Just checked our stats and we passed the 1000 posts mark sometime this week - not bad for only 6 weeks of operation.

Having revisited this activity (as far as I can), I'm pleased to see an increasing academic activity as well as social. Indeed the 1000th post was one made to a very active academic module community - one of several now beginning to really use Elgg for teaching & learning.

I've spent much of the last three weeks introducing students who are participating in CETL projects to Elgg. These projects vary from an evaluation of Elgg as a PDP tool and how it can be used to facilitate the personal tutoring role to one within our Arts faculty using Elgg as a means for media students to share and discuss video material they've produced.

All of these sessions have been very revealing for the following reasons:

1) The extent to which students either haven't been told or don't listen to the reasons for using the new system

2) The fact that, despite the vast majority being traditional school leaver undergrads, generally only 10% of them are prepared to admit they've ever used a blog or know what one is!

3) The fact that is you then ask them if they've ever used MySpace or Beebo, many more put their hands up

4) The number of them that spend half the lesson switching between what they're supposed to be doing and actually playing on MySpace

5) Whilst a generally unresponse breed, our UGs do appear to have no problems in understanding and using Elgg, albeit they don't appear hugely engaged with the specific projects they are involved in

6) The fact that, if you prepare for a group using videos and increase their quotas AND increase PHP's max upload config, if you then forget to restart Apache, anyone trying to upload a video over 2 Mb fails and, as the tutor, you get seriously embarrassed!!!!

Aside from this, the academic use is really starting to take off here now. In the last couple of days I've been approached by 3 tutors all wanting to investigate using Elgg to implement ePortfolios. Two of these appear very straight-forward and will probably fit into the Elgg framework very nicely. The final one is looking at its use for Nuring practice and that's much more challenging as their portfolios require considerable interaction from external mentors, many instances of signed evidence and specific needs to present the materials in particular ways. I'm looking forward to heqaring more about the proposed presentation tool that's on the cards for Elgg to see to what extent it may satisfy these needs.