In the early days of search engines Yahoo was one of the leaders. At the time (in the mid-90s) it sought to organize the internet by category. This approach became more and more useless, and was eventually supplanted by Google, which simply analyzed page contents. Why the history lesson? It has yet to be learned in the field of education, as Doug Belshaw makes clear in this article. Instead, providers of OER listings persist in the use of what he and Clay Shirly call 'zombie categories'. The problem is "The ontologies we use to understand the world are coloured by our language, politics, and assumptions." Categories are nice if you want to just browse. But they do not serve as the fundamental organization of contents.
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