Brad’s Ve-learning project

Theoretically the formal part of the project comes to an end, though I am sure it will continue for a while yet.

A few thoughts…

Have had a better look at Wordpress blog functionality & customisability.  It looks very impressive, had I more time to spare for playing.  Have installed the plugin for Flickr, which enabled the drag /drop exercise in an earlier post.  Also made use of the Blogroll feature to add some of the blogsreferred to herein.

Would also be interested in looking at VOX in more detail.  The more you learn, the more something else interesting comes along…

The Wikispaces wiki seems to work pretty well, but is inadequate for our needs.  The formatting quirks will make it easier for someone to cause problems in there, or leave frustrated.  At present the advertising would also not be acceptable.

As suggested earlier, our own hosted wiki with our badging & increased functionality would be the go.  Anne Bartlett-Braggs suggested that Confluence http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ was a wiki “to die for”, & while I’ve never felt quite that enthusiastic (& a lot of people seem to die for a lot less), I would certainly like to give it a try.  Apparently, make the most of the plug-ins.

Thought Google Docs or Zoho Writer with multiple user access & ‘publish’ option might be another alternative for the links, but am not happy about a URL that crosses half the country.

The boss was looking at social software as a forum appropriate to meetings & issues for senior staff (IMC).  She has her concerns re the lack of security on basic blogs & wikis.  She suggested I meet with Leona Norris, formerly involved with the veLearning project http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/course/enrol.php?id=771 incl the eMentoring exercise, particularly in the techie side of things, including the Edna groups area.

We discussed setting up an Edna site as a secure option of IMC, & it looks quite promising.  We also discussed a heap of other stuff, including useful blogs, VOX as a blogsite (looks interesting), Elgg as an educator’s MySpace & Protopage (mentioned by Leigh Blackall last week in the elluminate session).