Writing to be read - Readability Indices for Open Educational Resources

Much of the text of pen resources such as Wikipedia is written at a college level of readability, thus posing an access barrier to the general public. Reading levels are important when considering wiki approaches for a K-12 OER community, and even more so when developing for minority language schools. In Canada, many students learning in a minority language setting lack the environmental influences that promote the acquisition of a large fluent vocabulary. This paper discusses plans to automatically index pages in the eVrest wiki by readability, and to gather corroborating usage data on the impact of this approach. Readability might prove a pragmatic adjunct to semantic density when tagging learning objects.