Well, so far so good but this community wouldn't be hugely helpful if all the posts just said how well things were going so here's the first tricky issue we've uncovered:
I'm working on a CETL-funded project with a tutor investigating the use of Elgg as a tool to support the personal tutoring process. Because we believed we should try to follow the PLE concept as closely as possible, this project doesn't use a community but expects students to participate via their personal blogs. The students were all taught how to use Elgg and, most importantly, how to create an access control group that just included their tutor so they could post blogs privately with the tutor and therefore engage in one-to-one discussions etc.
There are 77 students in the group.
Now, when the tutor tries to view all the relevant blogs, the task is nightmarish - even though he's added all his students as friends so they're easy to find, sifting through all the posts to identify which are the private ones for him and which are the ones he can see because they're public or logged in user-accessible is a significant headache.
We've considered asking students to use consistent tagging but there's no way of enforcing this so we've decided to move the project to a self-contained community so the tutor only have to look in one place. I don't feel terribly comfortable about this as it kind of goes against the grain of the PLE concept and the use of personal space to collect, manage and share information with others but it's been a good wake-up call about how the real-world and practical issues of dealing with largish student groups impact on virtual ideas/dreams.
We live and learn.
