I am developing a short course in business English and am planning that a requirement of the course should be to set up a blog here to reflect on learning and anything else regarding the course.

It seems I have some students ready to start in September.

Another requirement of the course will be that students make contact with people with experience in e-business so maybe Elgg will be able to help with this though I think that this community may not be large enough yet.

I'm very interested to see Elgg launching into podcasting and have just acquired an MP3 player myself to see what the possibilities are. I was a bit disappointed though to find that not much is available from BBC radio (as an expat these things are important to me and reception here is awful on an ordinary radio). In fact what little is available is only an experiment until December and furthermore is only available on a 7-day licence! How does that work then? Does the file self-destruct after seven days a la Mission Impossible? Tomorrow I am finally getting broadband at home so maybe I can listen live on the internet instead.

Just found an interesting set of posts about 'the ideal e-portfolio'. It includes the following:

'Virtually none of them allow for cross referencing artifacts. Instructors who are evaluating the portfolios do them by student, not by outcome. I was always astonished that so little had been done with the database capabilities behind the portfolios--no searching, no querying, no sorting.
Many of them are not very accessible for the disabled or impaired.'

I arrived there while I was tring to find out why our Moodle keeps disappearing. Still no answer to that one I'm afraid.

I have just bought án mp3 player out of birthday money funds. I am having difficulty in working out how to subscribe and download other people's podcasts but have just managed my first interview with my daughter about a terrible school trip she has just had. Fortunately the file does not seem to work. I certainly need to work on my interview voice.

On Monday I have a serious meeting first thing, to find out what the problem is with our Moodle which keeps disappearing from the internet (though it sits quite safely on the server).

I have never been a serious blogger though that time may come soon. Still I have left a trail of started blogs in my quest for the perfect one.

I started with Blogger about 4 years ago and didn't like the contortions one had to go through to add pictures or collaborators. I think its better now but haven't really gone back to check (I just listen to the buzz about Blogger).

Then I tried Xanga where Sus Nyrop still maintains a blog. I was looking for a way of communicating with family but didn't like that they all had to subscribe in order to make comments.

When I was planning a student project where I wanted them all to maintain learning diaries I tried something called schoolsblog which doesn't seem to exist anymore. Since it was more often offline than online this meant that side of the project was a disaster.

When I next needed a blog for a class i tried 20six mainly because you didn't need to be a member to add comments. When it is a question of student blogging I want as few barriers to cross-communication as possible.

I like the Elgg blog though of course it isn't primarily a blogging tool. But the features all around it such as the file upload and social network and tagging features make it very attractive as a professional workingplace. It will be almost perfect when you add that wisywig editor.

Finally I found out about the new Yahoo 360 blog and that seems to have almost everything I'm looking for regarding the family contact requirements. I'm starting to upload video and audio which Yahoo doesn't seem to allow but otherwise it is a very easy system to use. I have serious reservations though about the aggressive tactics Yahoo uses when you install various downloads such as Messenger.

I would say that at the moment my favourite blogging places are Yahoo and Elgg. I can see me using the Yahoo site for family contact and the Elgg site for professional projects.