Thursday, January 21, 2010

ELVIN Kick Off Meeting + Social Networking




I'm just home from the ELVIN kick off meeting, hosted by Escuela de Administración Pública de Castilla y León (ECLAP) in Valladolid. ELVIN is an EU project which aims to leverage open source social networking platforms to faciliate online, collaborative language learning in the vein of social constructivism. Users will enter the system and, depending on their stated skills, goals, occupation and profile information, they will be paired with other learners in order to practice the desired language. Content will be developed at quite a granular level, more to facilitate collaborative, peer-to-peer learning than to act as traditional course content. The platform will be piloted with public administrations in 5 different countries. DEIS are heavily involved in the project as technology partners. We are responsible for developing both the platform and profiling tools in order to pair learners. We are jointly responsible with Salamanca university for developing content tools and a respository. At this early stage we think we'll use either Elgg or Mahara to facilitate the platform and Dspace to develop to repository. This is all subject to change pending further research!

These are two versions of an image I developed for my presentation in Valladolid. It represents a social network and it's components. The image developed from a number of preliminary sketches, particularly one of a tag cloud and a "taking a line for a walk" type image. The first image involves typical social network features, all overlapping and linked together. The second image concentrates on only the links.

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