Tama’s eLearning Blog

As James notes, WebCT and Elgg have come together through Curverider and Aperto. As Sasan Salari announced:

I am very happy to announce that Curverider and Aperto are collaborating on an integration between the Open Source system Elgg and WebCT’s product lines.

As is mentioned in the announcement, the collaboration brings together the robust eLearning framework of WebCT with the social networking and blogging tools provided by Elgg.

I am especially pleased that the integration demonstrates how innovation created in the Open Source world can be used in conjunction with products in the commercial space, to create a total solution which benefits the end user.

The integration provides a seamless transition for faculty and students as they navigate between Elgg and WebCT.

To me, the integration opens up a whole world of pedagogical possibilities – instructors can now easily take advantage of some really exciting emerging technologies:

• blogging
• podcasting
• social networking

Most importantly, Elgg allows instructors and institutions to operate outside the bounds of the individual course or section – learning groups can be created across multiple sections, multiple courses, and even across departments.

Over the coming weeks, I will be discussing how Elgg can be used effectively in conjunction with WebCT, and I would really like to hear from existing WebCT customers on what they are looking for.

I’ve commented on this over at James’ post, but I thought I’d repost here:

While I’m cynical about WebCT’s motives in all this (it’s a bit like the sinking Titanic deciding to order a whole lot more lifeboats at the time they hit the iceberg) given that many universities *are* demanding a blog tool within WebCT, I’ve got to say that an Elgg plugin/interface which seemlessly moves between the two (as far as I can tell) is a far better option than the internal blog tool we’ve been discussing in the past few weeks. Having a fully functional blog tool like Elgg will, to my mind, encourage the use of blogs per se and may, indeed, lead a number of people to the conclusion that Elgg might be one of the core tools they want rather than WebCT. Perhaps WebCT/Elgg will lead to Elgg/Moodle without the diruptions of completely alien systems.However, pragmatically, WebCT isn’t going to the be thrown out tomorrow by many unis, so Elgg-in-WebCT is, to my mind, a far better option in the shortterm than WebCT-without-Elgg!

It’s not perfect, but it’s a far better blogging option than those provided internally by WebCT alone. And once the ease and integration of Elgg becomes widely used by WebCTers, perhaps Elgg will stay the distance even if WebCT doesn’t …