My Classroom 2.0

I am exploring CMS and courseware options for the class next year. Elgg is a name that I see batted around as social network option for education, so I decided to install it and give it a go.

I tried to do an install on 2mhost where I host my Moodle install and a couple of XOOPS installs for different projects around the school. I really like the control panel and I have a nice chunk of disk space with a healthy dose of bandwidth. But when I install it it keeps giving me a globals_off error. For the uniformed, PHP (the software that accesses the database for all the entries for the website) used to have a setting called globals that was on by default. That was deemed insecure and now most things require a different setting. Elgg keeps coming up to an error that says “Elgg isn’t ready to run” and then gives a couple of suggestions to rectify the disparity. None seemed to work and after a little Googling I found that none of them would work. There were some ideas batted around on forums, including putting a php.ini file in ever subfolder and I had a brief interaction with my help desk. It still wasn’t working.

I tried to do an install on my personal space on 1and1. I don’t want to have a permanent install there, but it will do fine for testing. There were a couple of intructions to add to the .htaccess to make it work, but documentation on what to do was pretty easy to find online. Definitely not as smooth an install process as a Moodle install, but this is version 9.1. Version 1 is on the horizon according to a recently posted road map, so hopefully the install process will be a little smoother on the first full release.

Now that I have it up and running as a temporary install, it is time to experiment with it. What sort of things are possible with Elgg? Is it just a novelty or can some real collaborative work be accomplished with it? I plan to do some test projects with it as this semester winds down. Students blogs it seems will work well (Moodle’s blogs never felt really intuitive to me, but I need to investigate it further) and if I understand correctly students can upload an MP3 and the blog feed will work as a Podcast feed. It has a pretty standard Social Network feel to it, so the students should relate to it pretty easily, which is always a plus.

I want to make sure that the tools I am using for class just aren’t some gimmick and actually contribute to the learning process. I am not doing this to play with some neat toys, but to engage the class, to allow for facilitated cooperative learning. If Elgg seems like a gimmick to me, I will toss it and use something else. I am waiting for the confirmation of my Gaggle accounts (all outside emails are blocked at school except for Gaggle) and as soon as it comes through I am going to set up some test accounts to see how it works. If you want to help or see what Elgg is yourself, my test install is here.