Getting There...

I have been wallowing around the various LT702 course links and I think I am finding my way. One subject that was discussed at the previous workshop was the preferred level of organisation of course material. I was complaining away, and Bronwyn asked a piercing question: "When you open a book, where do you start?"

It turned out that different people start in different ways. Some like to flick through the book, looking at bits here and there. These people also seem to like the web page structure of the course, with links going everywhere, sometimes duplicated and sometimes in circles.

I am not like this. When I start studying a book, I go first to the table of contents, where I like to see chapter titles with subheadings and, ideally, sub-subheadings. For this, Bronwyn called me Linear (that is even worse than being called a rebel!) whereas I would expect anyone linear to go first to either the first page or possibly the index.

In terms of preference for the organisation of information, I would rather think of myself as Hierarchical. These terms actually correspond to historical terms describing information storage in IT. Beyond Linear (originally called "Flat File") and Hierarchical, the currently preferred information storage model (for the past 25-30 years) is Relational; maybe I should start working towards thinking in that way. I am currently teaching relational concepts to first-year students, so that might help me.

(There is a more recent (15-20 years) information storage model around: Object-based; the jury is still out on whether this is a generic advance over Relational storage.)

Bronwyn told me at the workshop that she thought the LT702 web site was fairly well organised, and of course she is right, certainly at the top level of the Guidebook. I am still getting used to the plethora of links underneath, but as the material begins to sink in, I am becoming more confident.