Over the past few weeks, I have been involved in a project using Elgg in a non-academic environment.

Vancouver is currently hosting the World Urban Forum, an international event on global urban sustainability. Working with teams from UBC and Opn Design, Aperto helped set up two sites to support activities related to the event:

Earthblog.ca is a site to promote dialogue around social, environmental, cultural and economic issues facing the Greater Vancouver region.

Elgg's main homepage was branded with logos, and the entry page of Elgg pulls in the most recent postings of four key bloggers, as well as a 'hot comment' (as designated by one of the site admins periodically), and the most recent comment to the site.

Most of the Elgg functionality was disabled for visitors, except for the profile tool. The official bloggers have access to all of the Elgg functionality.

Another key part to this site was the single-sign-on integration between Elgg and MediaWiki. All login is handled by Elgg, and the session is transferred to MediaWiki if a user wants to edit a particular Wiki page.

We will be releasing the Elgg-MediaWiki integration to the community shortly, as a number of other Elgg users are looking for this functionality. More on that in a future post.

The second site Aperto worked on is GUSSE, a social site to collectively discuss, review and apply the best ideas for sustainable cities.

The integration here involved a customization to the Elgg entry page again. Registration and log in is being handled by the social tagging system opntag. Elgg reads the opntag session information and creates users in the Elgg system. GUSSE maintains all Elgg core functionality.

It has been interesting applying Elgg to a non-academic environment, and I hope that these examples help showcase the flexibiliity of Elgg, and the ability to customize the look and feel of the application.

It is good to see that open source solutions are generating some interest at the Blackboard user conference which kicks off next week in San Diego.

Matt Pittinsky's overview of the conference highlights a panel session on Open Source. A follow-up post mentions birds-of-a-feather sessions on Blogs, Podcasting, RSS and Wikis.

From my read of the information, Bb seems to recognize that open source e-learning can (and will) co-exist with commercial solutions on campus. The timing of the conference is unfortunate, as it overlaps completely with the WebCT European User conference which I will be attending. After all those years of wondering what goes on at a Bb event, this would have been my opportunity, but it's just not meant to be.

If anyone attends any of the open source sessions at Bb World 06, or sees any summaries posted, please do point them out to me.

I am very happy to announce that Curverider and Aperto are collaborating on an integration between the Open Source system Elgg and WebCT's product lines.

As is mentioned in the announcement, the collaboration brings together the robust eLearning framework of WebCT with the social networking and blogging tools provided by Elgg.

I am especially pleased that the integration demonstrates how innovation created in the Open Source world can be used in conjunction with products in the commercial space, to create a total solution which benefits the end user.

The integration provides a seamless transition for faculty and students as they navigate between Elgg and WebCT.

To me, the integration opens up a whole world of pedagogical possibilities - instructors can now easily take advantage of some really exciting emerging technologies:

• blogging
  
• podcasting
  
• social networking

Most importantly, Elgg allows instructors and institutions to operate outside the bounds of the individual course or section - learning groups can be created across multiple sections, multiple courses, and even across departments.

Over the coming weeks, I will be discussing how Elgg can be used effectively in conjunction with WebCT, and I would really like to hear from existing WebCT customers on what they are looking for.

I will also be demonstrating this integration at the WebCT European Users Conference in Edinburgh from Feb 27th to March 1st, so please track me down at the conference if you will be attending.

For the Elgg perspective, also have a look at annoucements on their site, and comments from Elgg's Dave Tosh.

Alan Levine makes a number of great points in one of his Latest
Blog posts, as he distills the discussions from the Northern Voice conference.

I think nearly everyone agrees that 'closed' blogs - ie. those which are limited to a single semester class - are bad, and the EduGlu
concept by D'Arcy Norman has a lot of merit if all the pieces can fit together.

The 'closed' blog option certainly would feel safe for the novice faculty and student, who have no experience with blogging. The EduGlu option gets all of the early adopters and tech-savvy folks excited about the possibilities.

So what about everyone else? To me, social software in education is still in the early-adopter phase. Faculty and students need to be shown a way to incorporate these technologies into their daily routines if we want the technology to be taken up more significantly.

How do you do this? Make it as easy as possible (from a workflow perspective as well as technologically) and clearly demonstrate the benefits. I also don't think we will get there in one go, and there won't be a one-solution-fits-all model. Some institutions will want to have a locally-hosted instance of their social software, while others will be happy with a hybrid or perhaps a completely outsourced solution.

One way to get more of the mainstream faculty exposed to social networking software is to harness those who already have a toe in the water of the elearning pond - in other words, the ones who are using some form of Learning Management System, be that open source (Sakai or Moodle) or commercial (Blackboard or WebCT).

By this, I don't mean to move the faculty off any of the above systems and completely into a social space, but instead show them how to use these tools in conjuction with what they are already used to. As they gain more experience and comfort with the new technologies, they could very well change how they teach and for example use a blog approach instead of their closed LMS discussion board.

This past weekend, I attended the Northern Voice Blogging conference in Vancouver. The conference consisted of 'Moosecamp' on Friday with informal sessions on various topics related to blogging, and then the main conference on Saturday.

I was particularly interested in the eLearning sessions, but was also keen to find out about other blogging initiatives.

Moosecamp on Friday kicked off with an Edublogger Hootenanny moderated by UBC's Brian Lamb (see here for notes.) Some of the main points that resonated for me were:

• Students should not be expected to have a different blog for each of their courses.
  
• Blogs should not just disappear after the semester has ended.
  
• How are teachers and students expected to interact with blogs - can they be expected to read 5 classes x 30 students = 150 blogs?

Saturday's eLearning session made some of the same points, but also raised issues relating to privacy, ownership of blog content, and location of blogs (university hosted vs. central service.)

All of the issues above are on my mind as I look at ways of tying these technologies into systems such as WebCT.