I’ve been exploring Social Networking for Education…
Sorry I’ve been absent for a few days. I’ve been wrapped up in investigating options for set up my own social network for educational purposes. Studies have shown that students learn better in teams and so it makes sense that a Social Network, something modern kids have a real understanding of, would make a wonderful educational environment. Rather than try to work within Facebook or MySpace, both limited by their commercial nature, I’ve been spending a lot of time fiddling with 2 “open source” systems that are readily available at various web hosting companies. They are “buddypress” and “ELGG”.
Buddypress - http://buddypress.org/ is interesting in that it’s built on the very same software that I use for this blog, WordPress. As such, it supports a huge range of plug-ins that let you do everything from easily link to podcasts to create surveys, to link to advertising systems. It also offers all the basic features of social networks including:
- Activity Streams
- User Profiles
- Options to add user profile fields and sections
- Avatar uploads
- Group Creation
- Group discussion forums
- Group logo and Wire
- Friend system
- Messaging
- Bespoke themes
- Blogs per user (via the WordPress engine)
It seems very clean and looks promising, especially for groups where you want each member to be able to contibute a lot of their own writing.
On the other hand, Elgg – http://elgg.org/index.php is a stand-alone systems that was built in part for education. It features:
Elgg comes with default profile fields that can be extended or completely customized by the site administrator.
- Activity Streams
- Blogging / Microblogging
- Pages
- RSS / JSON
- Widgets
- Video
- Social bookmarking
- Groups
- Access controls
- Documents
- Photo Gallery
Which is better? It’s way too early in the process. But, I’ll keep you informed.
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