I am looking for a tool that will enable a group (some with little technical experience) to create and maintain a website on a voluntary basis. The desired features include: open source, standards compliant, easy-to-use, secure with threaded discussion forums, news, RSS, calendars and media handling. It must be suitable for showcasing papers, presentations and video clips from an annual conference.
The Old: Our group wanted to move away from a ‘traditional’ website created in Dreamweaver as it depended on one or two people to maintain it.
The New: We looked at and rejected:
Drupal and eZ Publish – difficult, steep learning curve, probably more than required.
Moodle and WordPress – stretching them too far beyond their original purpose.
Ning – we wanted a conference site as well as networking (also it’s not open source).
Now we are looking atJoomla- which seems at about the right level of functionality and ease of use. I was going to add their logo but it is not allowed!
Learning Town is a social networking site for learning professionals created and run by Elliott Masie CEO of the Masie Center, a learning laboratory and ‘think tank’ in elearning. Within a few days of its launch it already has 2,438 members. Members tend to be in the US and in business rather than education. Discussion groups have been set up in areas as diverse as Rapid Learning Design, Podcasting for Learning, Intellectual Property Rights, Human & Technology Issues, Higher Education and others. So it holds plenty of promise for learning professionals.
Conor Galvin of the School of Education and Lifelong Learning accompanied by one of his postgraduate students, a primary teacher, Anne, gave an overview of how a range of social learning tools were used on the course for practising teachers. The teachers wanted hands-on experience of tools that they could learn in one day and apply the next day. They tried tools such as webquests, blogs, eTwinning and used Ning as their social networking VLE.
Aine McHugh of the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Systems who is working on secondment with An Bord Altranais (Nursing Board) has led the development of an elearning project on medication management which is available through HSE Learning.