A “Learning Landscape” with Tagging

What is Elgg? (It’s being used at MIT.)

Described by its founders as a ‘learning landscape’, Elgg provides each user with their own weblog, file repository (with podcasting capabilities), an online profile and an RSS reader. Additionally, all of a user’s content can be tagged with keywords – so they can connect with other users with similar interests and create their own personal learning network. However, where Elgg differs from a regular weblog or a commercial social network (such as MySpace) is the degree of control each user is given over who can access their content. Each profile item, blog post, or uploaded file can be assigned its own access restrictions – from fully public, to only readable by a particular group or individual.

From a developer perspective, Elgg is built on LAMP and is open source – released under the GPL. The software has its own plug-in architecture, and supports a number of open standards including RSS (which is used throughout Elgg), LDAP for authentication (soon to support OpenID), FOAF, and XML-RPC for integration with most third-party blogging clients. The OpenID support is being developed as part of a project called Open Academic – which will allow a single login across installations of Elgg, Moodle, Drupal and MediaWiki.

Elgg focuses on the learner and interactions whereas VLE’s focus on the course and content delivery. It’s about providing an informal space that lets learners exercise their own thoughts, reflections, make their own connections and be able to compile a body of evidence that would normally slip through the cracks with the more highly structured approach that a VLE offers. The creation of ad-hoc communities around similar interests is what happens when you learn and discuss in real life, and Elggallows people to do this in the online space, whereas Virtual Learning Environments do not.

If you’re just after a personal space for yourself, you can log onto our free service Elgg.net, which is turning into quite a vibrant community of educators and students alike. This should probably be your first port of call if you want to learn more about what the system can do.

Finally, we’re about to launch Elgg Spaces. Anyone will be able to sign up and have their own distinct Elgg environment, visually tailored to them, without any programming knowledge or need to maintain their own technical infrastructure. You just sign up and it’s ready to go, instantly. If you want to link your Elgg Space up to other Elgg Spaces, through distributed search and OpenID, you can. I’m actually pretty excited about this; I don’t know of any services that allow you to run your own social networking site, even outside of the e-learning sphere. [Ed: PeopleAggregator does this too, but I agree it is fairly rare currently] Elgg Spaces is for the educational market, but there are more turnkey Elgg-based services in the pipeline.

What is on the future road-map for elgg?

Dave: One of the exciting new developments will be a presentation tool that will allow learners to capture the growth and development that can occur within these informal spaces. Effectively this will present a whole new paradigm on how learning environments can enhance and capture the rich learning that occurs within informal settings.

We also have the new version 0.7, which will come with a customizable dashboard and widget creator, as well as a revamped interface. Additionally there will be a vastly improved admin panel to allow people a higher degree of control over their site through a visual interface.

There will also be AJAX-based community real-time chat, internal messaging and trackback functionality.