I have seen the light ...

I have seen the light and I've seen it through the Facebook page for boagworld. This is what a peer support network could and should look like. No need for external services, or hosted Elggs. And it's in the place where our students live. I will need to study it to see how it was made, but it looks like a very good model to me.

Discipline Groups

Last night I invited all current level 0, 1, 2 and 3 students to join the new "Social Engineering" Network. I also notified members of eg-353.ning.com that that site would be wound down when the Ning charging scheme comes into force on June 14.

I am tracking and seeing steady growth in the membership of Engineering Social, but it's not as fast as it was for Ning. Maybe Ning is more compelling "out of the box" than Elgg is. Perhaps there's a lesson there.

To encourage community building, I have just created groups for each of the undergraduate disciplines on the new Engineering Social network. I hope to be able to promote at least one member of each of these disciplines to "community leader" in time for the new academic year.

Network Relaunch

EG-353 Research Project, the original grouping for the pilot of the HEFCw funded enhancement project "Peer Support Network" has just been re-launched (in rather a raw state) on a local hosted Elgg implementation as a group within Social Engineering. We are hoping that we can take enough of the community from eg-353.ning.com and recruit enough people from the group of students who will be taking EG-353 next year, to make Social Engineering a self-sustaining peer support network for the whole school of Engineering from Freshers' Week 2010.

Notification tools: big breakthroughs

Chris has gotten Twitter, and Grazr working now on the Blackboard site. He's also discovered ping.fm which allows us to "ping" status updates to Twitter (@eg353project), the EG-353 Facebook page, and Eg-353 Social (Ning) network all at the same time.

Lot's of other update partners possible too.