How Do Students Organize Personal Information Spaces?

The purpose of this study is to empirically reveal strategies of students' organization of learning-related digital materials within an online personal information archive. Research population included 518 students who utilized the personal Web space allocated to them on the university servers for archiving information items, and data describing their directory hierarchies. Several variables for measuring folders size and depth were defined, and four of them were chosen as best representing different aspects of the user's archive structure. Then, as a result of cluster analysis of the students, four organization strategies emerged, refining the classical piling/filing classification: piling, one-folder filing, small-folders filing, and big-folder filing. Also, associations were found between the organization strategies and archive size, students' studies degree. A discussion of this study and further research is provided. (Contains 4 tables.) [For the complete proceedings, "Proceedings of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) (2nd, Cordoba, Spain, July 1-3, 2009)," see ED539041.]