Category: Elgg

A phoenix rising from the ashes….

~ Chris Jobling ~ Leave a comment

Those of you who have been losing sleep over the withdrawal of free-Ning and its likely impact on the HEFCw funded enhancement project “A Peer Support Network” need worry no longer. The pilot social network EG-353 Research Project has been re-born, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, as a group within the even more ambitious Social Engineering site (named for the Lunch and Learn title for which I have to thank Chris Hall) briefly described in previous post “Plan B“.

Social Engineering will, hopefully, be the site that rolls out the idea of a peer support (social) network across the whole of the School of Engineering. It’s based on the open-source Elgg platform and is running, in the swan.ac.uk domain, on a server located in a lab next door to my office. It’s raw, it’s unfinished, it’s dangerously wide open (and for that reason I’m not posting the link!) but it’s working, and students are starting to come.

For those looking for a less stressful way of creating and maintaining a social network, see my previous post “Alternatives to Ning“. The subscription fee funded “pro” version to be hosted at elgg.com, due to be launched in May, may well be worth a look.

Plan B

~ Chris Jobling ~ 1 Comment


The recent Ning announcement was a particular blow to the HEFCw funded “Peer Support Network” project. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time: the 2009-2010 engineering research project is nearly over and the allocation process for 2010-2011 is about to begin. We need to roll over the students immediately, we won’t know the implications of staying with a paid version of Ning until May, and we can’t wait for a perfect alternative solution to come along.

Thus we have taken the decision to install Elgg, the open source community platform that once powered Oremi (fondly remembered, may it rest in peace) on to an Engineering Web server that I happen to have control of.
There are some immediate benefits:
  • We have control so the carpet can’t be pulled out from under us.
  • Elgg can host a whole school (or even University) and an unlimited number of groupings with the possibility of single-profile multi-group membership. Ning would have not played well in that space.
  • With the help of a plugin, it should be possible to use campus login in for authentication and control of access.
  • It plays well with Blackboard (see the Figure): Ning refused to run inside the Blackboard content frame. Students with a common login for Blackboard and Elgg need never really know that they’re different.
The disadvantages:
  • You need a web server to host Elgg on and some technical expertise to install it, set up the database and configure the system.
  • You need HTML, CSS and occasionally PHP skills to customize the system.
  • It’s open source so it will need to be maintained in-house.
If you are thinking of setting up social networks for your own students and have a longer lead-time, it may be better to wait for other solutions such as BuddyPress, Learning Objects Campus Pack Fusion or the community features of Blackboard 9.1. But we’re going for it in engineering and no doubt we’ll be able to report back in due course.