To ELGG or not to ELGG?

I was interested to read David Warlick's recent posting 'The ELGG Experience' and his wish to find out more and understand what the hype is about. Well, I have posted some ELGG resources, prior to NECC06 and am now gearing up for a new academic year and new challenges with online content management and social interaction opportunities via the Internet that will help the students and teachers at ISD to realise their full teaching and learning capabilities.

Some new resources:

• ELGG - Social Network Software for Eduation, an article by Steve O'Hear gives an excellent outline of ELGG and interviews the founders. The first article in the series E-Learning 2.0: How web technologies are shaping education provides an overview with examples of blogging, podcasting and media sharing
  
• TechLearning article by Amy Poftak, Community 2.0 provides an introduction to 'social networking for the educational set', specifically ELGG
• OpenAcademic is a new venture by ELGG founders Tosh and Werdmuller

From the OpenAcademic website:

About Open Academic

The OpenAcademic project is about options. We strive to provide a broad selection of tools that meet an array of needs within an institution. People learn and work differently, and the software that supports that work needs to be flexible enough to match each user. People shouldn’t need to adjust to a machine.

OpenAcademic runs on open source tools. For most users within your community, this information won’t matter. For people who acquire and maintain software (as well as the generally curious), this means a couple things. First, it means that the code that runs OpenAcademic can be downloaded and installed free of charge. Like commercial software, open source software undergoes revision and improvement over time. Unlike commercial software, however, you can have a direct voice in how the software develops. OpenAcademic is an open source project, which means that all code developed by the project will be released back to the community. If you are a programmer, you can participate directly.

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I think this is an exciting project and have spent time considering how we can implement this at ISD. We are in need of content management software and are reviewing our current use of weblogs as digital portfolio mediums and as a means to interact and blog. The weblogs we use are stored off-site and use Manilla. I am concerned that Manilla software has not continued to grow and develop therefore feel it is time to change and take advanatage of other tools. The merging of Moodle with ELGG and other tools will give schools the potential to manage content and at the same time, with the one login, provide social networking tools to all teachers and students including blogs, podcasts, RSS and wikis.

I look forward to sharing experiences and ideas as OpenAcademic grows and as more educators come on board with Moodle and ELGG.

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