Supporting online communities through open-source

Elgg website is http://elgg.org/, an open-source social software.

Today, I find Elgg. As a teacher, what the Elgg provides is just I hope to employ in my classroom. I teach programming course (C, Visual Basic). In the curriculum reform in undergraduate in my university, programming course is compulsory to undergraduate students. So the students' number is large. In general, in a class, the number of students is about 150-200 who come from different faculties. Because of so many students in one class, it is very difficult to have a good communication not only among students and teachers, but also among students peers. So it is a good way to consider to set up online learning community to assist students learning.

Elgg is an open-source social software programme which support online communities. Some feathers of Elgg:
---Personal and Community Blogs
---Tagging
---Private and Public Communities
---Fine-grained Access Control
---Learner-defined Spaces
---Personal and Community File Storage
---Podcasting
---Social Networking

Perhaps, it is a good try to use this platform.

With the emergence of online learning community, it should be a challenge and hard work for digital learning content management in online learning community. Because many learners need directing to "useful stuff", and it is (sometimes) inefficient for them to have to search for it.