Elgg describes itself as follows:
"An open source social networking platform based around choice, flexibility and openness: a system that firmly places individuals at the centre of their activities. Your users have the freedom to incorporate all their favourite tools within one environment and showcase their content with as many or as few people as they choose, all within a social networking site that you control."
Use of Elgg by UK educational institutions is probably increasing, and it is the platform supporting the JISC-funded EMERGE project in which ALT (for which I work part time) is a partner. Picking up on recent coverage of Elgg in Wired, Donald Clark writes:
"Some excellent folks at Brighton University (my home town) were given a glowing write up in Wired this week on the use of Myspace, blogging and other webby stuff in schools and higher education."
...
"It's free, downloadable and has Blogging, Social networking, File repositories for individuals and communities, Podcast support, Full access controls, Supports tagging, User profiles, Full RSS support, RSS aggregator, Create communities, Collaborative community blogs, Create 'friends' networks, Import content, Publish to blog, Multilingual with Branding/customisation."
Read the rest of Donald's piece.
Would this be a good piece of software for the CMALT application process in the future or is it not secure enough?
Interesting question, Ellen. The short answer is that I do not know. My instinct is that assuming it is secure enough it is probably too complicated for users to simply slip into using; and secondly not well suited to use as a vehicle for the assessment of applications for CMALT. Seb - 28/4/2007.
Posted by: Ellen Lessner | 28/04/2007 at 15:21