Kitchen Sink Link Buckets

I had a con­ver­sa­tion the other day with Kelly Hines on Twit­ter about resources for teach­ers. There are a num­ber of sites out there (like this one and this one) that col­lect links to resources for teach­ers in one place for easy ref­er­ence. Some peo­ple find them use­ful, and there are undoubt­edly some great resources there.

But I tend to find them dif­fi­cult to use, at best. Though they fre­quently are cat­e­go­rized by topic, or grade level, or some other sys­tem, in prac­tice, it is sort of like hand­ing some­one a list of all the book titles in the library. I think these kinds of kitchen sink link buck­ets have value, and I’m not say­ing there’s no point in hav­ing them or using them. I just per­son­ally find their value to be lim­ited. For some­one who plans around resources, they are, I’m sure, invalu­able. Browse the list, gather a few good sites, and then build your instruc­tion around them.

But I tend to plan in the oppo­site direc­tion. I’ll select my objec­tives and projects and develop a gen­eral out­line of where I want to go, then look for resources that will plug into the out­line. Link buck­ets are not the best way to track down this sort of resource.

Prob­lem is, I’m not sure what really would work. I’m a mem­ber of Diigo and Deli­cious and do search through the socially tagged links there. I do use the link buck­ets from time to time. But what I think we need is some­thing that’s a blend of a wiki and a social book­mark­ing site. The prob­lem I see with cur­rent social book­mark­ing is that each person’s links are sep­a­rate. When I search, I get an uncat­e­go­rized, unsorted list of links which may well con­tain dupli­cates. I can see if mul­ti­ple peo­ple have saved the same link, but a dif­fer­ent link on the same domain will show up as a sep­a­rate item.

Here are a few fea­tures (in absolutely no par­tic­u­lar order) I’d ide­ally like to see in the per­fect resource site:

• Search within search results to nar­row the focus
• Group­ing and sort­ing within results
• If I save a link, I will imme­di­ately see who else has saved the same page or domain so I can make an intel­li­gent deci­sion about how to save the link
• A way to dis­play anno­tated links (not just titles or sum­maries) for a par­tic­u­lar tag or search term
• A broad but struc­tured way of iden­ti­fy­ing links as appro­pri­ate for var­i­ous cat­e­gories (e.g. K-​​2, math, geol­ogy, etc.)
• A way of edit­ing the cat­e­go­riza­tion made by oth­ers and mod­i­fy­ing the struc­ture itself (like a wiki)

There has to be some way of bal­anc­ing vol­ume (lots of worth­while links) with find­abil­ity (lim­it­ing links to a few strong can­di­dates so it is more brows­able, like this list I put together for a work­shop I did recently).

What am I miss­ing? What other fea­tures should it have? How would it look in prac­tice? Is this even a pos­si­bil­ity? Maybe it already exists and I just don’t know it yet. I’d love to hear what other peo­ple have to say.