Who's is innovative

A very interesting post by Willem van Valkenburg (in Dutch) on the way a teacher made use of a wiki and Google docs.

Check out Docent te modern : "Het komt niet vaak voor dat de studenten klagen dat docenten te geavanceerde tools voor ze gebruiken. (..) zeker omdat het om informatica-studenten gaat, die bezig zijn met hun master."

One laptop per child (OLPC) video

Ben Werdmuller (of Elgg fame) pointed me to a great video. It shows off the user interface of the the OLPC - One Laptop Per Child - project. It really looks great, and has some similarities with the Elgg user interface. Ben writes on The Internet is People: "This social networking UI for the One Laptop Per Child ($100 laptop) project is amazing". See for yourself what you think.

The video referenced by Ben has been made by "90 percent of everything", which is a blog about usability.

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.

Google as Personal Learning Environment? Yes, why not!

I have sort of gotten into the habit of starting up Bloglines before anything else (well, sometimes i forget and start with my email client), when I arrive at my desk. Today was no exception. And I came across CogDogBlog » Barking » Google Home Tabs: "I’ve had the personalized Google home page set on all my browsers for a while, but just recently noticed that you can now add tabs to organize and spread out the different tools and feeds you can use".
So, Alan Levine was the first to remind me that Google is taking on the competition. Since Netvibes already has tabs for some time now, and Pageflakes also I believe, Google couldn't stay behind for a long time.
Anyway, what strikes me more and more is that these kind of tools very well can serve as a very decent Personal Learning Environment, combining all sorts and types of (web)services from around your campus and beyond.
I also spoke a little bit about this at my workshop "Dancing with services" during the seminar last Tuesday of the Dutch Digital University. See the slide.
References: PLE Blog at CETIS (UK), Wikipedia entry on PLE

Great name: LeMill

The last two weeks have been quite busy for me. Last week i was present at the very succesfull first European Sakai Days, that were organized at the Lubeck University of Applied Sciences in Germany. I delivered a workshop about issues that we should work on within Europe, regarding Sakai. Therefore this weblog was a bit neglected. But here we are again!
I've been following some Finnish developments lately. One very interesting concept has gone live a few weeks a go. It is called LeMill (which is neat name, I think).
From the FAQ on LeMill: "LeMill is a web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources. First at all, you can find learning resources. The stuff you find you can use in your own teaching or learning. You may also add your own learning content to LeMill. You may edit your content and combine out of the pieces some larger junks of learning materials. If you wish you might also join one of the groups producing or editing some learning content. In LeMill the content is always easily found where and when ever you need them."
This sounds to me like an interesting concept. You can export SCORM packages from LeMill, BTW. So far, the content is a little scarce, but let's see what happens in the near future.