Elgg has a long history of being used effectively in education. The University of Brighton made headlines a couple of years ago when they used Elgg to become the first institution in the world to roll out a social network to students and staff across campus, which is now being emulated throughout the UK higher education sector. In California, Jim Klein has an award-winning Elgg network for the Saugus Union school district, which is also serving as a model throughout the country.
So why is Elgg suited for education, and how can you use it?
A lot of the software designed for an e-learning context is aimed at formal learning: classes, courses and submissions. However, there is a lot more that goes on in an institution, which is rarely captured or harnessed. If you look back on your university career, you'll probably remember that some of the most valuable experiences were the things that happened around the edges: study groups, hallway interactions, unofficial discussions with tutors.
Elgg captures both formal and informal learning beautifully, but also - through cross-site tagging - clusters content together in useful ways. You can find documents, students or colleagues relating to the topics you're interested in; you can set up a collaborative group for you and three other researchers; you can create groups for classes and allow students to both discuss the content and discover related resources. Students maintain control of their own digital identities, and can create customised profiles that truly reflect their personalities and interests. They can blog, upload photos, record podcasts, participate in forum discussions and manage tagged wiki pages. All this while maintaining strict, powerful access permissions (you can control exactly who can see any given resource) and maintaining an audit trail using a full activity log.
In an industry first, Elgg also has full import and export capabilities using the Open Data Definition. That means students, if you allow it, can take their content from one Elgg community to another, for example if they change institutions. If you have to look after several different communities, you can also use the Open Data Definition to aggregate activity across them. They could be running Elgg, or any platform that supports the Open Data Definition.
Elgg's interface is extremely easy to use. In fact, we think it's by far the easiest social networking environment to master, which leaves education professionals to get on with the business of teaching and learning. Speaking of which, while use of Personal Learning Environments, digital storytelling and e-portfolios are all examples of how Elgg can be used in education, Elgg also works very well as a way to enhance traditional, face-to-face learning. We've written the software; it's up to you to decide what to do with it. Forthcoming features will include wikis, SMS functionality and more, so there's a lot of power at your disposal.
It doesn't just have to be about learners and tutors. Jim Klein uses Elgg effectively between teachers at the Saugus Union school district, and many others are following his lead. It's a great way to share teaching resources and experience, securely and efficiently. The network is closed, and you can further restrict resources to be read by as small or as large a group as you please, so you can be sure that your discussions are secure.
We're going to be talking a lot more about Elgg in education. If you'd like to find out more, please get in touch, either here in the comments or at info [at] elgg.com.
