Elgg is a new breed of social software based around choice, flexibility and openness: a system that firmly places individuals at the center of their activities. With the freedom to incorporate all of your favorite tools within one environment, Elgg allows you to showcase your content with as many or as few people as you choose.
Elgg is an open source software platform designed to allow people to easily connect and share resources. Elgg allows you to create a social network and host it on your own infrastructure, modifying the features to fit your specific needs. Users establish personal digital identities and connect with other people, collaborate with them and discover new resources through their connections. Plugins allow users on different social networks to collaborate, and provide specific functionality for tasks like project management, mobile browsing and collaboration through user-controlled wikis.
Features of Elgg:
- Weblog: Elgg comes with a personal and friends weblogging system. This weblog is a central piece and can link to items in the repository. Each weblog post can be shared with who ever the learner wants.
- Social networking: Elgg is all about the creation of a learning landscape therefore it is necessary to link to, and find, others with similar interests. Elgg uses social networking as a means of finding and sharing knowledge with others.
- File repository: Elgg has a file repository which can be used to house many different file types.
- Access control: This is one of the strongest features in Elgg, a powerful access system allows fine-grained privacy to all aspects of an individuals Elgg.
- Tagging: This is now a popular way to search and find other objects and people of similar interest.
- Customisation: Elgg comes with some standard templates, however, users can customise their own landscape. This is done through the templating system.
- XML-RPC: use external blogging clients to post to an Elgg site.
- Community building: using the communities function learners can create their own communities around shared interests. This is also proving popular for research collaboration.
- Wiki: Integration with MediaWiki
- Profile data: link to other learners and resources through your profile data.
- Syndication: RSS – there are RSS feeds for learners, weblogs, communities, tags, files and FOAF.
- Podcasting: Elgg is an extremely effective podcasting platform.
You can download Elgg by clicking HERE!
