Fika Time

cosey_fika1
Originally uploaded by mthorn_hawkesfarm.

Still flooded with good memories of the week in Sweden. Here's a lowlight shot of Hasan in conversation with one of the IT team during a cosey lakeside cabin 'fika' session late in the afternoon with a flaming open fire.
I came acorss this useful list of educational-friendly Web 2.0 applications on Miles Berry's elgg blog today:

Jabber (http://www.jabber.org/) provides a way for schools to host their own instant messaging system, providing similar functionality to MSN messenger or AOL-IM, also allowing voice over IP.
SquirrelMail (http://www.squirrelmail.org/) is just one of a number of web-based email clients, that with a mailserver ticking away in the background, can provide a service similar to GoogleMail. There are plug-ins available for spam and virus filtering.
MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org) is the software on which Wikipedia (and a whole host of other wikis) runs, allowing schools or local authorities to set up their own wikis, perhaps as a child friendly encyclopaedia or, at staff level, for policy documents and collaborative lesson planning.
Scuttle (http://scuttle.org/) allows a school to host its own social bookmark collection like del.ico.us, and even replicates del.icio.us’s API so that browser plugins will work seamlessly with this too.
Gallery2 (http://gallery.menalto.com/) at it’s simplest lets a school host its digital photo collection online, but it also allows users to upload their own photos and comment on others photographs, providing much the same functionality as flickr, but letting the school retain full control of its images.
Elgg (http://elgg.org) provides a whole host of key web 2.0 technologies, like blogging, e-portfolio space, RSS aggregation, folksonomy tagging, podcast hosting and feeds, and social networking.
Although Moodle (http://moodle.org) doesn’t feel very Web 2.0, with teachers remaining firmly in control of course content, a number of modules provide Web 2.0 functionality within the integrated VLE, so for example there’s support for podcasts, RSS, wikis, blogs and folksonomy tagging, and Moodle’s Workshop module provides an effective way of managing peer assessment of students’ work.

MediaWiki, Scuttle and Gallery2 sound particularly interesting. As for Moodle and learning platforms, there's a local conference about them here in East Sussex on Thursday, but my colleague Dee is attending that.

Today I heard from Honken and Felix, and obtained Bostjan's email address from Agneta.