Using Elgg as as Social Learning platform

Last Saturday I embedded into a posting the first of 3 short presentations on Organisational Social Learning I have been preparing for clients and others.  The first presentation was entitled The Future of E-Learning is Social Learning and placed social learning in the context of current e-learning, talked about the need for an organisational social learning platform and the new role of social learning professionals.

Here now is the 2nd presentation: Using Elgg as a Social Learning platform. This one looks at the use of the free, open source Elgg software as a social learning and collaboration platform for organisational use.

 

Come and join us at c4lpt.NET to experience Elgg for yourself.

At the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, we have offer business, technical and pedagogic Elgg services as part of our wide range of Social Learning Services. We have already been helping a number of organisations (both businesses and education) to set up social leaning platforms using Elgg, so do contact us if you'd like to find out more about how we can help your organisation.

Comments

[Greg]

Hi Jane,

Thanks for posting this presentation on using Elgg as a social learning platform and giving teachers a little insight on how this technology can be used to enhance the learning environment. I am a graduate student studying education technology and we have discussed the benefits of social media and web 2.0 tools being utilized in the classroom. I like how Elgg provides a one stop shop leaning portol that includes everything from blogs and wikis to file sharing and RSS feeds. I think online social learning is a really engaging way for students to learn and develop skill sets. As a teacher how can we best observe, guide, and evaluate the learning process as students interact on Elgg? What age group of students do you believe this is appropriate for and why?

Thanks,
Greg, ISU Grad Student

[Jane Hart]

Greg, thanks for your comments. I think Elgg is suitable for use with any age - it is often being used to build social networking or socila learning platforms for under-13s, since they can not join Ning or Facebook groups. Come and join the discussion at our Social Learning Network at http://www.c4lpt.net to gain the views of others on using Elgg for learning,

[DMACRIA]

Hi Jane and thanks for all the helpful information on social learning and Elgg. A few of us here in the office are working to move our enterprise learning options to include such, but it is an uphill struggle. Your recent social media articles gave rise to a question we cannot answer. If an organization like ours is already using SharePoint Office 2007, what would be gained by adding other tools such as Elgg? Or do you see see these two tools as offering reasonably comparable abilities, making the(large)effort to add Elgg less than worth what is gained?

Many thanks from all of us for your vanguard efforts!
Don

[Jane Hart]

Hi DMACRIA, what a great question! Can you do everything you want with your current platform? If not, you require something else. If yes, then stick with what you've got. I think Elgg, or a similar social learning platform, offers quite a lot more for many organisations. So the question for you is, does Sharepoint provide everything you need?

[Anton]

To add to Jane's reply: What do you think your co-workers would prefer to use? If you think it might be Elgg, why not make a test installation and let everyone sandbox their way around for some time, and then decide if it's worth a migration? If People Before Backends™ is your slogan (as it is for me), I think you should. :)