Stan asked, in his welcome to Lars and I in this community, if I have any tips to pass on from our pilot of Elgg at Leeds University. I thought I would respond with a brief reflection but there is probabley nothing very surprising here!
Our pilot has been a bit low key to begin with but is starting to gather a bit of momentum. It started life as an unofficial project by just 2 or 3 of us to see how it works and to try out blogging for ourselves in an environment that we might be able to roll out to other staff and students. We are now official in the sense that the installation has been moved from a development server and it is being more generally advertised round the campus. One stumbling block has been the lack of documentation and no time to prepare it ourselves so far.
Elgg has mostly been used by staff so far and has proved to be enormously valuable. It has created a network of academic, research, library, staff development and technical support staff that has never existed before and probably wouldn't have without Elgg or something like it. And this is still slowly developing. For this reason alone it has been a great success but we only have about 1000 users out of a potential of over 25,000 so it would be untrue to say there is a general knowledge and acceptance of Elgg just yet.
I have started a Postgraduate community for research postgrads in my School and so far only 1 has posted after about 3 weeks. We are thinking of introducing some induction exercises for PGs to at least get them to fill in their profiles and post an introductory message about their research area. We have a PG/Staff informal research seminar series and I will attempt to link this activity to the PG community to see if we can extend the seminar discussions there. One thing we have found out is that registering students on Elgg and giving them a bit of encouragement to use it with a few suggestions is not a successful way to get students blogging. The most successful use so far has been a computer science module where students were required or undertake a pair programming task (in python) and report regularly in their personal blogs at specific points in the development of the project and produce 2 reflective posts in conclusion, one on python and one on the experience of pair programming. This was a great success and produced some really useful work but a) there were marks at stake and b) none of this group has blogged since the end of the module. However this was only a couple of weeks ago and we are now in the exam period.
I gather that this lack of continuing to blog after a module like this is quite common. Presumably it is seen as just another assessment task - do it and forget it. On the other hand, if there is no initial structure and explicit pay-off little seems to happen spontaneously. I'm currently thinking about ways to get students started that gives them obvious rewards but pretty quickly shifts into personal and intrinsic outcomes that they might continue to pursue for their own sake, i.e. a personal online resource. This strategy might work with undergrads where we can give marks but a different approach is necessary for research postgrads.
It would be great to hear what others have been doing. We can learn a lot from both successes and less successful projects
