What motivates students?

So, what motivates people at work is challenge, mastery and making a contribution. Is that the same for students? Is it a better incentive than grade inflation? Will we get better students if we challenge them more, help them to be excellent according to their abilities and enable them to…

Continue reading

Hosted Drupal Sites for Social Networks

Drupal is an open source CMS framework that can and has been used to build all kinds of web sites (including Obama’s www.whitehouse.gov). It can also be used to build educational sites with elements of social networking (see Drupal in Education and Bill Fitzgerald’s book Drupal for Education and e-Learning,…

Continue reading

Bye bye BECTA…….. who's next?

So BECTA is one of the first victims of the government’s spending cuts. Could it be the start of greater scrutiny of education IT projects? Will there be others to follow? As Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent for the BBC notes, BECTA “has been criticized for being captured by technology suppliers…

Continue reading

A phoenix rising from the ashes….

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…

Continue reading

Treasure this…

“A nation’s treasure is in its scholars” – Chinese proverb. In an idle moment, I took the time to scroll through all the blog postings in the Learning lab community blog. I didn’t count them, but apparently there are 155 golden nuggets published since July 2007 by the small (but…

Continue reading

Alternatives to Ning

A brief survey of alternatives to Ning with comments. Please feel free to extend the list. Cloud Hosted The following were recommended by JP in a discussion “The Best, Most Reliable and Trusted Freemium Social Network Alternatives.” on the Ning Creators community site. I haven’t tried any of them. Ning…

Continue reading

Plan B

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,…

Continue reading

Reactions to the Ning "Bombshell"

April 15, 2010 TechCrunch was early to the news of Ning’s change of strategy, which at the time was still known only to a few members of the Ning creator’s network. Posterous announced that it would be building a Ning blog importer for free — but that still leaves all…

Continue reading

Ning … here today, gone tomorrow.

Just noticed this post (No more Ning) from James Clay which comments on this post on the Ning creator’s network which tell’s us that Ning is planning to phase out its free social networks to concentrate on their paid customers. The timing is immaculate: on the day as on which…

Continue reading

A Beginner's Guide to Social Engineering (the Slides)

Cross posted from Fresh and Crispy Today I presented a “Lunch and Learn Session” to colleagues at our Staff Development Unit. Here are the slides which are hosted at Google Docs. The creation of a Ning network for SALT was a highlight of the session, and unfortunately that bit is…

Continue reading