We are looking for any developers / programmers who would like to get involved with this project. The Personal Learning Landscape, Elgg.

If you can program in PHP and fancy exercising your programming skills please get in touch with either Ben or Dave. Thanks.

Ben

Dave

Over the past couple of weeks we have received a couple of emails from people saying all Elgg looks like to them is a weblog and connections to other weblogs and there are other systems out there that do this already - so what is different about Elgg?

The short answer to this is permissions and templating. Research is showing that if the e-portfolio is to be a truly learner centric tool then the learner needs to have complete control over all aspects. This is where Elgg excels. The permissions architecture is a powerful tool giving the learner that control.

Elgg does borrow many features from other social networking tools but where it differs is in its ability to share: files; blog posts; personal information; your own learning communitites; etc. through the level of permission.

How do I use the permissions system?

To use the permission system, once logged in, you go to the menu option 'groups'.

Here you can create as many groups as you wish and include anyone you like in these groups.

Once a group has been created everytime you add a new file to your repository, put up a new weblog post, add personal information, and so you will see a drop down menu titled 'access restriction' pull that down and all of your groups will be displayed.

When you select the access permission to be one of your groups only the people who you included in that group will be able to access the particular item in question.

Gradually this allows the learner to build up their own private space, public space and seperate communities based on shared interests.

If you want to point people towards your Elgg space just use the following url:

http://elgg.net/'your login name'

for example my login name is dtosh so I would point people towards:

http://elgg.net/dtosh

Those of you who have filled in the "interests", "likes", "dislikes" and "skills" fields of your profiles will see there's been a change today. You can click each of the comma-separated values to view other users with that interest, like, dislike or skill (but only if there actually are other users with those values to find).

For example, click through to the following pages to view:

People interested in music.

People interested in travel.

People who like cats.

Of course, if you've restricted access to any of these fields, you won't show up in the search results to anybody who can't see them.

We're continuing to add new features to the system; the latest is the ability to add keywords to weblog posts, and then search for all the posts written by anyone in the system which have the same keyword. Click on "elgg features" below to see this in action.

To cut up your weblog post so that only a smal portion appears and a link to the rest: Insert "[[cut]]" into the body of your post (replacing the angle brackets [[]] with curly brackets {{}}), and the system will do the rest.