#13. Social Learning Networks/Platforms  (Such as Ning and Elgg)

Develop a real social learning community for your class or school online. These tools are free and filled with the capacity to build an interactive community.

Ning is a hosted service that lets you build a private social network – like a “personalized Facebook creator”.  Ning has customizable themes and templates.  Also, it offers a public or private option.

Ning enables instructors to create classroom communities, organizations to create viral interest groups, and informal learning through communities of interest.

It offers teachers K-12 free and secure (no ads!) social networking for their classrooms. It can be used by students to share and make a learning community. Great discussion features, embedding, videos, flexible and personal design. This is the future of learning!

As one teacher says … “We achieved more with Ning in 3 months than we could achieve in 2 years with Moodle. It has helped us bring about a genuine learning community among our students and has enriched their experience considerably.”

Elgg is another open source software that combines a number of tools – eportfolios, personal spaces, file storage blogging, – all on one platform. So you can have blogs, wikis, video, podcasts, RSS feeds , social networking tools, discussions forums, bookmarking etc etc – and all in one place.

It is a good foundation for students to build their own Personal Learning Environment (PLE), and also an e-portfolio. Its really  a web publishing application combining the elements of weblogging, e-portfolios, and social networking designed to promote learning through sharing of knowledge, conversation, and reflection in a social/academic setting.

You can read more here.