WikiKids

Just a quick note here. There is a great example of the use of a wiki in K12 education here in The Netherlands. It is called WikiKids (only in Dutch). They have taken the Mediawiki software and adapted it for use by kids. And now they are starting to create a online encyclopedia by and for kids. It is a great example of kids that work together with other kids, as well as with teachers.

Weblogs at Leiden University: are they succesfull?

After a few weeks of inactivity on this weblog (but not on my other weblogs! check Dutch Sakai, or Twente Open Source Standaarden), I thought I should revitalize it. And since this is the end of the year 2006, I sounded good to me to start with a little reflecting.

So I started with reading what I wrote about when I started this weblog (is that sentence correct?).

1. I wrote about TagCloud, back in July 2005. Well, TagCloud is sleeping right now. Very sad to see actually, that the initiators of a trend, cannot keep up. I hope they will be back.
2. I also wrote about clustering del.icio.us bookmarks. This service has also died.
3. Back then I also wrote about Elgg. They are still alive and kicking! Which is good. I really like Elgg.
4. And then something really interesting. I wrote about weblogs at Leiden University. At that time there were "(..) 8 staff and 5 students actively maintaining a weblog. There is one so-called 'onderwijsweblog' and 8 groupweblogs". And now, in December 2006, 17 months later? Well, check for yourself. I am counting 10 staff weblogs, (only) 8 students that maintain a weblog. And there are now 14 group weblogs. I would not call this a success! Do you? It might be that people use other platforms. Like Hyves, or MSN Spaces, or Blogger, or Wordpress. Well, actually I think that we would be finding lots more weblogs than on the 'official' platform.

For all my readers, I am wishing you Happy Holidays! See you in 2007!

Going to Atlanta!

atlantaoverview,
originally uploaded by wytze.

Next week I will be attending the 6th Sakai conference, which is being held in Atlanta, Georgia (USA). All details are on http://www.sakaiproject.org/conference. It will remain quiet on this weblog for a while, due to this visit (please expect me to be back around December 12, 2006)
For 'live' coverage of t he conference you should go to http://sakai-nl.blogspot.com