Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a
Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a
Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a
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25 – Tools <strong>for</strong> Online Engagement <strong>and</strong> Communication<br />
because of mergers occurring <strong>and</strong> new companies entering<br />
the market, it is not possible to present a list that<br />
will remain current or be exhaustive. At the time of<br />
writing, the following selection of services is available.<br />
Nevertheless we encourage readers to use a search engine<br />
to search anew <strong>for</strong> “free blog services”.<br />
Commercial blog services<br />
• Blogger—the largest blog service is now owned by<br />
Google, which means that Gmail, Google’s free email<br />
service, is the easiest route in.<br />
• Wordpress.com—As the name suggests, this service is<br />
closely affiliated with the WordPress blogging engine.<br />
• More details can be found at Wikipedia (http://en<br />
.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog_hosting_service).<br />
<strong>Education</strong>al blog services<br />
These are blog services that use one of the major blogging<br />
engines, but are designed <strong>for</strong> a specific educational<br />
niche:<br />
• Edublogs—a service which uses the WordPress MU<br />
blogging engine, created to offer blogs specifically to<br />
educators <strong>and</strong> students. Although Edublogs originally<br />
were designed <strong>for</strong> teachers <strong>and</strong> education professionals,<br />
there also used to be blog subgroupings designed<br />
<strong>for</strong> specific student needs, such as <strong>for</strong> university students<br />
<strong>and</strong> <strong>for</strong> learners of English as an additional language<br />
(Uniblogs <strong>and</strong> ESLblogs).<br />
Other blogging services with which students may<br />
already be familiar<br />
These services, recently called social network sites<br />
(Boyd & Ellison, 2007), may not be suitable <strong>for</strong> classroom<br />
blogs, but students may have individual experience<br />
with them. They include:<br />
• MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/)<br />
• Xanga (http://www.xanga.com/)<br />
• Live Journal (http://www.livejournal.com/)<br />
• Windows Live Spaces (http://spaces.live.com/)<br />
There are a number of social networking websites<br />
that have blog-like features. For an up-to-date list, please<br />
see Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_<br />
social_networking_websites). Educators in other countries<br />
who are technically advanced, but do not use English<br />
as a general means of communication, may also<br />
have SNS in their own vernacular. In Japan, Mixi<br />
(http://mixi.jp/) <strong>and</strong> in Korea, Cyworld (http://www.cy<br />
world.co.kr/ US page at http://us.cyworld.com/), are two<br />
such sites.<br />
Photo sharing <strong>and</strong> image hosting services<br />
This field is in a constant state of flux, so we will only<br />
recommend a few sites. Also, because many sites do not<br />
monitor images, we urge some research be<strong>for</strong>e choosing<br />
a service. The ones listed below do monitor images, <strong>and</strong><br />
they are:<br />
• flickr (http://flickr.com/)—a service that now belongs<br />
to Yahoo! If you have a Yahoo! ID, joining flickr is<br />
quite simple, but can be a bit more complicated if you<br />
don’t. However, Yahoo! offers the simplest interface<br />
<strong>for</strong> including pictures in blog posts;<br />
• photobucket (http://photobucket.com/)—a free, independent<br />
service;<br />
• zooomr (http://zooomr.com)—offers geotagging of<br />
photos <strong>and</strong> unlimited uploads<br />
Also, many of the social networking websites (mentioned<br />
above) include image hosting as an option.<br />
WIKIS<br />
The wiki field is not as well-endowed as that of blogs,<br />
though several useful services exist. Newcomers to both<br />
blogs <strong>and</strong> wikis might wish to take advantage of the<br />
chance to get a free Wikispace with a new Edublogs accounts.<br />
Augar, Raitman & Zhou (2006), Mindel &<br />
Verma (2006), <strong>and</strong> Tomei & Lavin (2007) provide recent<br />
accounts of wikis. Please see the references <strong>for</strong> details.<br />
Two current wiki-related projects:<br />
• WikiEducator (http://www.wikieducator.org/)—free<br />
e-learning content repository<br />
• Wikiversity (http://en.wikiversity.org/)<br />
“Wikiversity is a community <strong>for</strong> the creation <strong>and</strong><br />
use of free learning materials <strong>and</strong> activities.<br />
Wikiversity is a multidimensional social organization<br />
dedicated to learning, teaching, research <strong>and</strong><br />
service”. – Wikiversity (Wikiversity: Main Page,<br />
June 29, 2007)<br />
Wiki sites<br />
You first may wish to get students acquainted with the<br />
concept of a wiki by asking them to contribute to public<br />
wiki sites. However, as the person responsible <strong>for</strong><br />
bringing students into the wiki, you have some responsibility<br />
that they behave <strong>and</strong> exhibit good netiquette. All<br />
of these sites use the Mediawiki software, so they have<br />
the same look <strong>and</strong> feel as Wikipedia:<br />
406 <strong>Education</strong> <strong>for</strong> a <strong>Digital</strong> <strong>World</strong>
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