Organization of online resources- needs work?

[Nancy O.]

Ah, sorry for the late reply.

Originally Posted by Kims Robot

I think FIRST has actually taken a crack at this themselves here:
http://www.usfirst.org/community/frc...nt.aspx?id=478
http://www.usfirst.org/community/frc...t.aspx?id=7006
The FIRST website has definitely collected a lot of the good & reputable resources, and they are much better organized & presented than in years past.

Thanks for the links, I took a look at all of those.

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

See Art Dutra's post above. I believe it recently finished a closed beta test.

Ah, closed beta? Oops, I signed up for an account >_< I think it got deleted so it all works out. They somehow managed to email the people on TIMS for our team though to verify me (I think that was the list they used). I didn't expect that, I got a questioning email from The Adults of our team u_u

Anyway, I'm not looking so much for a definitive list or collection of resources in one spot (in which case, the forthcoming NEMO list sounds like an excellent list), so much as I'm looking for some way to attach metadata to all the resources that are out there; this system that would accommodate resources that don't exist yet., as it would be more dynamic (continuously updated) than a static list (such as on USFIRST). The people who actually use the resources (for instance me) can contribute to the metadata, e.g. comments, ratings, or notes.

Also, not so much "link organizing" I suppose as document organizing. Version control, or something.
For instance, when I research one thing extensively, it seems that some of the newer powerpoint files will draw from previous versions, or from ppt files on similar topic from other people (or perhaps they just happen to use the same pics). Frustrating trying to merge similar documents, esp. if they're all huge files.
There's also distinction between documents used for presentations (just supporting material), and documents used to teach yourself. Or documents for presentations that have speaker notes attached that you can teach yourself from. But you can't tell from filenames.
As stated before, many of the presentations are in PDF format which is less amenable to reuse.
And a lot of the documents are missing info on whether it's okay to reuse / remix them. So, copyright info.

On a closer look, firstdev.wpi.edu has a lot of useful functions, so do ignore my rambling brainstorming post earlier.
Thinktank(?) has:
tags (well actually they are implemented like gmail labels, but with sub-labels, actually that should be plenty flexible for our situation),
capability to have online version of a document (not sure if it supports pics? Also not as supportive for online versions of slide-based docs),
multiple (community) rating,
version control (for the online version, not the attached documents. Although I suppose you could just keep on attaching documents with the name specifying the revision),
metadata for URLs (to do so, create a TT page around an URL).
A point of confusion there, the “assets” can be the document version(s?) of the online page, or links to outside resources such as you might find at the end of wiki page.
Actually the URL part is a little bit confusing since you can attach multiple URLs to one ThinkThank page, so the metadata is for the collection of URLs rather than each URL. And in fact a on WWW single URL is for page that can have multiple documents on it, so again not so much URL organizing as document / individual resource organizing.
Thinkthank does have editing, but not really commenting capability. So it's more suited for collecting resources on the site than applying metadata to resources outside the site.

Uhm. My brain hurts so I'll stop there. I'm not sure what I'm talking about anymore. X__x