Suggest creating a category structure
Hi Alison,
I agree and think this is an excellent suggestion. I was thinking along similar lines as well :-). At the moment I'm grappling and thinking how we might overcome the challenge with newbies getting their heads around categories and subcategories. Any thought or suggestions you may have are well received :-)
We might be able to automate some of this. Template:OER_Metadata can help a little, in that it will automatically insert a category tag. We could add an additional filed for "Sub-level" do manage the split between primary and secondary -- Two sub levels for schools.
Currently the experimental input box for lesson templates () sets creates the resources as a subpage of OERNZ -- eg OERNZ/World War II. Do you know of any tricks to remove the OERNZ from the actual alphabetical listing on the category page? The alternative is to drop the OERNZ prefex in the page URL -- but I'm worried how this will scale internationally. For example -- I imagine that there would hundreds of Lessons for Fractions for Grade 3 because of differences in national curricula regarding sequencing, emphasis, approach, links with other areas of the curriculum etc.
Thoughts and feedback welcome -- plus all the help you have time to give :-)
Cheers Wayne
As I said in an email response this morning, having OER authors complete the OER_Metadata template will go a long way to providing data about developing resources. And as you suggest, we can work in the background to figure out how best to use that data to maximize finding (and thereby reusing) resources. Categories seem to be the current solution to this, but Jim has some good suggestions in his email response below and we need to consider how the subpage structure will play out (agreed, there could potentially be an enormous number of resources for beginning fractions, grade 3 and otherwise, even within one country -- organization of it all will be challenging and ongoing).
As for how to achieve an alphabetical listing of many subpages on a category page, I don't have any ideas, although I have noticed that Wikipedia does something to create an alphabetical listing that ignores the namespace (but I'm guessing you all know about that already:)
To get us started thinking and give us a place for discussion about whether and how to implement categories, Jesse has started Workgroup:Categories. I'll sign on, so with one more volunteer we can initiate a community workgroup and get to work.
