ok. let me try to explain.
I'm new since July to this whole tech integration thing, but really liking it, and I have a lot of first impressions. Pardon the lengthy reply.
First, let me say thank you for all that you are doing at eduspaces. it's really wonderful and idealistic and well thought-out, very clean. I'm really excited to see what happens to this in the next 6 months.
MY GENERAL ORIENTATION TOWARD LEARNING
In an ideal world, I would give students money and time and space to just be themselves and grow up naturally. school often gets in the way of learning and interacting with the world in meaningful ways. I'm not against teachers; I just prefer to see them as expert learning guides, instructional designers, and information sorters, maybe even mentors... who have the main responsibility of lighting fires under kids and them supporting them in their crazy, erratic learning cycles instead of trying to cajole them into following a pre-set path (unless it happens to be a cutting edge crazy and fun path, of course!). And they should be nice and honest and inspiring and energetic.. but anyhow..
APPLICATIONS IN THE CLASSROOM
Part of my vision includes allowing students to progress at their own pace but still having meaningful group interaction with fellow students who happen to be answering the same question or working on a same skill at that moment of time... where learning paths collide, however briefly. And that's why I've been looking for a social network that integrates seamlessly with flexible, easy content delivery, whether that be a CMS like moodle (not my favorite, but the one we have installed here), or some other LMS. We have WPMU running at the school and the faculty have their dreamweaver websites for posting homework, but it still doesn't bring in the social and identity/community-design aspects that appeal to me (maybe there is a plug in I haven't heard of??).
I have been thinking of a sort of hack for your system, where a teacher could use the presentation tab to present lesson plans (is this site SCORM compliant? I just discovered eXe - I would love to be able to export to this site) and then create a ton of communities based on lesson plans & projects like this:
UNIT ONE (teacher only releases one unit's worth of lessons, but allows students to pick which lessons they will work on and go at their pace in their different learning styles)
So then, the TOTAL # communities set up for UNIT ONE:
In otherwords, the test stands as a proficiency gate to the real fun, the application of knowledge to get something DONE, instead of being the end point of learning...
i would probably then have the entire class evaluate the group's end result and talk about the process.
example might be something like, UNIT PROJECT IS: create a fictional story of a person who has come to Hyde Park for the first time. this person only speaks German. explain clearly how to get from the school's doorstep to these 5 landmarks. at each landmark the person has questions for you, that you must answer with audio, written, video, images, and original photographs. once we have finished each leg of the neighborhood tour, we will pool everyone's information together (by making a final project group, adding everyone to it, and having each student subscribe their content to it). then run an RSS to the public site to see the finished project. So I haven't tried this, but theoretically, the teacher could put links at the bottom of their lesson plans to a Quia test and then the student would email the teacher when he/she had achieved 90% to put her in a project group. The student might be in 5 project groups at once all applying knowledge learned in different ways on wikis, with video chat, etc. etc. etc. the student could even move to a different project group when he or she felt like it. at a certain point in time, the teacher would call it a wrap to UNIT ONE and release the next bundle of fun.
i hope that makes sense.
so what a teacher (and student) need are blank white spaces that can be chopped up into any kind of imaginary grid and where she can drag and drop a whole host of 3rd party widgets and javascript to create a really cool learning platform that has summaries, long text, outlines, links to podcasts, video, audio, additional resources, animations, etc. etc. etc. The presentations tool is ok for some student responses, but not quite snazzy enough to really inspire working with visual content (unless you know tables). The plain view just doesn't feel quite right to me... but maybe I haven't seen enough pages done right...
If you were to go the extra mile, there would be some smaller visual representation of the groups and who is in them that could be posted on the teacher's profile, so that I can see where everyone is distributed within that particular unit -- actually that should be permission based as well so that I can make that visible to the class, essentially sending the message, look we're all working on different things, but our different things will come together in the end for a really cool unit project. I don't think many teachers will want to make the investment to build courses on moodle at my school. elgg is lightweight (in the good sense of that word), clean, open, way faster than ning... if it just had more 3rd party apps and more design features for presenting content, I think teachers would be willing to make it their course platform.
I know that's not how social networks are designed to operate (everyone keeps telling me this!), but it's where I see you heading and I just wanted to cheer you on. another important 3rd party app would be to look at tags on the elgg network and automatically generate tag maps that show profiles most closely related to yours, communities most closely related to yours and perhaps eventually, other teacher's content most closely related to your interest tags. I think that users of decentralized elgg should be able to say, "I allow you to use all of "this" (a series of checkboxes) data to create maps (even for content that is for community members only), then when somebody clicks on a profile or bit of content they don't have real access to, they can send an email asking to be included in the group. that's when world wide learning could get really fun. this same thing would make your social network look really active, like a second generation tag cloud that doesn't necessarily reveal numbers but has different visual views to show which tags are getting a lot of attention (rate of growth over time)
other user bits: why isn't there a blog button on the top of the page? it was very hard for me to figure out how to start a blog until I saw the URL on your blog and duplicated it on my own. and now I'm not sure why it doesn't show up on the side bar...
i can't expand this editor window in Safari a browser issue?
are the tags multi-lingual, by the way? does technology = tecnología so that users from different countries can get in touch?
wouldn't be a bad idea to have a getting started group for an overview of basic functionalities...
I love the Friends not in network/ex.plode.us, but it's not working for me, is that still getting fixed?
Also, I caught word of templates somewhere by I haven't seen any formating controls, even a simple thing, like twitter has for tweeking color control would be enough. maybe i haven't looked hard enough...
Finally, as a side note, I asked a student here about the integration of education into facebook and he was vehemently opposed to the idea. facebook is supposed to be the "anti-school" space, the social space, for kidding around, even criticizing teachers (gasp!), and expressing themselves. Somehow this is very much divided in his mind from learning. "I am learning here. I am socializing here." Like they really don't go together. Of course, I disagree, but it signals why the more of an educational touch you can give on this site, the more the students will go for it as an actual learning space that is useful to them, practical, helpful. Another concern I've heard is that students who are super focused on their schoolwork (and there are many high-performing schoolers here) might get distracted by the social element. Again, I disagree. And even if that were the case, I would still take that risk knowing that at least some percentage of students would learn how to relate and communicate online (as an important 21st century skill), create identities online, manage their attention and focus (something we all need to work on!), and have meaningful interactions to get something done.
RANDOM QUESTIONS
is there a way to embed a live webpage into a page on eduspaces? like log in to gmail for googledocs or pbwiki? just having the login-widget "target=new" thing or being able to create quicklink buttons somewhere at the top from your bookmarks would do a lot for all-in-one integration without having to wait for integrative widgets
anyways, my 60 cents.. I haven't read enough of your blog to really know what your vision is for the future, but what I've seen so far, I really like.
thanks again,
allison
Chicago, IL
p.s. I was up on the atutor.ca demo today. have you thought about a glossary module? that would be really simple and very useful for language students.
if you haven't already, check out: http://atutor.ca/atutor/demo/users/create_course.php (a lightweight version of this would be enough for most teachers, as long as it came out looking good - visually appealing is key) http://www.atutor.ca/modules/index.php (can you get some of the better people to create widgets for you as well - - it would really up the credibility of the site)
Keywords: classroom, community, development, LMS, teacher