One possibility is link networking. This is done with normal websites. Resource websites are expected to give many links both to cite sources and to give a more thorough reference. So it makes sense that an educational resource would give links to relevant pages of other resources. It has in fact become a standard part of social media on the internet to help people find what you are talking about.
We hear about how this group, site or resource better for different reasons, yet the information and the resource links are rarely all together. That's why search engines, bookmarks and other such services are so popular. There is a need they fill. While I still think they should be used, I think it would improve the educational resources to have many related links right on hand, rather than even on a seperate resources page.
When you read a wiki page and come across a word that is a link to another page, something interesting happens. The link is right there and you ask yourself if you want to follow that link. Perhaps the info would help you understand the content you are reading. It could be that you have no reason to check out the link, but it is there in case you want to.
Worse than not having the links easily available in a timely way is when this is done, the entire repository is based on a particular groups ability to create, maintain and manage the resource. Take Wikipedia and Scholarpedia for examples. Scholarpedia makes claims to be better than Wikipedia in certain ways, while Wikipedia is claimed to be one of the best internet resources. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. However, both are limited to single groups of users. If something happens to the service of one, there is a problem. Redundancy helps, if you can find another good source.
Let's look at Wikia to see another pattern. Wikia has many wikis and a large user group who participate in one or more wikis. This is much like Google where there are several communities where users of one group may be a part of other groups. In this way one group doesn't have to have all the answers, just the relevant ones.
If we look at schools and universities as user groups, we see a fairly similar interaction. In any group there is likely to be sub-groups. For Google and Wikia I have described them a little, but for schools it can be roles (teacher, staff, student ...), classes, subjects, clubs or several other things. In this way each school is a group of user groups, but the same goes for each educational institution as for a link network of institutions. Changing schools or taking classes at more than one is crossing the lines of the user groups called schools.
To help make that clear I'll compare it to open source groups. They commonly have wikis, forums and sometimes other means of communicating and documenting. The interesting part is that they do some interlinking for how their products deal with other products. Both wikis and forums show this behavior, and the benefits. Sometimes one resource has the answer, sometimes another and usually more than one has a good answer.
The internet has been described as a series of tubes, but what happens when the tubes don't take you where you want to go? That's when we rely on the search engines. That's what an interlinking network can help avoid. It also helps the search engines produce useful results. In the end there should be several possible resources easily accessible from a single page.
The good news is that the current direction for educational institutions is leading towards this kind of inter-resource linking. There's a lot to be done still, but it could be coming pretty soon.
Have fun, spread the word and tell me what you think,
Igen Oukan
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