OPLS blog

Barbara Stefanics, an ITGS teacher at Vienna International School, recently alerted me to a project her students are involved in with a number of their peers from Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia (US) and the Qatar Academy.

It’s called Digiteen and is a collaborative wiki project looking at Digital citizenship, which they define as “knowing how to behave appropriately and responsibly with regard to technology use”.

It involves approximately 50 students, who have contributed new media resources and their own thoughts around 9 topics identified by Mike Ribble and Gerald Bailey in their book, Digital Citizenship in Schools.

The students have collected together some great material and I encourage you to have a look some time and let them know what you think. I particularly like the Guidelines for Teens section at the bottom of each page.

If you’re reading this, Barbara, please pass on my congratulations to the students and colleagues for such an excellent initiative.  I have a couple of related questions for you though. I was looking to see what the students thought of the Creative Commons movement, but couldn’t find any reference to it (unless I overlooked it, for which I apologise). But, what do you all think about Creative Commons and its tools for licensing intellectual property and their derivatives? Do you think the tools help digital citizens become more responsible in their use/sharing/remixing of content published by others? Is it something you would consider using yourselves in a blog or wiki for example? I’d love to know what you think.

Although “best of…” posts tend to appear reasonably frequently, the good ones are worth their weight in gold. Here are a couple of blog posts summarising the best Web 2.0 applications of 2007, in so far as they relate to teaching and learning, and as proposed by Larry Ferlazzo and Silvia Tolisano:

Larry Ferlazzo’s best Web 2.0 applications for 2007

Langwitches best web 2.0 applications for elementary school

You are, of course, free to agree or disagree.

Please note that these were shared via the Classroom 2.0 network on Ning.

For those of you who enjoyed Michael Wesch’s first video, the Machine is Us/ing Us, you might want to have a look at his follow-up, Information R/Evolution:

It’s a great exposition of the power of tagging.