Description

Communities outside traditional course boundaries may be created by any user and can be private or public. Community members have access to shared file areas, shared resources and a community blog. Communities allow students to discover, and to interact with, a much larger set of the institutional population to broaden their educational experience.

Example Scenario

A first year geology course has 5 WebCT sections with 40 students each. The instructors want all 200 students to work collaboratively on issues related to global seismic activity.

Students can all be placed into a single Geology community in Elgg, to collect and share resources with each other.

Description

Every user within Elgg has their own personal blog, to which they can post entries. Blog entries can include images, audio files, and links to other external resources.

Each blog entry can be tagged with keywords, so that the entry can be more easily found, either by others in the community, or by the author at a later time.

Blog entries can be kept private to the author, completely public, or only accessible to a subgroup of users, such as a community or a private access group.

Community blogs allow members of a specific community to all post to the same blog, so that a continuous narrative on a particular topic can develop.

Personal and community blogs can be subscribed to, either from within Elgg, or from an external aggregator. This way, users can easily keep track of multiple blog authors from a single access point.

Example Scenario

Mark uses his blog for two purposes:

He is writing a term paper on Newtonian Mechanics. As he works through his readings on the topic, he uses the blog to reflect on the ideas presented in the research. Mark designates all of these reflective blog posts as private, so that they are only accessible to him. Once he begins writing his paper, he can use the "term paper" tag to quickly search for all of his private entries and re-read his notes.

Mark is also part of the Physics 302 community. The instructor invites speakers once a month to discuss a current issue in the industry. Mark uses his blog to write about the speakers' presentations, and invites other members of the community to comment on his writing.

Description

Personal and community blogs and file areas support podcasting by default. If an audio file is uploaded to a user's filearea, any subscribed podcatcher will be able to detect and download the audio file. Audio files can also be listened to online through the browser, via an audio-playback control, and users can subscribe to podcast feeds filtered by subject.

Example Scenario

A third-year French instructor records weekly interviews with guests, to improve her students' listening skills and vocabulary.

She uploads the audio file to her Elgg file area. Students wishing to download the interviews subscribe to the instructor's feed from their iTunes software. iTunes automatically downloads
interview episodes as soon as they are posted, and students can then easily transfer these to their iPods for listening.

Description

Elgg supports the standard RSS protocol for content syndication. Elgg can pull in external RSS feeds into a user or community resource area, or even auto-populate a user's blog with external content. All content within Elgg can be syndicated and accessed by an external aggregator or by Elgg's internal one. Elgg therefore makes it easy to keep track of
other users' content and activity.

Example Scenario

A biology instructor wants his students to be up to date on the latest developments in cell biology. One of the major cell biology journals produces a news feed highlighting current events. He copies the feed link into the resource section of his Cell Biology community in Elgg, and all students now have access to the daily updates from the journal feed.

Description

Keywords (tags) can be assigned to any item within Elgg, such as a blog post, or an upload file. These tags serve the following purposes:

Recall and classification

All items related to a particular topic can be assigned the same tag, so that finding the items in the future is easier for the student.

Filtering

All syndications can be filtered according to specific tags, so that feed subscription is limited to specific topic areas.

Social Linking

By searching for a specific tag, or viewing the site's tag cloud, users can find others which share common interests.

Example Scenario

James is a second year Biology student searches the institution's Elgg community for the tag "mitosis", as he is working on a research paper on that topic. He finds a graduate student who has written blog entries on mitosis, since the grad student's thesis covers aspects of mitosis.

James subscribes to the graduate student's blog feed, filtered on the tag 'mitosis'. Thus, any blog posts by the graduate student which are tagged with the word mitosis will automatically be brought to James' attention, while any non-related posts will be omitted.

Description

Each user in Elgg has access to a personal file storage area. Within the file area, the user can create a nested folder structure. Any file type may be uploaded to the system, and access permissions for each file or folder can be set.

Communities in Elgg have shared file storage, so community members can upload documents to share them with other members in the group.

File areas also support RSS syndication, so that subscribed users are notified if files are uploaded to the file area.

Example Scenario

Robert uses the file area on Elgg to store research articles for his graduate thesis. He often works from different computers, so the central file area enables him to access his materials from anywhere in the world.

Robert has also created a private community for himself and his thesis supervisor. New drafts of his thesis are posted to the community file area. Since his supervisor has subscribed to the community file area, he is notified whenever new material is ready for review.

Description

A user can create custom access groups in the system, and can then add other registered users to these groups. For every element in Elgg - such as a specific blog entry, an uploaded file, a personal profile section - the user can decide who is allowed to view the content. A user can thus choose to set an item private, public, accessible to a particular community they belong to, or to make it accessible only to members who belong to one of the custom access groups.

Example Scenario

Ellen is working on a term project, and wants to share her thoughts and progress with her mentor, a graduate student in the department. She creates a private access group and adds the mentor as the only member. Ellen then designates blog posts and files related to the term project as visible only to the mentor's access group.

Once Ellen has incorporated the mentor's feedback, the accesss level on the files can be changed to public to release her work to a wider audience.

Description

Elgg allows users to connect to others in many different ways. The "Search" function lets users easily find other users with similar interests by looking at public profile information, or by looking at tags used for blog postings.

Communities are another way to find members who share similar interests.

Once a user has found another person with shared interests, the person can be made friend, which provides a shortcut to their blog, profile and resources.

Example Scenario

Barbara is a new member in the institution's Elgg community. She has automatically been enrolled in her course community, and browses the member profiles to see what her classmates are interested in.

Although her studies are in Economics, she has an interest in French literature. She enters those keywords into the Elgg search box, and finds 3 other users who share her interest.

One of them, Michael, is a French literature major, who has posted a number of blog posts about books that Barbara has wanted to read. She adds Michael to her Friends list, so that she can periodically check in on what he has been writing about.

Description

Elgg gives learners control over their personal environment, thus providing a greater engagement with the resources that are available to them. Users are able to decide which information to share with others, and which to keep private for individual reflection.

The learner is also in charge of which resources to assemble to aid them in their learning. The ability to search for others in the community, and to link to users who are not directly associated with their program of study, challenges students to assimilate information from varied sources. Resources can easily be pulled in from external sites, or from other parts of the local Elgg community.

Students have the ability to express themselves in ways they are most comfortable - text based blogs, audio podcasts, and images are all supported.

Example Scenario

Jason is a computer science student in his second year. His instructor encourages his class to keep up to date on current developments in technology. Through Elgg's RSS syndication capabilities, Jason monitors three technology sites which produce daily news feeds on the latest hardware announcements.

He also monitors the blog of one of his TAs, who is doing graduate work on human computer interaction.

To round out his learning landscape, Jason has connected to a half-dozen friends in computer science, and reads their blogs on a regular basis.