Week 8

Before the class, students were notified that they were supposed to take photos from campus and bring one of them to class as printed. There were no constraints about pictures besides it should be taken on the campus. The pictures are numbered by hand and posted on the walls of the auditorium.

An informative booklet about “gathering information” and “classification”. Library coding systems (Library of Congress and Dewey’s Decimal Classification) are explained. Then class has walked in the auditorium studying each picture and discussed possible category headings for the photographs and categorization hierarchy is developed collectively and live in class.

Assignment 7 (5/100 points): Students are asked to prepare a spreadsheet by hand having collectively designed headings and sub-headings and to assign each picture to a relevant group.

Students have remarked that some pictures belong to more than one group and learned that “boundaries” are not absolute.

Learned concepts are “classification”, “categorization”, “boundary”, “abstraction”, “focus”, “content” and “context”.

An extracurricular by-product of this activity has been a departmental exhibition of campus pictures taken by freshman students, which let them feel as part of the departmental community.