I’m collaborating with teachers and students of Humanities Amped at McKinley High School to organize (curate? present?) the educational resources they’ve created or accumulated over the past couple of years. One of the primary concerns they have deals with framing and narrative. The reason I can’t post a live link is because my partners aren’t comfortable making an incomplete site public, particularly while they’re still in the phase of deciding exactly what this project should be. In order to get a better since of how Omeka might work for them, though, I’ve taken some of their files and created a “test site.”
Omeka could be useful for the MHS-HA project because they can gear it toward practical organization and access (I need a rubric to grade x assignment), but they can also use Exhibits to highlight the theoretical underpinnings of the Critical Pedagogy and Participatory Action Research that drives all of their work and resource creation.
An interesting alternative to Omeka is Zoho. The obvious limit is that Zoho is not free, but it is extremely affordable. I’m currently using it for a database on my blog. The reason it’s useful is because rather than the collection model Omeka uses, which imposes a rigid organizational structure, Zoho allows for the flexible table model that removes some of the organizational burden off of the curator and allows users to organize the collection according to the metadata they deem relevant or important. This approach also allows curators to build collections more quickly.
