I have been spending time on significant maintenance projects since the beginning of February. If you decide you want to offer resources to the public, you find your self making many decisions. Do you want to offer periodic blog posts that offer ideas in small, independent units that appear for a few days and then roll of the screen? Do, you want to create content that is less time-based in how you imagine your readers will interact with this content?
There are variants of both approaches that are workarounds in allowing you as content creator and those who rely on your content to deal with the time issues. Bloggers can offer a search tool (search or tags) readers can use to see what you might have said about a topic years ago. You see a search box on this page if you are viewing the page display on a computer. The search box is also available for those who rely on mobile devices, but I am guessing few ever think to find this tool for accessing content. Bloggers can also repost content based on analytics that indicate which posts had been viewed frequently or intuitions about what might be useful at a given time or when bloggers find themselves with nothing new to say.
I do blog (you are reading one), but I also present what might be described as organized collections of resources. In one case, I developed and maintained a resource I imagined as an open educational resource (OER) textbook. I had written and continue to write what I consider a commercial book and I wanted to explore other issues you do not learn about by selling a product. My second collection project involved content I could provide as an extension of the textbook I write with my wife. Again, this was an experiment of a sort. I was and remain interested in topics such as keeping textbook content current, keeping the cost of a commercial product low, and offering educators who assign a textbook ways to make what they assign to students more flexible (I call this my interactive syllabus project).
Time is also an issue with such collections. The content ages and this means some links no longer work, some tools described are no longer available, new laws require educators do things in a way that was not previously required, new topics catch the fancy of practitioners and they expect to see these topics addressed in what they study, etc. All published instructional content faces these challenges, but offering content online was intended to meet these challenges. Online content is modified at the source and the updates are available to all. Goals like this are well intended and reflect real problems. Addressing these goals requires far more time than most consumers assume. My two projects consist of several hundred individual pages of content and several thousand web links. Maintenance does not result in compensation, but neither did the original investment in these projects.
As I claim at the beginning of this post, I have been working on my maintenance initiative now for several months. I have completed the first phase which has little to do with the reasons I have just listed here for doing maintenance. I decided it was most efficient for me to address the technical challenges I was facing first and then deal with the challenges that were more inherent in the content. My OER project (Meaningful learning and the participatory web) had gone through previous upgrades first changing the delivery system from a wiki, to individual web pages, and then to a page-based approach using WordPress. Most are probably familiar with WordPress as a blogging platform, but it also works well as a way to create a large collection of pages that can be interlinked. The tools internal to WordPress I was using to create what could be experienced as web pages were primitive and it was time to retool everything to take advantage of more recently developed capabilities. The idea is that the maintenance would allow more efficient content creation with more power. Worth the investment as long as I continue to create content.
The content generated as the free extension of our book was authored using a sophisticated program called Dreamweaver. This authoring environment allowed me to use Javascript and CSS to add efficiency and power to my content. Adobe, the company responsible for Dreamweaver, continues to upgrade its products. It can be argued that this is necessary as the hardware on which these products are used changes. There is also that upgrade fee that is nice to receive from users. At a point some years ago, Adobe went to a lease rather than purchase model for its products. My son who is a professional media producer claims this is great. My opinion as a hobbyist (making no money) user was different. I was comfortable with the software I owned. I was comfortable until my old computer crashed. I did recover my files, but this was at the cost of a new motherboard. It was time to guard against an inevitable problem of not owning a working content creation environment. I decided I needed to take a different approach and am moving my content to an online web authoring system called Concrete5. To my knowledge, there was no automated way to make this transition, so I have been moving the content page by page and image by image. The move is complete, but I have identified one remaining maintenance task. For some reason, the theme I am using in Concrete5 does not color code links. The links are there and function, but linked text is not visibly differentiated from the normal text. I am now going to have to manually change the color of the text that is a link.
Why tell you this? First, I wanted to announce the availability of the updated systems. My OER project (Meaningful learning and the participatory web) and our resources for extending our textbook (Integrated Technology for meaningful learning) sites work. Second, I wanted readers to understand what is required behind the scenes to provide the free online content you consume. I make this effort especially as it relates to OER resources and those who complain about commercial textbooks and offer OER content as an alternative. Simply put, there are practical limits to assumptions that OER education resources will be available. There are not enough hobbyists who find this process enjoyable.