After more than ten years extolling the virtues of blogs and wikis, I was pleased to discover that they have gone mainstream, at least in Denmark. Any Danish school now has access to a strong array of blogging, wiki, web page and audio and video hosting services tailor-made for the education sector called Skoleblogs. The advantages of this are:
- based on WordPress
- uses the established UNI-C log-in used for many other Danish educational services
- backed up by a suite of how-to videos
- common user interface
- in Danish
I have been using WordPress not just as a blog but as a website hosting service for several years so I appreciate how flexible it is fulfilling these different roles. The fact that teachers and pupils don’t have to create and remember a suite of new usernames and log-ins is a huge plus. So is the library of how-to videos prepared and structured as a coherent whole instead of searching YouTube for how to videos which match your needs. And finally, the fact that the whole thing is in Danish means that teachers here can avoid the absurdity of using English interface tools in Denmark to teach German for example. I tend to think that the language issue is often overlooked and that when show-casing Web 2.0 tools outside of the English speaking world we too often fall into the easy example of using Web 2.0 tools when teaching English when the foreign interface is an advantage rather than a drawback.
The Danish educational service has previously tried producing its own tailor-made products, called Tavle, but as far as I can gather these never gained much traction and were in any case not open to the outside world. Using an established tool such as WordPress with its established and expert user base seems a much better bet to me.
But I would say that this is a necessary foundation from which to explore the wealth of new Web 2.0 tools which have emerged since, rather than an end point. The tools are also backed up by an attractive and growing library of publications by Peter Leth showing how to use these additional Web 2.0 possibilities such as wordclouds in the classroom. So this means that Danish treachers now have a natural home in which to embed YouTube videos, Wordle images, cartoons, movies, live conferencing, back channels and all that Web 2.0 entails.