It’s taken a lot of work, but as you may have seen on the news blog, Elgg 0.6 final is now available to download.

What’s been really awesome about this release is the input from the wider community. As the system has matured, we’ve started to see the development process really harness the power of open source. I think this will happen more and more as time goes on, which is great – things are beginning to snowball. Although the updates in this release are largely under the hood, 0.7 will be about interfaces, design and visible functionality; the things we plan to have in place by 1.0 go beyond any other comparable software platform, within or outside of the education sphere.

Over on Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow has a piece about the O’Reilly / Web 2.0 trademark issue that I mentioned yesterday. O’Reilly are asserting that Web 2.0 is their trademark, thereby assuring everyone they’ve well and truly jumped the shark in terms of being a name to trust in web culture.

What I don’t understand is – and I realise I’m being a hypocrite here – why we have to use the ‘web 2.0′ term at all. Can’t we all agree to just call it the web? Any non-static website that doesn’t use the ‘web 2.0′ technologies is obsolete, end of story. While it was a useful marketing term, that’s what it always was: marketing. This stuff is changing the direction of software and how we use computers; I think what we call it is really the least important of the many issues we’re going to have to deal with.

This is slightly depressing: a potential student, stuck in his cubicle job and desperate for the qualification he needs to get out, is hoping to pay for his MBA course by selling 10,000 3″x3″ art squares for $5 each. Best of luck to him, says I.

And in other news, Tim O’Reilly has trademarked the term ‘Web 2.0′, the crafty old so-and-so. Maybe Dave and I should trademark ‘personal learning landscape’ …

Something I’ve observed in the years I’ve been working on Elgg is the dynamic between the people who produce tools and the academics who talk about using them. Which is this: while there are mechanisms in place for an academic project to get funding to talk about using Elgg and trial it on a handful of students, it’s next to impossible for us to get similar funding to produce the tool to begin with.

Here’s a question posed by this blog post:

If an elf appeared and offer to give you a program that met your spec, how happy would you be?

Obviously everyone knows that programs aren’t made by magical elves; we know that they take thousands of person-hours and blood, sweat and tears to get right.

What the question assumes, though, is that having a program made is just a case of writing out a spec, passing it to an engineer and having it built. This simply isn’t the case if you want to produce a quality software application, particularly if you are not a programmer or software engineer yourself. Since beginning this work I’ve heard time and time again, from people I’ve met in institutions all over the world, that e-learning software is not a place for programmers and computer scientists. This is plain wrong: of course it is. Who else has the expertise to know what’s possible and what works in a software context? Every project needs a balanced mix of expertise and skills.

Of course, this is a learning experience for us, and in some ways we’re feeling our way around the academic scene. If you’ve got any advice or thoughts on obtaining funding and/or joining academic projects, we’d love to hear it.

A Chicago high school student is facing explusion for talking about his school in his personal blog.

The ease of publishing that blogging affords has allowed us to see more clearly things that have been going on forever. I know when I was at school people felt bullied by the faculty and staff; I know when I was at school some people were bullied by them. The answer is not to expel a student who chooses to post these views in their own time using their own facilities. Not only is it out of the school’s jurisdiction, it’s reinforcing an us-vs-them mentality that can really undermine education and the self esteem of individual students.

What got them scared, in a knee-jerk alarmist sort of way, was a reference to Columbine:

The kids at Columbine did what they did because they were bullied. In my opinion you are the real threat here. None of us ever put in our xanga’s that they were going to kill or bring harm to any one. we voiced our opinions. you are the real threat here. you are depriving us of our right to learn.

Bullying is an important issue that’s hardly been touched on in the context of online learning communities. There are likely to be several dynamics at work; the most pressing may be the worm turns scenario, where the very computer-literate and/or eloquent students who are bullied in the real-life classroom take the opportunity to get the upper hand online. In any event, there are likely to be little cliques and infighting and petty personal politics: school classrooms are not happy friendly places where everybody gets along – or at least, they’re not at any school I’ve seen. How do you prevent that dynamic from carrying over into the online space?

(Via Slashdot.)

The other day I talked about investing in the Elgg project through contributing to the development community. There is also another, even simpler way, that requires no outlay or really even much of an effort. It’s this:

If you’re using Elgg, tell us.

We’re constantly hearing second hand about this or that organisation using Elgg for some purpose or other, often at conferences we’re not at or as part of investigations into different ways of doing things. The thing is, if we know who’s using it, that can help us design the system around our userbase; we can also help you network. If there are two organisations translating Elgg into Portuguese for two different reasons, and we know about you both, we’ll connect you up, and suddenly you have to do half the work. We benefit because we can give a more accurate total number of installations to people who ask, and you benefit because we can help you better.

Elgg now has an installation routine that executes on first run. I’m tempted to add an optional screen that contains a form so you can easily tell us about your project; this would in no way be required but would make it even easier for us to know what’s going on.

Can anyone recommend a Unicode-enabled (must support the Chinese character set) questionnaire/survey system? It can be free, open source, paid-for, installable or centrally hosted.

Business Week has an article from a couple of days ago about the masses of investment money being poured into social networking systems in the wake of Myspace’s sale (and we all know what I think about that). A piece of Facebook costs a mean $25 million; Bebo (which for me is indistinguishable from Myspace) recently raised $15 million in investment.

What’s the purpose of all these sites springing up? This just about covers it:

“We think Facebook has a unique opportunity to reach a crucial demographic at a key point in their lives. And when a site has this much scale and brand recognition, advertisers will come,” said David Sze, a general partner at Greylock.

It’s still all about networking as a delivery mechanism for advertising.

The more fiscally minded of you might be wondering how to invest in Elgg, which is the only fully-featured standalone social networking system that you can install on your own servers (and one that more and more universities and businesses alike are turning to). The answer is this: join the development community (don’t worry, there’s no buy-in to join the table). Lend your ideas and your talent, because we’re building a system for the community, and the whole community should benefit.

We could have plastered Elgg.net with ads, kept the software closed, sold it on a per-head basis and harnessed it for market research; we would have made a fortune. But we didn’t, and for this reason, which we’ve repeated over and over again: your eportfolio is your digital identity, under your control. Your installation is your learning landscape system, under your control and featured to your specifications. Pick it up, do what you like with it; it’s as simple as that.

(Via Om Malik.)

Shunning Dave’s wise advice, I’m waiting for a brand new Dell laptop to be delivered. The machine I type this on has been a very useful workhorse for the past few years, and I’d recommend it to anyone after a laptop on a budget, but there comes a point where upgrades are necessary and inevitable.

This new machine is going to have a bit of a twist, though. Although it will be running Windows (because it comes bundled, and if I pay for something I feel like I should use it), for all applications I’ve set myself the following rule: if an open source solution exists, I will use it in preference to a commercial application.

Okay, so this is partially mean old penny pinching, but my suspicion is that open tools have come along to the extent that in many cases they work equally as well as, or perhaps even better than, their paid-for equivalents. I’ll be installing Open Office instead of Office, Inkscape instead of Illustrator, Gimp instead of Photoshop, Nvu instead of Dreamweaver and so on. All suggestions received with thanks, particularly for any good open source anti virus applications you might know of. (Otherwise I’ll revert to MacAfee, which is what I’ve subscribed to on this machine.)

Part of the point will be to determine how user friendly these applications are, and whether they’ll be usable enough for non-technical home and school environments. The supposed selling points of commercial software are usability and stability, but is it actually any better? It seems likely that a lot of educational users will want to switch over to cheaper alternatives while remaining on a Windows operating system (given that using Linux for a lot of people is like wading through particularly unforgiving treacle), so I’ll let you know how I get on.

Update: no longer waiting, but it turns out one of the perils of buying a Dell is the free trial software it comes preinstalled with. Off comes AOL, AIM, Paint Shop Pro, etc etc. I feel tainted.

Slate have an interesting hack that allows for ‘textcasting’ – basically a way to read text from a feed on an iPod.