This topic resonates with me, and I think its important that students take on the curation of their own resources and assets long term, but that institutions should have a duty to help individuals in that process, so I will add a little more…
The excuse provided by the subject of study on IDEL11 in the last week to look at a “Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)”, e-Portfolios like “PebblePad” and “Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs)” like WebCT/Blackboard and Moodle was actually quite timely as I was getting concerned that the volume of assets I was creating for the course was getting scattered across the very many social media sites used on various courses, was being locked into the WebCT walled garden for each module, or was being scattered across my own preferred blogging and information sharing sites like OpenVCE.net. I had had an entry page for useful and quick access links for the course at http://openvce.net/mscel since the semester started, but it was inappropriate to personalise that public facing web page too much. I also was starting to build image repositories in my own personal web area at http://atate.org.
So, as reported before, I have now created a “Personal Work Space” which is acting as a PLE for now, but after the MSc it will be made more generally useful for my continuing life long learning and asset storage at stable URLs. This could be timely as I am within 5 years of likely retirement, and many of the assets I have built over the last 30 years will be ones I want to take into retirement for my continuing interests.
I took the opportunity to put in place a new page format and underlying CSS stylesheet that would work more flexibly than my usual project spaces. It accommodates browser width much better, is easier to add content reliably without changing the appearance as my previous tabular layouts tended to, it works in multiple browsers, and it works well in very small windows and on mobile devices. It also uses only simple and standard CSS and uses no Javascript. I moved all the convenient links and a set of useful embedded elements like a course twitter feed as well. The initial result is at http://atate.org/space/.