JANET are creating a Web 2.0 type collaborative site aimed at education staff, called, with impeccable logic, JANET Collaborate. You can access the site as it's being developed here: http://www.janetcollaborate.ac.uk/. It's still very much in the development phase and too early to judge functionality. However, it looks like it will provide a fairly standard range of tools (groups, forums, wikis etc).
The obvious questions:
a) Do education users really need their own space - why not use Facebook? (you can ask the same question about MyCommunity!)
b) If we do need our own space why not build on the leading educational collaborative tool, Elgg, particularly as the current beta looks very similar to Elgg? (If you want to try Elgg join http://eduspaces.net/ )
I'm not really sure about the answer to b), but the answer to a) would be 'yes' if JANET collaborate allows us to do things you can't do in Facebook etc. Phase 2 of the project gives an indication of what these things might be, eg:
- Integration with the JANET video conferencing service to make video conferencing much easier (removing the booking barriers?)
- Integration with the UK Access Management Federation (Shibboleth based authentication, meaning you don't need yet another user account etc)
I would hope, as an example, that we would be able to move our HEWIT (Head's of IT in Wales) online activities to the service. It looks far more elegant that our current website/Jiscmail tools.
The service is due to be formally launched in Summer 2007, so I look forward to seeing how things develop.
(It needs a shorter name though!)
Yesterday I gave a presentation on our SMS and MyCommunity services at the annual Welsh HE IT Colloquium, held in Gregynog.
I've just added the slides to Slideshare here:
http://www.slideshare.net/michaeldwebb/sms-and-mycommunity-gregynog-2007/
It's a fairly short presentation aimed at a technical audience, giving a brief overview of how we implemented the services.