Got an email from Matthew Kearney at UTS asking about what to do and where to go with those enormous and valuable projects we all went nuts over many years ago, namely the ‘resource / links sits’.
In particular Matthew points to some resources he put together a while back (edtech, science) for kids and prospective K12 teachers and shares frustrations which many of us, I’m sure, will share:
“As you can see, it soon got out of hand with a) maintenance b) user-friendliness (became simply another ‘long list of 1000’s of resources) and c) broken links..”
Which brings me to write (with Matthews permission) this post.
For me these are really valuable sites… there’s a lot of selection, expertise and opportunity for people to browse off from these and as much as I like my ‘up to the minute’ tagged, blogged or social links… this is where I’d point people / turn to in looking for significant links.
But, of course, it isn’t sustainable (unless you’ve got many hours to put this together) and is really, the reflection of only one persons perspective.
Matthew’s after something which is:
a) more student-driven & collaborative i.e.. by our prospective student teachers
b) easy to search and find useful resources and
c) (somehow?) free from ‘link-rot’ …
I’d probably add ‘currently relevant’ to the pile (another of the problems that these sites have encountered is a tendency to point to years old materials… particularly out-of-date considering the pace of change at the moment).
One of the possible solutions he’s thinking about is Scuttle, obviously there’s wiki potential here (but that doesn’t help currently relevant or link-rot issues) and something tells me that there needs to be a rating / review system here (a bit like an Amazon.com of links).
Another question is whether this could / should be a broader project than UTS… or whether you would want it to be?
Any ideas, I think this is something that most ed designers will come across at one point and it’d be good to have system in mind… even if it’s yet to be developed!