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.

e-Learning committee

Here's the presentation, made with prezi.com that I used to present our progress report on the HEFCw enhancement project "A Peer Support Platform" to the e-learning committee today.

Made a Pipe

To overcome the deficiencies of the RSS gadget in ning, I created Yahoo! Pipe to take the twitter feed, the delicious bookmarks and this blog. I tried to include the RSS feed for the Blackboard module blog but it wouldn't work! The resulting combined feed stream was sent to a new RSS feed which you can access directly through a link. I then updated RSS feed reader gadget on the home page to display the new RSS feed.

The same effect is possible using Google Reader feed bundles, but the default output is an OPML file rather than an RSS feed. Nevertheless, here is the equivalent as a Google Reader feed bundle. Stop Press: I just noticed that the viewable page has an Atom feed, so you can subscribe to a feed bundle!

Restrictions of the RSS Feed in Ning

There is an RSS feed gadget in Ning, but it's a bit restricted in that it only supports a single feed. To have multiple feeds, you'd need multiple gadgets and for that something like iGoogle, Netvibes or Pageflakes would provide a nicer interface. To work around this restriction, use of an external feed aggregation service such as Yahoo! pipes or a shared Google Reader collection would be needed.

There is a RSS feed reader gadget, but that's limited to 6 feeds. In both cases, it's not clear whether the feed gadget or feed pages are per-site or per-user controls.

Anyway, I've added an example of both to see what the community thinks. I've used the RSS gadget to post a collection of delicious bookmarks for the EG-353 project. I'm using the RSS Pages application to serve the eg353project delicious bookmarks and tweets using the #eg353project hashtag.

I seem to remember that Elgg has much better support for importing and sharing RSS feeds. If we were keeping score, that would be Ning 0-1 Elgg.