Well in an official-esque announcement sense I now pronounce learnerblogs.org and uniblogs.org open for business.
Basically these are sites in a similar vein to edublogs.org in that they are seeking to provide free blogs, but this time for K12 school students and university / college students.
learnerblogs.org is basically born of demand. Soooo many teachers wanted to use edublogs.org as a place for their students to set up blogs that it basically seems to be needed and let’s face it, if you’re not tech savvy then Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga etc. don’t really cut the mustard for what you want for your school kids doing blogging. So, my aim for this is to make it work as well as possible -specifically- for school students in educational contexts…. feedback / requests / comments / thoughts very welcome here!
uniblogs.org seems like a natural complement (and also a pretty funky name) and I have to admit that I’m a bit excited by the potential with this one. Things like global categories could do amazing things in terms of getting people blogging about particular disciplines together, and then there’s the social aspect… huge I reckon. So again, a slightly different focus to learnerblogs or edublogs (which both have a kinda ‘independence’ about them) and one that I’m looking forward to toying with.
Now, what I need [read: am begging down on my knees] people to do is to share these with other teachers, university student groups and the ol’ listservs, you know it makes sense ;)
Excellent! Hopefully not too long before some enterprising university decides to get themselves a huge amount of publicity by sponsoring this…
Or pays me to design set-ups for them ;)
Hi James, I think I’ve pushed blogger as far as it can go with my iGeneration course this semester, so I think it’s time to explore a new space … uniblogs sounds good for the next course and in the meantime, I think tama.edublogs.org has a ring to it! :)
Nice work!
Sweeeet, thanks for that Tama :)
I’m interested on using this next semester but am wondering if it is available in localizations other than English? My students are Korean EFL learners and I don’t want them to get frustrated by not knowing understanding the backend interface. If there is a Korean localization I would definately send my students here to blog (in English!).
I could try something with this: http://www.ceprix.net/archives/spotmilk-admin-theme-for-wordpress-15/ but the problem is that WPMU has a different admin interface, couldn’t it be good language practice?
James,
Yeah it could be good English practice, but probably would be overwhelming to many of the students since they are relatively low level. Anyhow if it’s difficult don’t worry aobut it. I’ll probably send them here regardless, but the Korean langauge bit, for me, would be icing on the cake.