Learning the World

Elgg is an open source social networking web app designed for use in higher education. I’ve played with it a little here and there, but haven’t done a heck of a lot with it (you can see it in action at EduSpaces).

Of course, there are a lot of these kinds of services out there (Facebook and MySpace obviously come to mind first) so what’s different about Elgg? For one thing, colleges and universities can deploy this software to bring a social networking approach to their campus web apps. Instead of relying entirely on something like Blackboard or even Moodle, you can use Elgg to friend people, set up spontaneous groups, share files, etc., and do it in such a way as to not tie it to a specific commercial platform like MySpace.

But there’s more to it than that. The new push with Elgg seems to be to give it ePortfolio and presentation capabilities, allowing you to easily track, organize and promote your work online. This article on Nuclear Sledgehammer gives a brief overview of the idea. It’s an interesting read, and when I have a spare moment I plan on returning to EduSpaces to see exactly how you’d go about doing some of this stuff.