Luz Pearson and I (both CCK09) are co-facilitating the ICT and Connectivism MOOC in Spanish

George has posted before about our MOOC

We started using Ning and we have now moved to MOODLE. We only use their Forums. Other tools are outside Ning/MOODLE, like in CCK09

We are aware that It’s not about tools. It’s about change.

….I think it’s important to consider your audience when picking your toolset.

I’m planning to facilitate an open seminar (calling it a course is a bit much) later this year and am leaning toward Drupal. My core constituency for this project are used to Blackboard. I could tell them to go forth, create a StatusNet account, and find somewhere to blog, but I worry that this would push them too forcefully out of their comfort zone.

A solution like Drupal or Elgg, on the other hand, takes them into a more open environment (blogs, posts, and content are world readable) while still putting all the tools together in one place as the proprietary LMS does.

Drupal certainly supports aggregating content from elsewhere, so it would offer a decent community hub. I’m not sure if Elgg does aggregation, but I’d be surprised if it doesn’t.

After teaching 2 excellent decentralized connectivism courses. When everyone seems to be against LMS/CMS, and write post after post about PLE as substitutes to LMS, you are back to centralized non connectivism courses using a CMS/LMS: Drupal and Elgg.

These tools are good for groups and not for networks. What will happen after the MOOC ends? The course hasn’t helped participants to develop their network and PLE since all their content is inside a CMS/LMS, useful only during the MOOC

Based on feedback from new users about difficulties in using Elgg, a new CEET sub-community (http://ceetbc.ning.com) for educational technology neophytes was created using the NING platform and we adopted moodle for Professional Learning Potlucks.

To our surprise, all three venues gained popularity and attracted new members. It seems that some people are more comfortable with NING while others are more comfortable with ELGG and yet others prefer moodle. All three have grown and developed in directions according to the needs and interests of the members.

We now have a web page launch pad to our three communities @ http://ceet.ca We plan to add Second Life and Facebook in the near future.

*Note: NING requires no tech support. ELGG requires a lot. We have an amazing technician who has helped us to work out all the ELGG bugs and quirks and customize it to meet our needs. The biggest advantage to ELGG is the group feature. Groups are mini communities with all the tools that the parent has.

As a community developer, which of the three do I prefer? I love them all.

We’ve trialled it for several months as an institutional social networking platform for our University and found that it lacks some basic features that teachers and students have come to expect from using other social network platforms (eg. Facebook, NING). As a result the uptake has been poor.

We’ve now starting to think that a better path to introduce social networking tools into formal educational environments might be to adopt NING, which has more features, and keep an eye on future developments with Elgg.

What I’d like to see is more educators using Elgg and discussing it’s pedagogical uses so the idea of using it for MOOC is a good one.

I’ve used it for years now. It’s well supported, and easy to tweak.

It lacks the vast number of plugins that WP has got, and the smart user interface. But it’s got a lot of features that make it easy to manage.