Contextualized Collection Building

Posted Fri, 08/28/2009 - 3:04pm by eileen
Beyond basic information dissemination, the next phase of development on the community site should be a place to build small, vetted collections for repurposing.
Wed, 11/11/2009 - 2:20pm
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rt
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Contexualized Collection Issues

The first question that comes to mind when thinking about creating small collections of re-usable objects is, "How granular should the resources be?"  A resource at its most granular state (think image or sound) is the most useful to the most users, but assigning an educational standard to it can be difficult if not impossible.  A good example is an image of an erupting volcano, which could be used in many ways and for many grade levels and subject areas.

As resources become "contexualized" and grouped with other resources into lessons or content units they become easier to tag for discovery, which is a good thing.  However, the resource "group" becomes less useful to the widest audience, e.g. a lesson on kinetic energy.  A good reference for this notion can be found at:

http://www.reusablelearning.org/about/Granularity.html

 

Another issue will be the need to use objects that have repurposing rights available and an easy method to let the user know how to find this information (the Granularity.html link above also has its own Creative Commons declaration).  A current example of this attribution approach can also seen in the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears' Photo Gallery collection at:

http://beyondpenguins.nsdl.org/photogallery/index.php

 

A third issue to tackle would be how to provide a method for users to both rate and share the grade-level usefulness of a contextualized resource with others.

rickT
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