Organizing teaching resources

[liv]

So the first online course of our giant international Covid training project is live: behold The power of genomics to understand the Covid-19 pandemic.

I'm mainly linking to show off, but you're welcome to join if you'd like. It's pitched at a scientific audience but if you have high school biology and some general curiosity you'll probably make sense of most of it. Totally free of cost and it doesn't matter if you poke at it but don't complete it.

Getting it over the line has been a massive enterprise; basically it's involved three months of shifting our entire way of working from a local thing mostly run by me and senior minion, to this incredibly complex collaboration with the COG consortium, already a huge mega-group across many different institutions. Plus we are desperately trying to decolonize! all! the! things! and work on an equal level with experts from all over the world, even though most of the UK team are used to a Eurocentric model of training.

I mean one of the reasons it's slightly delayed is that Omicron hit in the middle of the development process. The African-led group who first identified the variant got extremely angry with the rich countries that punished their disclosure instead of helping them with the crisis. Which was entirely justified but we got somewhat caught in the backlash and a bunch of previously enthusiastic African collaborators decided they didn't trust Europeans at all any more. We are honestly trying not to be parasitic White Saviours, but it's a learning curve and it's basically fair that we've run out of benefit of the doubt and second chances with some people.

Anyway, work discussions and planning have reminded me that in my personal life, I've spent the pandemic years creating and accumulating a huge pile of teaching resources, while I'm teaching on Zoom and don't have access to books, or the books available aren't suitable for what I'm trying to achieve. But it's all a big mess just dumped into a directory on my computer.

I know I have information management people among my circle. Would you be willing to give me some hints for organizing all my electronic teaching materials? I feel like I should know this kind of thing based on my professional experience, but actually... I've either been in large institutions and relied on infrastructure and expert support, or I've been in backwaters who never really had an IM strategy and just got away with things being in a bit of a muddle because the scale was small enough that it never got unmanageable.

What I need is some kind of sensible plan for my personal materials, so I can find them again and adapt and reuse them. I am willing to spend some money but not five figure sums on subscribing to a service meant for institutions, not individuals. It needs to be something fairly easy to use; if even starting to tag and store things becomes a massive faff I'll end up just not doing it. I would strongly prefer something where the architecture is on my own computer and not in the cloud. I don't have a massive amount of stuff in terms of file size, just a very large number of mostly text files. Backups would be good but that's not the main part of the problem I'm trying to solve.

And-a-pony level would be something that can easily manage a mix of English language and Hebrew language materials, but I can probably catalogue things in English and use transliteration as appropriate.

Comments

[cesy]

It may be worth talking to alexwlchan about tagging personal documents.

[alexwlchan]

(Here via cesy, some suggestions below from somebody who's spent way too much time organising their digital files.)

What I need is some kind of sensible plan for my personal materials, so I can find them again and adapt and reuse them.

So I think the key question is how you want to find them again; what will help you retrieve the document you're looking for? e.g.

• are you going to look for an exact document that you know exists
• are you going to look for everything about a given topic
• do you want to explore your collection

And how does your brain like to organise things? Are you a "files and folders" person, or a keyword tagging, or a free text search in a large folder person?

You should organise your documents around how you'll want to find them later, because (1) that creates a positive feedback loop around organising and (2) it avoids pointless busywork. Organising it for some hypothetical other person probably isn't a good use of time.

If that’s a bit hard to think about in abstract, I’ve written a blog post where I went through a concrete example of this (organising my scanned paperwork).

---

FWIW, I use a mixture of two apps:

• Obsidian for text notes. You can create some dizzying structures in it; mostly I use keyword tags and Wiki-like linking between notes. e.g. I can find all the notes about trains, or all the notes that link to a longer reference note. It's just a collection of text files on my local disk; very portable.
• docstore for organising non-text files with keyword tags. I wrote it myself and I'm not sure I can recommend other people use it, but it might give you some ideas.

[jenett]

Librarian here, also do my own information wrangling for writing purposes (world bible and publishing related info) and general life stuff.

There are a couple of keys for me in a system that I'm accessing (as opposed to a shared one like a group drive at work, where I need to coordinate naming systems and structures.)

Stuff I think about:
- How hard is this going to be to search? (there are some topics in my files and notes where the same words show up thousands of times over hundreds of files: I am going to need some other way to find things in those files. Other topics may only show up a handful of times, a good search tool will handle that.) For the stuff that shows up a lot, I probably want something like a coherent tagging system or folder system to differentiate content usefully and find it again.

- What kinds of stuff am I storing? Text? Images? PDFs? Audio? Other files? I am mostly a "Stack non-text stuff in topic-focused folders and put pointers to where it is in my text notes" but there are exceptions.

- Am I talking about current projects that I'm accessing a lot, or is some of this archived stuff I mostly don't need but don't want to get rid of? (The latter can be in a different structure, harder to access, etc. Or maybe I can do a layer of "I know what this relates to" structure that doesn't always happen when I'm in the middle of a project.)

I'm currently using Obsidian as the main tool for that (with bookmarks in Pinboard and books to read in a different app).

I'm planning on doing a write up and video call about how I'm using Obsidian for early March (the call is part of a series I've been doing about research and accessibility related stuff relevant to modern Pagan/witchy/magical practices, so the relevant content I'm tracking there is going to be my witchy notes and reference materials, but the structure is relevant to a bunch of things, and I will probably also show off some of the world bible bits.)

If that's interesting to anyone reading this, feel free to ping me and I'll send you the call info when it's set up in a week or two. (Recordings + transcripts go out to anyone who registers for the call, no cost for any of this, but asking me questions is super helpful to me for what to talk about.)

[ephemera]

Could I get in on that call? Thanks!

(Reading these responses with interest - I'm runnning a hybrid folder/file system for personal docs and heavy tagging in Zotero for published-things-and-associated-notes, but always up for learning about new tools.)

[davidgillon]

I did a lot of this kind of thing with Evil Aerospace, but unfortunately not in a way that's actually going to be useful. Mostly I was running configuration/file management systems (as in software file) and we started off with a homegrown system, segued to a heavily customised commercial system and were migrating to a not-at-all-customised one when we came to our parting of the ways. I'm not certain they're really relevant other than that they point out the disadvantages of a bespoke solution when the people doing the bespoking are no-longer available.

I also helped set up the company document management system (a commercial product), but I can't for the life of me think what it was called, and it was probably too high a level product to be viable at the individual level.

When I looked at procuring a new CMS, the main issue (well, over and above the eye-watering license cost), was convincing people we should change our processes to match the software, rather than try and make it jump through hoops to do things the way we were used to. How you work is important, but you need to be able to find a workable middle-ground between you and the system, otherwise its not worth bothering. So if you do look at actually buying something I'd strongly suggest starting with systems that offer evaluation copies.

[hatam_soferet]

Hooray for you managing to scale up in an international way!

[ephemera]

Congratulations on the global launch!