The other thing was to invite the MAPJD online students I work with to the ning site i set up ages ago, but wasn’t sure whether or not to make it live. The choice of ning by such an experienced group as the facilitators of this workshop gave me the confidence to go with it. So I’m interested if anyone else is using it for running a course in higher education, we are hoping to use it as a ‘virtual commons’ to mirror the physical social spaces of a f2f environment, as well as to keep the group informed of key dates, classes etc etc.I am part of a team at my university who are trying to ‘demonstrate the need’ for a more web 2.0/social networking approach to HE, and we are trying to find something that can sit within our existing VLE (blackboard) and offer more interactivity and feedback, so we can then get the investment that building something like elgg would need.
One problem with this is that ning doesn’t seem to be able to sit ‘inside’ a window in another browser so that it ‘looks’ like it is embedded within BB, which netvibes can – has anyone used netvibes as a portal for information etc? -  its what michael wesch uses on his anthropology course at kansas.

We as an institution are stuck with BB for at least the next 3 years or so, so there is a team of us trying to work from within it – it does do some things like student enrollment etc etc reasonably well – so we populate our courses from bb and then add the content using whatever plug in software we want. So far we are trying things out, and i suspect that something like elgg or drupal wil be the final solution, but until we can justify the investment in something like that ning et al provide a realistic short term way to experiment and  ‘demonstrate the need’

The Q is how much work needs to be done in order to create an environment where the average user can easily get in and set up a site like this one- we talk a lot about targeting the ‘hump’ – the middle area of staff who will use new tools if they are easy and quick to master, we will never impact on the bottom of the hump – those who are so old school that they will never change – nor do we need to affect those at the top – the early adopters who are already doing stuff. We need to create the conditions for change amongst the middle to see real benefits.

So perhaps the solution is to take your VLE and mash it up a little. I started playing around in blackboard and pretty quickly realised that you can create links from it to external sites very easily, and make those sites your course start page within the secure bb environment. So inspired by Michael Wesch’s course site at netvibes, I’m playing around with a version for my course, with lots of RSS feeds from relevant blogs and sites. Add in student and staff blogs and create a course facebook, ning or myspace site and you are away. The IT dept are happy because you are still using their expensive gateway, you have a secure site that is password protected, and your students think that their course site looks way cooler than it used to.

Thoughts welcome from anyone else who has tried this approach.