LSG Webinar - Choosing the right social and collaboration platform for learning

Aah! I finally made it to this one. Had a busy afternoon till now, but now it's webinar time. Today's LSG webinar is by Jane Hart, one of the world’s leading experts in social and collaborative learning. In today's webinar she's promised to examine three platforms explin what they can and cannot offer. I'm kinda interested in what could be a low-cost Ning replacement. I've also got a blogpost planned on this topic - keep your eyes peeled if my blog interests you. This is my third time with Jane - she's amazing and she's especially nice to me online so I'll do my extra bit to record her webinar properly. She blogs at http://janeknight.typepad.com, btw and if you aren't following her already, please start following her @c4lpt. She's the best source of wisdom about social learning, IMO. So take it away Jane - give us all you've got.

Craig's asking me about whether I have my superman outfit on -- don't know about that Craig, I'll do my best!

Jan'es asking us whether we're just curious about social learning or are we looking for a Ning alternative or if we're just evaluating platform. Looks like there's a huge mix of people and needs - and a lot of curiosity. Hmmm.... anyways, here are the liveblogged notes.

10 criteria for selecting the 'right' platform

Here are some of the criteria Jane mentions we should think about when selecting a platform:
1. Purpose: How will it support learning?

• Will it be a formal learning community?
• Will it be for a PLN/.
• Will it be a group space
• Will it be a file sharing network?
• Will it be an enterprise wide social and collaboration platform?
• Will it be an external platform?

2. User Functionality - What should it do?

• Social Networking
• Communication - messaging, discussion, chat
• Sharing - links, resources, etc
• Sub-groups - open or closed collab spaces
• Collaboration Tools - blogs, wikis, microblogs, etc

Ning seems to be good for most stuff here. Don says that Ning is great for bulletin board style stuff but not project collaboration.

3. Closed or Open Source - Can you look under the hood?
4. Hosted or Installed - Can you host it within your firewall? Do you have to be on the cloud?
5. Data ownership and export - If you do have stuff on the cloud, do you have an NDA on your content and can you choose to not expose your data? Can you move data out of the platform?
6. Terms of use - What kind of work does the platform allow you to do on it?
7. Ease of set up - Ning scores highly on this
8. Ease of customisation - Ning scores fairly highly on this as well
9. Ease of use - and Ning scores well on this too! Yaay! but it aint free anymore! Damn!
10. Cost - Jane's reading my mind here. So the question is -- is it free? Is is commercial only? Is there a choice of plans?

There's obviously the bunch of pros and cons beyond these parameters that you should consider. I for one won't restrict myself to a matrix, though a matrix like this will be really useful for you to make your initial evaluation. I like this Jane!

Jane's 3 social learning platform demos

So what platforms are you going to show us Jane? There's heaps of names going around in the chat area. Ok hold your breath!

Platform1 - Grou.ps

Grou.ps is a great Ning replacement. It actually allows your to migrate your Ning network which is kinda cool. And you can create your own little YouTube if you'd like. Some interesting pieces of functionality:

• Wikis
• Blogs
• Social Networking
• Calendar
• Video
• Filesharing
• Chat
• Groups
• Media sharing
• Facebook Integration - it actually pulls your information from Facebook profiles (very nice)

Jane's started off a grou.ps site here. Should be a nice place for inspiration. I'll take a look.

Platform2 - Socialtext

Socialtext is an enterprise class social learning platform. It offers a variety of features including but not limited to:

• a desktop client that allows you to microblog - I think it's called Signals;
• microblogging;
• wikis
• shared spreadsheets - ala Google docs
• there are a range of socialtext and third party widgets to extend your social platform
• closed groups if you need them - though I'm not a big fan of them
  

One problem with signals is that it doesn't support hashtags. BTW, my desktop sharing has died.

Platform 3 - Elgg

If it's Jane speaking you've got to expect a mention of Elgg. I actually like Elgg a lot and it got mentioned on Hanif's webinar. It has a whole bunch of good features:

• widgets
• social networking
• blogging/ microblogging
  
• open-source
• closed groups
• control over CSS and eventual look and feel - this is one place where elgg scores a big win
  
• granular access control - user and admins can exercise a high level of control of what people can see. This is a good feature from the privacy standpoint.

The great thing about elgg is that it's hugely extensible given all of the plugins from the community. There are heaps of examples on Jane's website in case you want to look up stuff.

So now for the side by side comparision:

Functionality:

• Grou.ps is a good social platform. Social Text is a great enterprise collab platform. Elgg scores in both areas

Closed or Open Source:

• Grou.ps is Open Source, though clunky when you download it. You can host or install it. Socialtext is Open Source as well, though outdated in that version. And then you can host and install it (SocialText appliance). Elgg however scores as being open source and being a hosted and installed version at the same time.

Data ownership and Export/ Tems of Use
Here's a table from Jane's presentation.

Ease
Here's a table from Jane's presentation.
Cost
Grou.ps has a variety of plans, Elgg is free, but you need config effort and Social Text has a free version but you'll perhaps need a plan to make the most of it.

That's a fair comparision. That was a whirlwind session, really dense in information and quite insightful. I've struggled to keep up I must say. I'm now going to tune into the QnA. Jane's gone ahead and put up all this stuff here. Thanks Jane!