I'm giving Elgg a try as a blogging tool for Year 6 in my school, as an alternative to our usual 'design your website' topic for ICT lessons.
Today was the first day I let the pupils loose on the system!

Setting things up on the server was pretty straightforward, although I seem to be missing the manual from my distribution ;-)
Ours being a primary school, a little hackery has been required, to remove the public access option and user registration now that we've got the first cohort in place. Having just set up SSO for Moodle, e-mail and windows, it's a shame not to be able to do the same for elgg, although I believe this is on the agenda for v 0.3. Similarly, being able to create bulk accounts would have made the focus of today's session more content than process!

The pupils are quite excited by the prospects and potential, and love the idea that they're testing v 0.2, alpha release code! We didn't get much further than filling in our profiles, but they love the linking to other's pages where there are shared interests. We'd like to hide some of the fields on the profile page, next time round though.

Next lesson is a week hence, but it's going to be interesting to see whether any of them play with it in the meantime. Also, any way to get our hands on more templates, like the ones on this site?

Rushed off my feet for the last week, but I've been meaning to post an update on how we've been getting on.

A few of the pupils did come back to Elgg between the first and second lessons to add more to their profiles or check out what their friends had posted, but on the whole, fairly quiet. Following Dave's advice, I did edit the profile categories to change some of the work related stuff to invite them to talk about music, sport, drama etc, as well as naming a favourite film and author - I'd be interested to see how these change over the year, and in the future if any of them keep using our Elgg as their blogs - not sure what we'll do about access restrictions then...

Anyhow, the first proper lesson on blogging - emphasised that it was their space to talk about and reflect on the things that were important to them, but suggested that they all start by writing about the first two weeks of school - fascinatiting to compare and contrast the entries: here are two, for which the authors have given consent for me to quote here:

• It was interesting in drama. We have to make up a small play with stereo-types of a mad professer, a detective and a movie star in them. I am also enjoying my responsiblities as a nusary helper. The choldren are so cute and sweet. Maths and English are interesting. In maths we are learning about fractions and I am enjoying it. In english we are learning about poems by Ted Hughes it is quite fun and very intersted in it. Outside of school I do swimming six times a week. I love playing with my sister bo {Elizabeth} and she has a dog kennal in the car she likes cuddleing the dogs in the car and she drifts of to the land of nod {goes to sleep}. Bo dislikes my worms [the author has a worm farm] and gets all scared and runs away. My other sister is the most anoying girl in the intier world. She enjoys kicking, punching, and practicly killing me. I enjoy fighting back but I tend to walk of and she wins. She follows me everywhere and looks up to me but I don't really set a good example to her. She doesn't even know about my worms.
  
  
• The first couple of weeks being in year 6 have been brilliant.It's great to be back with my friends after the holidays.THe practice common entrance papers wern't as bad as I thought and I was very pleased with my mark.
  
  I am really enjoying my responsibilities being house captain and science monitor.Although we havn't had a house assembely yet,green house are having fun with designing competitions,looking after the other house members and planning the house assembly.
  
  Today we are playing in a netball tournament at Barrow Hills.It's only a fun tournament,but i'm still determined to win.I'm playing at goal attack,but as it's a versitility tournament we change positions every half time.If we win this,we will have won all the tournaments that we have ever played.
  
  These blogs are really fun and I will allways try to keep it up to date.

I'm interested in exploring a way of getting a sample of these set up as a class blogg, to still let them have some publicly accessible space on the web, despite our worries about access.

Not having a WYSIWYG editor is great! I'm being subjected to far less OTT formatting than I'm used to, and they're learning a few HTML tags, which can't be a bad thing - we've got as far as hyperlinking. I dread to think what things will look like if we get as far as editing the CSS files, though.

A good number went on to write about stuff not related to school, which I'm hoping to encourage, and we've had a scattering of coments on others' blog entries. A few more have started using it in their own time too, and there's a good mix of school / non-school subject matter in these posts. They've also had a chance to go back to their profiles and add more detail, as I found myself covering a PSRE lesson.

One issue facing me now is about the images - even though we've closed off access to blogs and profiles to the outside world, it seems that anyone can get as far as a page with the users name and image, which is a big no-no in our context - so short of some .htaccess unpleasantness I think it's got to be icons, avatars and symbolism, rather than digital photos - this may be no bad thing. A little semiotics never hurt anyone.

Having promised them v0.3 this week, I think they may also be about to learn the virtue of patience, yes?

One other feature requests or support queries whilst I'm at it: we love the 'All Weblog Posts' link - is there a way to get an RSS feed of this? What if all the posts are only available to logged in users? It'd be cool to have this feeding into our Moodle courses.

A few elgg/ related things have struck me over the last week or so, so thought I'd share them here.

The first was Jeff Flyn's recent post about Young Learners, which resonated well with a lot of what I've been thinking - I was really taken with his idea of the blog as a page created for the young learner rather than necessarily by them, although it could mix the two, with a gradual move to more learner created content over time. This is a tremendously appealing way of presenting the whole personalized learning notion which is getting more attention in school policy here. The problem would be teachers finding time to add personalized content, links, ideas, whatever into the blogs of all their pupils, but something like elggs groups might provide a vehicle for this, or it could be possible to write stuff straight to the database for all the learners in a particular category.

The personalized learning thing is emphasized in the DfES e-strategy Harnessing Technology. Here's an excerpt from the Secretary of State's introduction:

I am particularly excited by the idea of giving every student and learner a personal online learning space [...] And in the future it will be more than simply a storage place - a digital space that is personalised, that remembers what the learner is interested in and suggests relevant web sites, or alerts them to courses and learning opportunities that fit their needs.

OK, so Elgg can have a role to play in providing this, but it keeps the social dimension to learning too - instead of relying on the machine to 'suggest relevant websites', Elgg's social model means that it's the other learners who're doing the suggesting, and thus far more authentic, situated learning becomes possible as the learners can continue the dialogue that those sites might initiate, in a way which automatically generated lists of relevant sites are unlikely to promote.

The other really interesting thing was an email from a product manager at a big educational computing supplier, asking about blogs, and how I thought they could be used in education. Here's what I said:

I'm certainly not an expert on blogs, but I think there's a huge amount that they can offer in a school based setting [...] It's relatively early days for most of this web 2.0 stuff in schools, so there's limited practical work and hardly any academic research at school level, but lots of enthusiasm amongst us early adopters.

A couple of avenues suggest themselves,
1) as a learning journal, focussed on school work, with the opportunity for learners to reflect on their work in a course or across a range of courses, and providing ocumentation of work done for coursework etc, with possible linkage to e-portfolio type stuff.

2) as the learner's personal space, closer to the classical' blog, to provide them with opportunity to comment on issues as they affect them, some of which may be school related, but needn't be so - perhaps closer to the personal homepages of days past or something akin to the think.com pages, but with regularly updated content and most of the presentation stuff taken care of so users can concentrate on the content. This is the route we're taking, but our context is a bit unusual, I suppose.

Integration into a VLE would be probably high up the list for most schools, but it's been interesting here to keep the two separate - they seem to like the life / work distinction and it's good for them to see more than one package. The moblogging (ie updating the blog from a mobile, either by SMS, photo, audio or video) would be cool if you could get it working securely.

Wow.<br /> Many thanks for all the work that's gone into getting the new release up and running.<br /> I spotted the download was available first thing this morning, and took the plunge to upgrade from v0.2 <a href="http://stiveshaslemere.com">here</a>. It took about 90 minutes to get things working right - the two main problems were: <ul><li>MySQL didn't like the first two lines of update.sql, rewriting as <blockquote>DELETE FROM templates WHERE 1>0;<br /> DELETE FROM template_elements WHERE 1>0;</blockquote> seemed to do the trick.</li><li>v 0.3 is <i>not</i> happy sitting in a webserver subdirectory. The rewritebase in .htaccess needs changing, and to get things working I've had to put another .htaccess in the webserver root, with manual rewrites for each of my users' profiles. Aargh. If there's some simple way to get round this, please say!</li></ul><br /> That said, all this was sorted in time for the lesson - more posts focussing mainly on yesterday's drama workshop, together with great fun creating avatars from the creative commons collection at <a href="http://www.stortroopers.com/">Stortroopers.com</a>. Interestingly, one or two of my pupils miss the old style grey and purple interface, especially the pencil star icon. Now they can see who's who, they're rapidly creating lists of friends.