Over the last few weeks we've been gradually rolling out our implementation to selected users to test before the great rush at the start of term.

The reaction has been overwhelmingly postive but with a consistent delay whilst people take the time to "get it".

However, I thought I'd post one particular reaction as it made me smile a lot.

5 minutes after emailing our Student Union Vice President with his account details, he'd logged in.

5 minutes later I got the following message:

"Mate
I think I love you"

... and this is from someone I've never met.

Well, I haven't posted here for a while mainly because we've been so busy doing the implementing rather than talking about it. However, it's now been a week since we went live so I thought I ought to review progress a little:

• Friday - thanks too Misja's xml import utility we went from 20 users to 33,000 users in 15 minutes and suddenly our little private test community was open to the world
• Friday night - a cavalier network contractor decided to leave the network to our VLE (and therefore Elgg as well) inoperable and what followed was one of the most uncomfortable weekends for many years - and spread to the first day of term as well!
• Tuesday - finally got everything sorted and when live properly
• Wednesday - err... where are they? Why aren't they blogging?
• Thursday - here we go, we have our first blogger, followed shortly afterwards by several others
• Friday - it's really starting to take off. Whilst most of the posts so far are "hello everyone", at least they're starting to use it
• Saturday - our first piece of shared learning. An education student started posting about Piaget and put his notes up for comment and I actually learned something!

So what are the key observations so far? Well, it's going pretty much as I'd anticipated it from a personal blogging perspective. What I find interesting is the community side of it. I kind of thought students would dive in and start foorming communities with their mates and clubs etc but they haven't so far. Ok it's very early days but what is interesting is the reluctance for people to participate in existing communities as well as form their own.

Observations so far include:

1. Despite creating obvious communities like "humour", "for sale", activity in these communities has been zero so far
2. It may well be there isn't an appropriate mechanism within our setup yet to adequately alert users what communities actually exist or even the fact that they can create their own communities. Maybe there needs to be an alerting system so if they want to create communities just for their mates, they can notify them and invite them to join?
3. What communities the students have been created have been specifically for their courses - with several students creating a community specifically for one of their modules or the course as a whole - this is somethign I really didn't expect. I thought we'd see social adoption before academic adoption and that academic adoption was more likely to come from the explicit use of Elgg in course work rather than a voluntary use by students.

So, I'm actually very pleased with the way things have gone so far. We've still got loads of work to do and a lot of hands to hold to help the early adopters make most of the potential but some of my nightmares have, thankfully, not materialised.

Oh.. and a I have to say a word about Dave, Ben & Misja who've been supporting our installation by writing customised code and bug fixing - the speed at which issues have been addressed and fixes emailed has been outstanding and we couldn't have got this far without their help - thanks guys!

Stan