This past year I used Elgg as my blogging platform for the Informl Learning Unworkshops, as I wanted to keep my posts separate from my main website. As many readers already know, I am a real fan of Elgg, which is a social networking, blogging, aggregating and e-portfolio system all in one. It’s also available as a free service or as open source code to host yourself. However, the experts are always available for additional services.
I recently revisited my site on Elgg, where I have a number of informal learning-related articles. Since I last posted, Elgg has been updated and is even more usable, in my opinion. Today, as I was explaining how it works, the ability to tag each post with a level of privacy (Public, Logged in Users Only, Specific Community Members, Group Members, Private) was seen has a great feature, especially to those new to blogging and Web 2.0 applications.
I’ll be covering Elgg in some detail during the CSTD Ottawa workshop next week and thought I’d give a heads-up to anyone who may want to create an account, explore a bit and discuss their experience.
Harold – I honestly don’t quite get Elgg. Can you provide a bit more of how you use it and get value? And also how you’ve chosen to separarte this blog from Elgg activity?
Tony; I’ve written a lot about Elgg; ever since we used it to support several communities of practice in the healthcare field.
Elgg’s main premise is that the learner is the centre of everything and decides what is important. There are no course or program boxes that learners have to “go in”. Elgg is a good tool for CoP’s because you can have “frends”. Elgg is not a course management system, because there are no courses. For educational settings, I would suggest Elgg for informal learning and giving a sense of continuity outside the construct of the course and Moodle (which integrates well) for the individual courses.
We can discuss this at TK2007 if you like.
BTW, a lot of people are turned off Elgg until they actually see it action. Not sure why.
Here are 3 links explaining why I find Elgg so valuable. (In one I quote Harold!)
http://elgg.net/vinall/weblog/126293.html
http://elgg.net/vinall/weblog/145563.html
http://elgg.net/vinall/weblog/148567.html
I agree it’s the MySpace for academics, with it’s levels of privacy, tagging, and friending possibilites.
Joan
Thanks, Joan. Much appreciated 🙂
Harold, love to discuss this at TK2007. Hope we can rope in a few other interesting folks as well for drinks/dinner or something like that.
Joan – much appreciate the links. It makes a lot of sense to me to use Elgg as part of a collaborative learning experience as you’ve described. I was thinking more in the context of how I would use it for my own learning? Or in a corporate learning context? Again, makes sense for learner collaboration – but I’ve not see much use for on-going personal learning.
Again, I may be missing something. Hopefully Harold can shed light at TK2007.