ELGG: a powerful social engine
ELGG is an open source social engine that empowers people and institutions to create their own social environment. It provides the basic elements and necessary functionality you will need to create and run your own social application or a site for your institution. Among ELGG's core features are its advanced user management and administration, social networking, cross-site tagging, powerful access control lists, internationalization support, multiple view support (eg. cell phones, iPhone), an advanced templating engine, a widget framework, and more.
Creating Communities
At Solution Grove, we leverage ELGG to build communities. In doing so, Solution Grove creates community support sites for organizations such as UNESCO.
World Network of Biosphere Reserves Community Platform
One support site is for the Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB) run by UNESCO. The purpose of the platform is to facilitate information gathering and exchange, and common development of ideas and projects among the World Network of Biosphere Reserves of the Man and the Biosphere Programme through collaborative and community oriented online tools.
The site runs using stock ELGG code while all customizations were created using plugins. In developing the support site, Solution Grove worked on the following areas:
- customization of user profiles based on a modified plugin (custom_user_profiles)
- videos support using a customized version of the izap_videos plugin
- photos support using a customized version of the tidypics plugin
- minor modifications to the site_access plugin
- customization to the groups model to support classification of groups
- modifications to the group profile pages to support display of different fields, layout and icons based on group classification
- creation of custom widgets
- creation of custom XML feeds for customized group types
Take a look at our work at http://mab.unesco-ci.org
World Summit on the Information Society Community
Another support site is the one for the World Summit on the Information Society. The purpose of this platform is to facilitate information gathering and exchange, and common development of ideas and projects among the multi-stakeholder team for each Action Line through collaborative and community oriented online tools.
The site runs on stock ELGG code while all customizations were created using plugins. In developing the support site, Solution Grove worked on:
- creating an Oxford-style online debate plugin similar to what you can find on Economist.com
- supporting forum replies by email using a plugin that handles incoming email
Check out our work at http://www.wsis-community.org/
Moodle + ELGG
At Solution Grove, we value the importance of combining 2 or more platforms to achieve the client's goals. One of the more common combination is Moodle + ELGG, where e-learning and social networking work together to make up a learning communities.
With MEL, Solution Grove answers the need to come up an easy-to-install and easy-to-use Personal Learning Environment. We call this solution Shovel Ready Ed and it is now used in schools. ELGG is one component of this solution. We have done the following work:
- an improved eportfolio block based on the NZVLE project
- an improved single sign-on and automatic user creation from Moodle to ELGG
- support for mapping of Moodle groups to ELGG communities including automatic group and group membership creation
Among others, Solution Grove also created sites with ELGG as one of the components, which include our very own demo site Solution Grove's Personal Learning Environment, Connecticut Career Choices Online Learning Environment, and Bethel Public School.
Learning Communities for Adults
We, at Solution Grove, also support learning communities for adults. Thus, we have created sites that integrate social networking and class/workshop-based learning, specifically customized for adults. Work for this type of solution include:
- creating a custom look and feel that is consistent between ELGG and Moodle
- creating a single sign-on plugin for ELGG using Moodle Network (MNET)
- extending the MNET protocol to allow publishing of specific Moodle events or actions to the user's ELGG dashboard river
- adding code to allow the ELGG top navigation bar to be called from outside ELGG, resulting to a more consistent look for the Moodle theme and making the integration transparent to the user
Some related post about ELGG, Elgg plugin: Moodle Network (MNET) Support, discusses further the single sing-on between Moodle and ELGG using MNET.
Learning Communities for K12
Aside from our support for Adult Continuing Education, we, at Solution Grove, also support learning communities for K12. We provide solutions for Middle and High Schools and build your school's capacity to deliver high quality of education. In strengthening our support for the K12 community, we built quite a few sites which include Shovel Ready Ed and Bethel Public School, also earlier mentioned. We provide schools with a Personal Learning Environment, of which ELGG is one of the components. Our very own demo site Solution Grove's Personal Learning Environment caters to the K12 community as well.
