Internally Hosted Facebook?

[Sentro]

Hi All,

I’m really keen to provide students with a sort of internal social networking site which they can use to create their own pages and share work and thoughts with their peers and teachers with the monitoring and moderating features also. It would be good to host the system internally but could be externally hosted too, it simply has to be a ‘closed’ network to only our students and staff.

Does anyone operate a system like this and could give me any pointers to either open source solutions or a commercial product.

Thanks in advance!

[irsprint84]

sharepoint

[tsimons]

Hi there,

There are many community scripts out there, its just finding the right one and adaping it to your needs, as irsprint84 said you could use Sharepoint..

Take a look at this Social Networking | Hot Scripts or this one PHP Virtual Communities | Scripts & Programs | Hot Scripts

Hope you find the right one!
If you need any help let me know and ill help as much as i can.

Tom

[Sentro]

Thanks I'll take a look at those.

We use sharepoint already for Sims Learning Gateway but I haven't done much investigation into it doing those kinds of things. I will certainly look into that also.

[Sentro]

Is anyone doing anything with ELGG?

[Sylv3r]

Edmodo will do the job your after and it has a look of facebook to it also.

Edmodo - Free Private Microblogging For Education

[Sylv3r]

^^ I forgot to mention although its not available for internal use only this is something they are working on for the next release I believe.

[mossj]

Try wordpress MU with Buddypress plugin

[SteveMC]

There's also BuddyPress - based on Wordpress (it's an official project of theirs too). Wordpress itself might be enough (although you'd probably want the multi-user variant of it, so you could have multiple blogs.

Stephen

[Edu-IT]

Try wordpress MU with Buddypress plugin

Looks pretty amazing does that!

[pwds]

Heard lots of good things about Buddypress and can strongly recommend Wordpress MU.

Also worth noting you can extend Wordpress MU with BBPress and share common authentication and cookies between the two. I don't have any experience of linking this setup to Buddypress but would be happy to help the OP with linking WPMU and BBPress should blogs and forums be the requirement.

[allan67]

Is anyone doing anything with ELGG?

ELGG and moodle integration seems to be taking us away from the VLE and onto the PLE. It provides thie social networking aspect with moodle being used to drive the content. I'm also interested to see if anyone is using ELGG and Moodle to this end

[allan67]

sharepoint

On the subject of sharepoing has anyone found staff, students having difficulty using the mysite section for blogging. Its not as friendly as some applications out there.
One thing i have looked at is Joomla. It's modules including community builder show some real promise and apparently u can authenticate with Joomla and Moodle using an extenstion (jforms or something like that)

[dsm]

We use the Frog VLE (Frog Learning Platform | The UKs most advanced Learning Platform) which has integrated social networking features.

Our students have a 'wall' on their front page similar to the Facebook wall. They can also add friends, upload profile pictures, talk in chat rooms, forums etc.

You can make this content only available in school too if you wish using the 'If local user' component. We actually allow our students to access these features in school and out. It provides them with a safe social networking site for them to communicate with the friends.

I realise you wouldn't buy Frog based on this alone however if you are looking at other things that you want to do in a VLE or web site this may tip the balance.

Regards

[CAM]

Our Fronter VLE lets users make their own simple user page (or entire site for the more proficient at using the editor) and set up forums only for staff, only for students or for both. Students can also send stickies to each other which are private messages and have their own user picture. Downside is no status updates or blogs.