Elgg

The last few days have been busy. I flew in to Edinburgh from Portland for Curverider's first conference on social networking tools in education. My trip was relatively short -- I landed on Friday and left Tuesday. While in Edinburgh, I managed to squeeze in a few touristy bits and pieces, but a good portion of every day was devoted to meeting with these guys and this guy. The meetings took place in a series of pubs in Curverider's remote offices, and they were pretty amazing. In the space of three days, we covered a lot of ground, sorting out sundry details of the OpenAcademic roadmap -- including a timeline, the exact structure of the development site, and details relating to single sign on, tag and full text searching across sites, and moving content cleanly between Elgg and Drupal. All of these details will be made public as soon as I clean up my notes.

Over on the OpenAcademic blog, Sean Lancaster has asked the following question:

i appreciate the effort that is being undertaken to create a terrific online learning environment that brings various resources together seamlessly; however, i am curious to better understand how Drupal and Moodle are different in what they provide. i mean, why would a person use both tools at the same time?

The short answer to your is that the best option is a subjective determination -- kind of like Mac vs PC, etc, etc.

This has been in the works for a while, but now it's official: http://openacademic.org

This is an open source project designed to integrate Elgg, Drupal, Moodle, and Mediawiki. All code that fuels the integration will be released back to the community.

The project is a collaborative venture between the Elgg team and FunnyMonkey.

In the next few weeks, we'll be building out the infrastructure to support the project, including a development site to centralize the integration discussions and coding, as well as a svn repository for the codebase.

OpenID provides a method of Single Sign On (SSO) between multiple web sites. OpenID allows users to "claim" a specific url; this url identifies the user as they browse and join different web sites.

Other SSO options exist, including Shibboleth, SXIP, Pubcookie, and JA-SIG's Central Authentication Service. OpenID differs from other methods in a few ways, but the purpose of this post is not to compare or contrast the pros and cons of the different SSO options. This post is also intended as an overview to demonstrate some possibilities, not as the final word on what OpenID can or can't do.

Elgg, Drupal, and Moodle all have a role to play in providing tools for learning communities. The example outlined in this post illustrates one way these three applications can work together in an academic setting. At the outset, however, it needs to be stressed that this is one solution chosen from among many. These three applications can be used by different institutions in different ways in response to specific institutional needs.

In this post, I am assuming some familiarity with Elgg, Moodle, and Drupal. For a quick overview, go here for Elgg, here for Moodle, and here for Drupal.