I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the buzz around eLGG, and the more that I think about social networking, our students, and retooling classrooms for the future, the more these two elements (eLGG and our challenges) seem to be coalescing in my mind. Yet I still have questions.
I’m playing around with eLGG now, but have to admit that I am underwhelmed. It’s a basic blogging system, with the ability to create communities, upload files, attach files to your blogs, and a sundry of other features, and that the basis of the product is electronic portfolios. But I’m afraid that I don’t entirely get it — at least to the degree that the buzz implies. The thing is that I’m not really sure if I’m missing something in eLGG, or I’m too old to understand the whole online social community experience.
If you can help me to better understand what eLGG is about, please post a comment. I’d love to have a single blog that I can point people to in order to read a conversation about this potentially important learning service. Please give examples…
David: I don’t know if this will help or not:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/elgg.php
Dave
David, I am also investigating ELGG. My pre-NECC06 posting at http://123elearning.blogspot.com/2006/06/elgg-at-necc.html has some extra resources including a paper by Aaron Campbell and one by Tosh and Werdmuller the ELGG creators.
Also check out the TechLearning article this week from Amy Poftak at http://www.techlearning.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=191901615
Also, have a look at the newly created Open Academic venture at http://openacademic.org/index.php that aims to help us build a ‘safe social networking environment’ within our own schools.
In terms of a single blog to read I am sure you have already found the ELGG blog at http://elgg.net/
I do not share your reservation as such as I can see the development of ELGG in conjunction with Moodle and Drupal and MediaWiki (Open Academic plans) as most exciting news for schools. In terms of ELGG as a standalone it will provide a ePortfolio interface but also a lot more as users can interact and connect and collaborate….how could we do that before so easily with traditional online portfolios? My students are continuing to use Manilla-based weblogs for portfolios and other online social construction tools but I think I now need to now wean them off these and implement these more versatile, all encompassing tools. The potential is to provide all the services we now use (blog, wiki, RSS etc) under one passworded login rather than opeing bloglines and then blogger and then pbwiki……..
Ironically, since I mainly use Blogger for my blogs, I find elgg really superior when it comes to the ease with which one can attach files, particularly video clips. I don’t know if my post on the subject was one of the ones you read: http://karynromeis.blogspot.com/2006/07/elgg-blog-saves-day.html
Julie Lindsey blogged about this subject at eLearning Blog. You can read it here:
http://123elearning.blogspot.com/2006/08/to-elgg-or-not-to-elgg.html
— dave —
Joan Vinall-Cox talks about eLGG and points to an interview with its founder. Joan says…
Is ELGG similar to creating a website presence which links to each of your blogs and wikis and other things that are important to you? My web site http://jfriesen.net was created for that reason and it is very handy for me as a central place were my online stuff is. Now that can be done without using Dreamweaver, knowing html or even paying an ISP for space. What do you think?
Janice
I think that bud hunt’s experience with elgg is the typical one. He had the same experience that you did… wasn’t really sure what all the hype was about when he first tried it. i suggest that you go here and see what its like when a community starts from scratch (about 4 weeks ago Alex Ragone and Arvind Grover asked Jeff and I if we would host an elgg teaching community, which has been working great)
The trick with elgg is watching it WORK. Yes, i agree with you, it is a very simple platform, therin lies the beauty of it. Once people get familiar with its different features (like being able to post from one spot to any number of communities, groups, to the signed in people or to the world) I wrote a beginners post on the subject here.
My favorite thing about the system is that only through actually using it (posting, filling out your personal details, clicking on the tags to find other people who share your interests, forming communities with them) can you actually see how cool it can be. For students, like the one’s in our personal learning space (8th graders from 2 different countries, working in a walled garden, i think 6 schools this fall) it gives them a chance (with slight code modification all hail open source) to freely communicate with each other and find people from other schools that they have never (and probably will never) meet by simply tracing the tags around the website.
They make their own communities of practice.
that’s cool.
cheers dave. dave.
http://davecormier.com/edblog/?p=65 that link didn’t seem to work.
David, I think Dave C. is right. I didn’t get it at first. I was really, really underwhelmed. But then I started playing with Elgg through the EducationBridges installation. Now, I’m setting up a school-wide version of Elgg so that we can create and maintain our own school version of MySpace. Students will have a safe place to learn how to be responsible digital citizens, and we’ll have a space where we can read, write and think together. The counselor will be using the space to share information that students need, and to create useful communities to help students. Students can create their own communities and build relationships with each other without me controlling what they do, past basic “school appropriate” issues.
Elgg is really simple and really powerful because it allows our students to work information with each each other. Working information is what social networks are all about, and Elgg is going to provide me with a space free of half-nekkid models and other distractions. I encourage you to fiddle around with the Elgg at EducationBridges in your copious amounts of free time.
Appearantly we were having pretty similar thoughts at the same time. Hadn’t seen your post when I this one up.
It may be the best one out there right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s quite there yet. I don’t think it’s quite ready for the masses yet. A persistent techy person can ‘get it’, but I don’t think average teachers are going to be able to make sense of the type of communication employed by Elgg in its current form.
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