We have launched Scribble, Scran's Elgg installation.  It's at scribble.scran.ac.uk. Please do come and have a look and, if you're interested, read on...

Scribble is for our customers primarily but the staff has been encouraged to make use of it too.  The boss wanted us to make sure it was populated in some way before it went live so we've been using it in-house for the past month or so and it's been filling up nicely.  It took a bit of evangelising to the others on my part to get things moving but everyone is well and truly addicted now.  Prominent tags in our cloud at the moment include Edinburgh, cat, progressive rock.

We had hoped initially to make this a completely open community.  However, since most of our users will probably be teachers and pupils in schools, we've decided to start with a slightly more closed off service.  To begin with, the community will be availably read-only to anyone but only Scran users will be able to register.  However, Scran users includes all teachers and pupils in all state schools in Scotland so that's a massive group.  If all goes well and the schools are keen, we may open the community up fully in future.

We are also making a few exceptions to that rule, ie. we're keen to welcome anyone who is interested in the project (and poach active bloggers), so I'd like to invite any of you to drop me a line if you're interested in joining our community.  Perhaps you'd like to feed your Elgg blog to a Scribble one?

I'm on Scribble at scribble.scran.ac.uk/kateo and you'll find my contact details there.

Cheers, Kate*** 

Since I attended the Curverider conference we at Scran have been plotting and planning what we could do to get in on the social software act. Today we took a big step forward and launched our new "Share" tools, which include a tool to post any one of Scran's 340,000 images to your Elgg blog.

In fact this post has been created in that way. This image is "Faience amulets: the Sons of Horus", number 000-000-659-423-C, from the British Museum. Currently you can only blog to elgg.net but we intend to add support for other blogging sites in the near future including, when we launch it, our own Elgg community. There we plan to found an open community and support it by developing tools for interaction between Scran and Elgg.

We're not thinking too carefully about exactly what we want the community to do other than support learning by helping people connect to one another. I hope that we'll start to use it in house too. Since one of my main responsibilities is user support I'm quite excited by the prospect of being able to connect with users and tap into their needs, wants and opinions.

I would also love to see the staff start to use it to discuss all sorts stuff (development ideas, lunch plans, Christmas party arrangements?). I'm fascinated by the healthy climate for learning found at elgg.net and I want that for Scran. I've had a go at encouraging the staff to use elgg.net already but there's no real motivation for them to frequent the community. I wonder if adopting our Elgg as a platform for some of our office communications would encourage that and what benefits we'd reap.

Comments and questions sought and welcomed.

Stan Stanier - Brighton university :: Stan talks about the University of Brighton's adoption of Elgg.

Chris Sessums :: Is there a community with this text?

Misja Hoebe :: At the crossroads, supporting a global learner community at CHN University

Apologies for the missing ones; we'll try and get them up as soon as we can. 

One of the ways is  to create a community for people to share ideas and success stories, ask questions etc. But, of course, the best resource for such needs is elgg.net. The easy solution would obviously be  to tell everyone to use elgg.net - and we will, but might that alone be at the risk of dilutng a sense of community amongst Brighton staff?

One way around this might be to consder ways of joining  the two communities in some way - taking a feed from the Pedagogic impact community on elgg.net into the Brighton community is something that's already possible but when you start to consider what I understand to be the potential benefits of openID and SSE that Kevin detailed in his presentation, then these could very well represent the glue to bring such communties together. If my understanding is correct (?), then these two facilties used in combination could be used to allow both cross searching of elgg.net from our community AND automatic authentication for our staff as a direct route into elgg.net - if I'm right ths strikes me as a great way to bring communities together.

I landed back home last night, and I've been thinking about the ideas discussed in the conference and beyond. As many of you have said, it was great to be able to put names to faces, and carry on the conversations begun online.

I'm cleaning up my notes/collecting my thoughts, and I'll be getting these ideas into this space as time permits.

It was great to meet all of you, and I look foward to more good conversations down the road.

Cheers,

Bill 

I work for www.scran.ac.uk, which is an online cultural archive used primarily by schools, colleges and universities.  We've been looking at Moodle and ELGG lately in order to come up with some ideas on how Scran can best interact with these technologies and I came along with a simple enough question from the non-specialists on our team: "What is the difference between Moodle and ELGG?"  I was expecting to find the technical answer but am pleased to report that I found a much bigger and more interesting educational answer.  

What started out this morning as a brief roundup of the day for my colleagues has turned into a monstrous great essay, so my thoughts are too abundant to post.  Here, however, very briefly and broadly are some of things about which I was particularly pleased to be enlightened:

• How letting social software rather than a CMS run the show turns control over to the learner, creating a true Personalised Learning Environment.  Terry's practical example with his distance learners really showed this up as a viable option.
  
• The revelation that students are already using social software (Misja) so much that it's part of what they expect from an ICT system (Stan).  Therefore, implementing it is not jumping on a bandwagon but providing a wanted and needed tool.
• The motivation possibilities of forming communities and publishing ones work, as exmplified by Miles's girls and Stan's "Grumpy Old Gits".
• A general trend towards making social software which facilitates interaction with other programs.  Open ID and the new ELGG dashboard sound particularly interesting.

I've just finished a review of the conference.

http://www.berthelemy-family.org.uk/blogs/index.php/mark/2006/09/05/curveri

It was a very good day. Mainly down to the organisation & welcome we got, and also the fact that a lot of us "knew" each other before the conference through our respective online presences. 

• "The text book becomes the launch pad for community-generated text" (Chris Sessums)
• We're not alone (everyone but particularly Misja as CHN are facing the same chanllenges)
• I want to find out more about Apple's speedy lectures software
• Miles very much echoed something central to our vision of Elgg's potential at Brighton - "Social learning = shared learning" - i.e a vision of providing both PLEs AND a shared learning environment - to us the community provision is probably more important than the personal provision
• I'd love to know where Miles got his avatars from! And also loved the theme he showed in his screen grabs - very clean and simple
• I'm very interested in the potential of SSE to provide a "federated search"facility - we have a very immediate need for this and I'm going to need to find out more very soon so if anyone has any pointers to a good summary I'd be grateful.
• Equally Kevin also gave more details on the potential of OpenID and this may well have significant potential for our implementation

Those were just some of the key points - I enjoyed all the sessions and came away feeling part of a very exciting and forward-thinking community.

My presentation can be accessed here: The Brighton Experience [application/vnd.ms-powerpoint]

Stan