Summer Holidays begin today and they will last a whole month, it’s even hard to believe!

I have set up a plan to enjoy my free time and, simultaneously, to engage deeper in this new world of “web-school”.

Thus, I’m participating in a Wiki Educator workshop called L4C – Learning for Content – where newbies may develop basic wiki skills, such us basic editing, text formating, but also different ways to make internal and external links from a wiki page.

We  will also learn the syntax for adding images and formatting them; later we shall be introduced to Wiki Ethics with a special stress on collaboration and interaction between participants; we will then work with pedagogical templates and, finally, we will be enabled to structure educational content.

I didn’t know Media Wiki before, nor the rigourous laws of Coppa – Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act -. I only hope it will be allowed to work in such a wiki with students under 13; this could turn into  a problem if  our  pbwiki – now nicely upgraded to 2.0 – were to be closed as the pbwiki team changed the way users must log in; now a different password is required from each user, thus maybe excluding young students to enter the wiki sharing a single password, as we did before. I tried Wetpaint Wiki too, for my new 5th grade class,  but they remain under the scope of the same law.

Wiki Educator is a Community whose main purpose consists in “planning  education projects” related with “free content” and  building “open education resources“. I understood the Community is deeply engaged with projects that aim to help students from countries in need to have free access to knowledge and education.

This made me think about AJU the institution of social solidarity linked to my school; it is inspired in the founder of our Sisters Congregation . As it also aims to “facilitate children and young people’s learning ” I thought that maybe our wikis could be open to those students, thus sharing  resources and collaboration.

Up till now, Zemanta kept giving me tips about everything I wrote, but along this last paragraph, it sent me to a somehow philosophical article in Wikipedia. However, I’m perfectly aware the web is full of successful intitiaves and dynamic projects concerning  social solidarity. Perhaps the expression I choosed is unusual in English and that’s why  Zemanta couldn’t “grasp its meaning”.