MILJØEDDERKOPPEN

Environmental Education on the Internet made easier:

The Environmental Spider - "Miljøedderkoppen" www.miljoeedderkoppen.dk

A facility on the Internet for searching environmental information in Danish.

Developed for Environmental Education in Danish schools.

There is a strong drive in the Danish educational system to develop pedagogical strategies which make the use of IT (information technology) a part of everyday teaching.

The Internet offers an incredible potential for finding information related to the topics in school, but at the same time the search too often ends by being waste of pupil´s school hours.

The Environmental Spider – Miljøedderkoppen in Danish – is a strong helping hand for the Danish teacher in planning and carrying through the use of the internet in all topics related to environmental issues and nature. 

The Environmental Spider as inspiration for other countries

The experience from the Danish work with the Environmental Spider can be made useful in other countries. The basic structure seems to be easy to transfer to other countries with other languages and other cultures. Besides that we have got some experiences which might be useful for other web entrepreneurs. Therefore some of the basic ideas, the structure and some good advises are explained in the following sections. 

The Project Group

The initiative to the Environmental Spider came from two masters´ students in Environmental Education at the Royal Danish School of Educational Studies: Thomas Neumann and Ole Laursen. And they now form the project group together with associate professor Søren Breiting (project leader). 

Democratic Environmental Education

The Danish Ministry of Education has underlined the democratic aspects of comprehensive education, - and not least the field of Environmental Education has for long been in focus by teachers and educational researchers for democratisation. This is shortly described as "The New Generation of Environmental Education" by Søren Breiting. (Read the paper, at URL = http://www.edu.uleth.ca/ciccte/naceer.pgs/pubpro.pgs/alternate/pubfiles/15.Breiting.rev.htm)

The work at the Research Centre for Environmental and Health Education (link to URL: http://www.dlh.dk/bio/bio/misu/index.html ) has for long been focussed on the idea of developing the Action Competence of the learner. This has been done in relation to experimental teaching in the MUVIN Project and other innovative programmes. 

The basic structure of the Environmental Spider

The Environmental Spider is a "portal" to links in Danish language on the Internet with quality information about environmental issues, environment and nature i Denmark and in the rest of the World. The aim is to direct the attention of school children and youngsters to material which is understandable from grade 5 and up. Well made web sites with graphics and interactivity, but without too long loading times are preferred, too.

To find a simple and workable basic structure for the whole content, which is easily recognised by the young users was a big challenge. How successful we have been until now has still to be proved in a later phase of evaluation, see later.

The four main categories of links:

Environment in Denmark

Environment in the World

 

Nature in Denmark

Nature in the World

 

 

Besides these we offer links to

We also offer a Help and Search function.

The following overview displays the subheadings.

Environment in Denmark

For each of these the links have been categorised after the following subheadings:

The category Energy had to be divided in a different way, namely:

Each section is introduced by a short text explaining some few basic aspects before the learner jumps to the list of links.

Each link is announced by a sentence to indicate the content and the amount of information.

Maintenance of The Environmental Spider

A facility for schools like the Environmental Spider is very dependent on continuous maintenance and improvements.

This implies to garden the website for dead links, supplementing with new links, answering e-mails and the like. All in all quite demanding. 

The future for The Environmental Spider

This facility on the internet depends on good links already existing, or on the creation of new pages by others which could give the linking possibility in the future. It is the aim to offer different organisations this possibility by pointing out obvious needs for information for the target groups of young learners.

 

The web address of the Environmental Spider is www.miljoeedderkoppen.dk

And the e-mail is edderkop@dpu.dk

Søren Breiting