxonomy topics with ontologies.)
Interactive exercises
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| Workshop participants doing a card-sorting exercise |
Participants like interactive or hands-on exercises. One of
the learning benefits of my onsite workshops is that they include interactive
exercises that involve the entire group or class. My online course includes
exercises or assignment to learn from the practice and from feedback I provide,
but only the onsite workshops offer the opportunity to work on assignments with
others and thus learn from others. Creating taxonomies, like designing websites
or software user interfaces, needs to consider different views and is somewhat
subjective. The classroom setting offers the opportunity to learn from others.
Small-group exercises are the best for this kind of
learning. My full-length workshops include small-group exercises for designing
a set of facets and for doing a card-sorting exercise to categorize topics.
Groups may comprise from three to six participants, depending on the total
number. In addition to hearing ideas from their group members, participants
then share the resulting taxonomy outline to the larger class, and I provide
comments. Even exercises that do not involve small groups, but are assignments
to consider and shout out answers, are beneficial, because we obtain, discuss,
and evaluate various answers beyond the answers that any one individual might
consider.
Remote participation is also possible, especially if the
remote participants are co-located in the same office. They can form their own
small group for the small group exercises, and they can do the card-sorting
exercise online. This was the case in my latest corporate workshop.
Customizing corporate workshops
Another way I customize the workshops is by the outline and
topics included. While all workshops include the basics (taxonomy types,
definitions, uses and benefits, standards, structural design, best practices
for creating terms and relationships, and governance), optional topics include:
user interface display options, metadata and taxonomies, testing taxonomies,
tagging, mapping taxonomies, multilingual taxonomies, integration with search,
and taxonomy management software.
Finally, I customize the group exercises so that the choices
for topics for facets would be applicable, and the card-sorting exercise may
take an actual example especially if the client has a public taxonomy I can use
as a basis for the exercise. I also include discussion questions, so that the
participants can share and discuss the taxonomy issues as pertinent to their
organization. In any case, I sign an NDA, so the client can comfortably share
information with me which I may sue in the workshop.
Continuous improvement
I found that asking the client for some input on possible customization,
I can also generalize the issues to enhance the workshop presentation for
future use. In other words, the client input on “customization” is not always
that, but rather leads to a general improvement. The result has been to make
the workshop presentation based more on real-world scenarios and less
theoretical than my previous conference presentations. I actually did not
consider my conference presentations to be that theoretical in the first place (since,
after all, my knowledge of taxonomies is based on my work experience, not on
studies for a degree in library/information science). But now I have made the
workshops even more practical.
Input from the client can also lead to topics for
clarification, such as differing use of terminology. For example, a client
wanted me to discuss taxonomy “mapping,” which we taxonomists understand to
mean the creation of equivalence links between terms in one taxonomy and
another, so that one taxonomy may be used to retrieve content that was tagged
in the other taxonomy. However, what my client meant by “mapping” was a kind of
“see also” related-term relationships between terms in two different
taxonomies. Now I know to clarify and discuss both kinds of links between taxonomies.
Just as I am an accidental taxonomist and then an accidental
consultant, so am I now also an accidental trainer. Details of my corporate
training offerings are on my website.
