The Wales-Wide Web

Last week, I went to Klagenfurt University to speak at a workshop organised by Wolfgang Greller.

Dave and Ben in action. Photo: Elmo De Angelis

The workshop was entitled 'ELGG - Social e-Portfolio Landscape for Reflecting and Presenting Learning'. I was the warm up speaker, talking about the use of social software for learning. Dave Tosh and Ben Werdmuller from ELGG did the hands on stuff.

It being August, I was pretty doubtful how many would sign up, but we had more than 30 (enthusiastic) participants, from four countries.

We specifically agreed we would show how the ELGG-Moodle integration worked. Now, if anyone has been following the history of this integration through a development block from New Zealand, you will know it is non trivial. Early releases of the plug-in for Moodle appear to have been buggy.

Anyway, Rene Samselnig from the University of Klagenfurt had done a wonderful job in configuring (or hacking) the plug in.

Dave led a walk through session, showing how form a single log-in, users could move assignments undertaken through the course structure in Moodle to their ELGG personal learning portfolio and went on to show the pedagogic use of ELGG ind developing personal portfolios.

I was impressed. For me, this bridges the gap between present VLE oriented practice and the Personal Learning Environments we have been talking about. And this is not proof of concept, this is rich, working software. There is also a further release of ELGG due in the next ten days or so, with many enhancements. It seems this will feature federated search across any ELGG install configured to allow such access. And a presentation module is planned for this autumn. ELGG is getting to be powerful stuff.

I have worked for the last two years with the JISC e-learning programme. In general, I think JISC have made the right call in backing the development of a Service Oriented Environment and in developing 'reference Models' for standards between the different building blocks of an e-learning, e-adminsitartion and e-researcch environment. But progress is painfully slow. Open Source providers are making much quicker progress through providing working solutions, utilizing Open APIs and de facto standards to allow the development and repurposing and reuse of contents.

The University of Klagenfurt are producing a video of the workshop. We will write it up and present the workshop on ELGG and on the Bazaar site. And if anyone is interested in a similar, hands on, practical workshop please get in touch.

Meanwhile, there are many people who should be thanked, too many to mention. But I have to say what a wonderful job Wolfgang did in organizing the event. he has only been in post in Klagenfurt since last autumn, but there is a real buzz around the place. Long may it continue.

Technorati Tags: e-portfolios, Peronal Learning Environments, Personal_Learning_Environments