Hi folks, I have been fairly tuned out from W.E. for some time because of changes in my teaching opportunities. But I have a project that may fit the W.E. mission. It's a bit more specialized and therefore more obscure than my previous project.
I work with schools that identify invertebrates in rivers as part of a large research collaboration. I host invertebrate identification web sites http://academics.smcvt.edu/Vermont_rivers/ each of which is tailored to the individual streams being visited by my partner schools. Each river page like this one: http://academics.smcvt.edu/Vermont_rivers/River%20sites/WR_AllnBrk_361.htm is just a shell that presents content from 16 or so web pages, each of which looks like this: http://academics.smcvt.edu/Vermont_rivers/Bug_templates/Arthrop/Insecta/Trich/hydropsychidae_ceratopsyche.htm The advantage being that when I update the Ceratopsyche page, the changes get reflected on all river pages that use the ceratopsyche page. There are about 100 such puzzle pieces that can be assembled into a river web site bases on what bugs we find there. It strikes me that recreating this resource on W.E. would be technically very feasible and once the puzzle pieces were there, they could be reassembled by others to match their favorite river. There are of course limitations; my bugs are specific to Vermont and Puerto Rico. However, it would not be much of a stretch to expand it to the North East US. At the family level it would cover a slightly broader geographic region. Potential collaborators might jump on the idea and expand it by creating their own puzzle pieces? Crop scientists might emulate the idea to fit their unique systems. Had I not a working model that get's about 20 hits a day I'd say that this was all pie in the sky. But I think it has some potential if the WE community feels that it has a place for something such as this. What do folks think? Declan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
