We've been collecting survey responses from our first semester, and they look pretty good.  Obviously, we've got to actually enter them into electronic format (groan), but I think that we'll be able to say some interesting things. 

A couple previews:

• Students think that privacy controls offered by Elgg are crucial.
• Students really think that it's important to have class activities on an academic site, rather than a commercial one like blogger/google groups/etc...
• Most students felt a sense of ownership over their posted material.
• Students think that the website is clunky and kind of hard to use.
• A significant number of students prefer Elgg over a traditional CMS like WebCT/Blackboard
• A surprising large number of students have shared their profiles with friends/family/advisors (esp because we didn't encourage that at all).
• The wiki add-in I created was heavily used. Some students liked it, but there were a number of usability complaints.

More to come in a couple of weeks...

Well, I've been working over the past couple of days on getting my old 700mhtz laptop running a development environment on Linux. It's been a struggle, and if it weren't the holidays, I wouldn't be spending this much time on it.  However, I can definitely see the attraction of the linux architecture.  However, it's a royal pain to relearn everything on a new platform.  I am really experiencing some frustration here... 

On the plus side, I'm hoping to get it working today & really make some progress updating the folio plug-in.  It has some issues with the most recent version of Elgg, and there are some features I'm dying to integrate.  I'll probably post it up here in a couple of days.