social networking services & educational communities

About Emerge

The Emerge project is an innovative 28 month consortium-based project. Its primary aim is to support the creation of a sustainable community of practice (CoP) that will develop and exploit new emergent technologies (e.g. social software, pervasive computing) for use in educational settings.

Project hub

Event management Synchronous events & meetings

“To act as a conduit and pathway for the range of locations inhabited by all participants.To channel and enhance the reach of content from existing community members, whether working in single or multiple locations. To scaffold the online practice, work and communication of the group. To organise, store and aggregate the project documentation, map development… The hub will allow the project team to support participants to create overlapping individual and group personalised web 2.0 environments that most suit their needs and preferences. The emphasis will be on the circulation and identification of distributed content, allowing participants to work and to have a presence across multiple sites, and dialogue across locations.”

Why Open Source?

• Opportunity for project to contribute in terms of profile raising

• Modeling good practice• Focus resources on supporting community• Ideally, contribute to development• Ownership & flexibility• Best tool for the job

Some Issues

• Mixed user group in terms of confidence with and preference for SNS organisational structure

• Search functionality and practices, including tagging

• Disputes over aggregation practices & context

• Institutional, professional, personal activity

OS Social Networking

• AroundMe http://www.barnraiser.org/ - three social tools, OpenID-based

• Elgg - Classic & 1.0 http://elgg.org/

• Dolphin - http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/

OS Social Networking

• Inoshi - http://portal.insoshi.com/

• Lovdbyless http://lovdbyless.com/

- both Ruby on Rails

• Mahara http://www.mahara.org

Open Source Social News

• Drupal Vote up/down module - http://drupal.org/project/vote_up_down discontinued for version 6

• Drupaligg http://drupaligg.com/ built over Drupal

• Newscloud - http://www.newscloud.com/• Pligg - http://www.pligg.com/

Open Source Social Bookmarking

• GetBoo http://www.getboo.com/

• Scuttle http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/

• Unalog - http://unalog.com

OS Video Hosting

• Plumi video sharing http://plumi.org

• Showinabox http://showinabox.tv/ - for WordPress video blogs

• FilmForge http://filmforge.koumbit.net/ - video for Drupal

OS Microblogging

• Identi.ca http://identi.ca/ Open Source federated microblogging

• Laconica - http://laconi.ca/

OS virtual worlds

• OpenSource Metaverse Project http://metaverse.sourceforge.net/

• Croquet http://www.opencroquet.org/• NMC Open Virtual Worlds Project

http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/nmc-launches-open-virtual-worlds-project - extension of Sun Microsystems’s open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland

Developments to watch:

• Buddy Press http://buddypress.org/ Open Source project creating plug-ins to turn Wordpress Multi-User in to a social network platform.

• Identi.ca http://identi.ca/ Open Source federated microblogging

• OU SocialLearn platform development http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/socialearn/index.php (leaning towards OS)

• Wikia’s Social Profile extension for Mediawiki http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SocialProfile

Current & future issues

• Data portability - online identity, contacts, relationships, personal details, media & assets - about standards and interoperability but also about user experience design & support.

• Data management - privacy issue & concerns, context.

Looking out for…

• Tagging development• Meaningful permissions granularity• Import & export functionality• Better user support - docs, videos, how-to’s• Hosted services/ online educommunities

Thank You!