I just spent the afternoon editing e-Literate’s site theme organization. There are a number of reasons why I felt this was necessary:
- Too many posts were going into too many themes. While I deliberately chose to create a system of overlapping themes rather than a rigid taxonomy, an organization system starts to lose its value when more than half of the things being organized fit into many categories. I wanted to reduce the overlap somewhat.
- I often wasn’t sure which categories to use for a post. There were two reasons for this. One was that I needed to add a few new categories. But the other was that some of the categories I had didn’t fit quite right. For example, as much as I love Amy Gahran’s “Arranging Ideas” angle on KM, it’s a bit too…painterly for the way my own mind works. I don’t come at KM from a writer’s perspective the way that she does. So I had to change a couple of category names to make the boundaries clearer to myself.
- The posts listed under each theme didn’t seem to cohere well. Posts in a theme should ideally read something like a sequence of reusable learning objects, in the sense that there should be some feeling of common threads even though the individual posts were not written to be read in that explicit sequence. I didn’t have that sense of coherence when I went to the site themes page.
- Not all theme titles were helping readers to find content. Some theme topics, like “instructional design,” were getting lots of hits from the search engines (which pay special attention to words that are written as titles on the top of your pages). Much as I like the title “Aggregation Sciences,” nobody is entering that phrase as a search term on Google. So I tried to add more searchable phrases into at least the majority of the titles.
After reviewing the categorization of all 154 (!) of my blog entries, I feel a lot better about the organization now. And actually, I’m quite proud of an accomplishment that I didn’t even realize until I reorganized my categories. I created a new theme called “Build This, Please” which highlights my ideas for tools that I don’t have the skill to build myself. Despite the fact that e-Literate is only a little over three months old, I have actually had technologists respond to a surprisingly large number of my requests/proposals. That feels good.
