[Oer-community] OER Geography in an Internet Age - Which "geographies" will provide the most utility to users?

[Virginia Cram-Martos]

Dear OER Colleagues, 

I would like to suggest that while mapping OER initiatives according to 
their geographic centre of development is useful, it is not necessarily 
the system of "classification" of most use to potential users in an 
Internet age.

As an example, if I was looking for work done on maths for early secondary 
school students speaking Spanish - a geographic map is helpful only to the 
extent that there is a correspondence between work done in Spanish and 
countries where Spanish is an official language - but if someone were 
doing work in this area in Chicago, I might miss it - and looking through 
every organization doing work in Spanish to find "secondary math" would 
probably be time-consuming as well.

This is a problem that can be overcome without large investments because 
we have at our disposal databases and tools that allow data to be viewed 
from "more than one angle". Therefore, in order to provide the greatest 
possible utility to users, the OER community may want to consider making 
the information gathered on OER available to users according to multiple 
"geographies" so that each user can select the "geography" that best 
corresponds to their needs. 

The range of geographies would need to be well-defined (say with drop down 
menus for selection so that, for example, "Spanish" and "Espagnol" go into 
the same location) and simple enough so as not to impose an excessive 
burden on those submitting information. My initial proposals for 
"geographies" would be the following:

        - Language
        - Academic Subject Area (Geography, Economics, Physics, Sociology, 
Maths, etc.)
        - Age Grouping (Pre-School, Primary, Middle School, Secondary, 
University, Post-Grad, etc.)
        - Geographic Location of the Developer(s)

I do not work in "education" per se, but in my organization/division, we 
recently developed an interesting Guide to Trade Facilitation that uses 
multiple "geographies" for looking at the same data.  The Internet address 
for this Guide is: http://tfig.unece.org/     FYI - we also have 
additional, associated training material.

This Guide was developed with technical support from the United Nations 
training centre in Turin, Italy - and if participants in this discussion 
found the format to be of interest, perhaps UNESCO could contact the 
centre in Turin about working with the OER Community (caveat emptor - they 
do not work for free, even if you come from within the UN system).

Best regards,

Virginia Cram-Martos
Director
Trade and Sustainable Land Management Division
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
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