(image by flickr user craigemorsels per creative commons license)
Does Prof. Hacker take requests? You bet! For example, Katy writes to ask:
I don’t know if you officially take requests, but I have one for you if you’re willing. I’d love a post on how you keep your class files organized. I’m in the process of trying to come up with a logical filing system for all of my class notes/handouts/exams etc. and am struggling with how to do it. By class taught? By subject area? By author? Also, how much student work do you keep and how do you file it?
Excellent questions all!
First, a principle, which I am stealing wholeheartedly from Merlin Mann: “Lose the shells”:
The idea here is that you probably don’t have a place in your home or office where you store the shells from every peanut you ever ate. If you did, you’d definitely want to organize them by the year in which you ate them, perhaps keeping separate jars per-month or per-location where you ate the nut. You know. For posterity. But you don’t do that. It would be insane. Once you eat the peanut, the job of the shell is done. So lose it. Ditto dead email. Never organize what you can simply discard; and if you can’t discard it, throw it onto one big pile.
This is where you protest, “but class notes and handouts and such aren’t dead e-mail, and they’re not peanut shells. They’re an important part of my work, and they need to be Organized.” Because it’s an affront to their dignity if I don’t have an excellent taxonomy that lets me find the handout in its proper spot.
Mann’s point is that whichever taxonomical scheme you choose will be the wrong one later. If you organize files by course taught, then chances are you won’t remember le handout juste when you teach a different class. Organize ‘em chronologically, and you’re always having to make fresh copies of things. There’s got to be a better way!
I know this will shock the Prof. Hacker community, but I recommend saving almost no paper copies of teaching materials–this is what computers are for. You don’t need a filing system; you need to be able to search for the right file at the right time. Your Mac doesn’t care about your elaborate filing scheme–you’re going to use Spotlight to find the file anyway. You can use applications such as Evernote or DevonThink to index your files, or you can do cool keyboard ninja searches with Quicksilver–it doesn’t matter which.
The only organizational scheme you need, then, is the one that gets you through the current semester. I have a folder on my desktop called “active,” which contains a folder for each class, a folder labeled “service,” and another labeled “research.” At the end of the semester, I move the contents of the first two folders into another folder labeled “archive”–and I’m done.
As far as student work goes, unless I’m keeping something as a model to show other students, I throw unclaimed papers out after a semester.
One caveat: Your university–or your state if you are at a public university–might have regulations about how long to keep things like old gradebooks. But even there you can usually digitize a copy and save that.
All of which is just to say: Don’t file. Search. Lose the shells.
Is this wrong? If you have a great filing scheme, leave it in the comments!
10 Comments
Don’t forget assessment for accreditating bodies, for internal review and so on. I’d add a folder called ‘assessment’ or ‘portfolio’ to keep examples of student work and build a record of teaching effectiveness.
Great – this is very helpful. I must confess that I am a packrat who keeps all the peanut shells. One add-on question for commenters: how do you archive websites and videos that students produce for teaching portfolios and tenure dossiers?
There are two places you can expend the effort: on the front end, organizing all your materials, or on the back end, finding what you want specifically. I figure it’s best to wait to expend the effort until I’m sure that I need something.
Actually, search is improving to the extent that you don’t have to expend that much effort to find something. It almost never takes me more than a couple of seconds to find a digitized handout, or the various syllabuses I’ve used to teach the Brit Lit survey.
I’m with Jason about being less concerned about finding files on my computer. I use Google Desktop, or even lately, gasp, Windows Live Search to locate most of my files. I generally try to create electronic file folders in broad categories (Chair Stuff, Courses, Scholarship) with just a few subheadings.
Still, as a department chair, I have a lot of paperwork that I have to hang on to in paper form. Keeping that material organized is always hard, though generally most of it is personnel material, so it sorts nicely into individual folders for each person. [I've found that for the non-digital files, a label maker is essential, especially if you can find one that will print from your computer. I use the Brother PT-2100 Label Maker, though I think it only works with Windows....]
Interesting remarks about taxonomies and their not being right when you need them.
I know of only one computer program deliberately designed so that you can create multiple taxonomies and search with exactly the one that you need. The program is called Tinderbox and it uses “agents” which are tiny pieces of code that perform all sorts of actions including searches on a body of unorganized texts.
It can be found here: http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/
We were trained to think up taxonomies; most of us couldn’t have written dissertations without them. Mark Bernstein — the author of Tinderbox — has argued that we need to learn to collect first with NO taxonomies and then create — via agents — organizing shapes to apply to the texts.
ken tompkins
The only things I save in hardcopy format are file folders with handouts and syllabi, and anything students had to sign (like permission forms for research or things like that). Oh, and course evaluations. But that’s it — everything else is electronic. It helps that students turn in their work as attachments or via Google Docs — it reduces the amount of paper I even see.
As for my own work, like notes or handouts and what not, given that I have a formula for how much time I spend in a coffee shop for the free wifi, it should come as no surprise that I have an organizational system for my course files too (and naming conventions). Courses I’m currently teaching live in a directory off my desktop, and courses I’ve taught are archived in a different directory. Naming convention for directories is: yearsemester_course_section, like 09SM_ENGL403_03 (English 403, section 03, Summer 2009). Files in the folder follow a similar convention, which I shorten up a little in lieu of using a descriptive name, such as: SM09_E403_project3_generalinfo.docx When students send me their work electronically, it goes into a subdirectory for each assignment. For instance, essay1 or employmentportfolio, depending. I long gave up on students following any sort of naming convention I would give them in the assignment sheets, so I just change it when I extract it from email — with a naming convention like assignment_lastname.docx (p6_chun.docx).
If I think I’m going to reuse a handout for many classes, I’ll throw it in the “general” directory, up a level from the class directory, and with a general name, like coverletterexamples.docx or setting_up_a_blog.doc and so on.
I’m incredibly organized when it comes to teaching, but with regards to my own research….I have a directory of PDFs and scattered notes in text files, going back several years. That directory is called “add_these_to_zotero_you_idiot”.
I agree wholeheartedly about not archiving paper copies of class materials.
But I’m going to offer another perspective about organizing digital course materials. Two significant reasons I don’t rely on file searching are (1) to get usable, distinctive results, either your files have to be well tagged or they have to contain distinctive terms in the fulltext. I don’t like having to waste time sifting through search results to find the file I want, especially since teaching materials fall into simple, predictable categories; and (2) to find something using search, you have to know that you need to search for it.
I have some courses I teach every year; others I only repeat every 3 years or so. By keeping my course materials bundled together in a consistent digital filing system, I don’t have to rely on my faulty memory to recall that I had a handout on a particular topic. When I return to teaching that course, I can pull up its folder and easily see the sequence of assignments, handouts, etc.
My file tree looks like this: A folder for each course I teach (ENGL 1234, etc). Under that, a folder for each iteration (Fall 2008, Spring 2009, etc). Each of those contains lecture notes and other materials from that term, with subfolders for handouts, supplemental readings, and study questions.
If you frequently teach the same texts or topics in different courses, you could bundle handouts with the notes on those texts or topics. I know that if I am looking for notes on author X, that there are usually only 1 or 2 courses that I’ve ever taught that author in. And I keep a separate file for my actual notes on the texts, which are different from lecture notes. But obviously, that’s getting into much more detail than anybody cares to know about…
for me, I keep all course material (lectures, etc.) in a loose two-tiered folder structure (Courses > Social History of Digital Games or Projects > NEH Civ Mod). Then, I leave the rest up to Spotlight (I’ve tried Quicksilver about 4 times, but have never really gotten the hang of it).
The vast majority of my course material is digital – no syllabi, no hand-outs – so, I don’t have to worry about physically archiving any of that kind of course material. When it comes to non-digital assignments (I still have students physically hand in papers – mainly for the purpose of grading), I keep ‘em as long as the university requires (1 year), and then dispose of ‘em (in the secure manner mandated by the university). I tend only to keep those papers that I find important or noteworthy. Same thing applies for exams – I keem ‘em only as long as I’m required, and then delete them (its rare that I’ve got an exam from a student that is worth hanging on to). For my classes that have pure digital assignments (game design, user experience design/user centered design, cultural heritage informatics) I follow the same strategy – I keep stuff only as long as I’m required, and delete as soon as I can. As with paper assignments, I’ll keep what I find interesting.
Given the fact that I’ve got so much digital, I back up obsessively. I’ve got a Time Capsule that backs up my Mac Book Pro regularly. In addition, I dump course content to another external HD at the end of every semester. I regularly export and back up the database from each of my WP driven course sites (so that I can restore the site if the server has a nervous breakdown – something that has actually happened). I’ve also considered turning an old linux box into a file server/ftp server (and sticking it in my office) so that I can remotely dump and retrieve course files if needed. I’m pretty paranoid about loosing digital content – hence the crazy backing up. I’ve never had a catastrophic HD failure, but you never can be too sure.
I’m teaching on the college level for the first time this fall, so pardon my newbie status, but I also strongly agreeing about keeping the amount of paper hard copies to a minimum other than the examples cited above. As for organizing my files, I will use the same system I did late in my undergraduate career and in graduate school. I label files by semester and subject. For example, the paper I wrote in the spring of 2008 on Mrs. Dalloway would be labeled s08_dalloway.odt
I keep everything in odt format and export to pdf or doc as needed.
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