I have joined several Nings and generally get very little traffic in my email as a result. This is strange since some of them such as Classroom 2.0 have 11,000 members and are very active. Keeping up with what is going on here has been my main worry because otherwise I like the ease with which you can add all manner of multi-media and discuss it here. So after Helen and Cris took the initiative to organise a Ning exploration session I think I am a little wiser or at least can begin to see a way forward.
The key lies in using the RSS feeds. There is no RSS feed for the whole site but if you go to the main page you will notice RSS feeds available for all blog posts, latest activity and forum posts.When you click on the orange RSS icon you are directed to a strange looking page. You need to copy the URL and add it to one of the following
1. Outlook The latest version of Outlook (2007) now has RSS as one the available folders among the usual Inbox, Sent, Junk and so on.
2. Explorer and other browsers. The latest versions will have a feed collector button in the tool bar which you can use to collect feeds.
3. Bloglines is a program you can use to collect feeds. There are others such as Feedburner.
4. Aggregator/personalised webpages such as Pageflakes, Netvibes, iGoogle or Protopages. You can add the chosen RSS feeds to these pages and make that page your start page so that is the first thing you see every time you turn on the internet.
So I will be adding the Ning RSS feeds to my Netvibes page which is my start page and on which I have summaries of all the blogs I am interested in. I have already added two of the Ning RSS feeds to the VITAE Moodle entry page.
Today's session with Helen and Cris during which we discussed various aspects of Ning has also clarified for me how to administer course activity within Ning.
I have a group of participants who have started in Moodle and who I will be meeting face to face at the end of the month. The blog function in Ning is ideal as a way of introducing participants to blogs outside of the locked Moodle course but I think that our participants will feel safer if their blog postings have a restricted readership at least at first. How to achieve this? My proposed solution is that participants befriend each other and me and therefore everytime they post they can choose to make posts only available to their friends. This will make sure that they can have the safe restricted audience until they have the confidence to allow their blog posts to become more public.
Comments
Hi Anne, I am also in learning mode about Ning functionality, and find it a confusing mix with a little of everything, for example I discovered only recently having more unread, personal messages that I had never noticed,just because I had supposed that they would also appear in my mailbox.
Now as your Moodle course could eventually choose using the built in Moodle blog feature, I am wondering why you would want ot have both Ning and Moodle to augment complexity? Would your course partcipants feel comfortable with a comparative choice of VLEs, or are they resistant to chaos?
That is a very good question! The Ning is serving another purpose in the VITAE project in that we are using the Ning for our community of practice. We considered very carefully using Moodle also for our community of practice but after three failed attempts using Moodle as CoP (Nordic Voice, VOCA and VOCA2) we decided to try Ning instead since it seems to be social by nature. So given that we had a VITAE Ning which we wanted our participants to continue using after the course I thought they could use the blog feature in Ning. The Moodle blog would have had a much more restricted audience.
One thing that irritates me a bit about Ning is that it does not seem to be possible to upload documents. You can upload all sorts of weird and wonderful things but just not ordinary text documents and to me that seems like a limitation for running a course in NIng.