Sarah Eade set up the Blue Group Ning. Of all the Web 2.0 tools that we used I found it to be the best wrapper for a collaborative online activity. As a teacher I liked the fact that it featured good control over privacy and security and like the Wiki's that I favour, Nings require that the administrator has invited users to join. However once a user is a part of the Ning the are then free to add content and actions and start to get things moving as it were.
Nings, incorporating as they do, email with individual user inboxes, forums, an automatic online chat tool with any other member(s) that is / are online, as well as the capacity to upload photos and video content to; make an excellent candidate for the sort of active, sustainable sort of online community that our group talked about and ultimately made recommendations about in Assignment 2. For these reasons I see a lot of potential for using Ning's in the classroom or even across a whole school. Further evidence of this can be seen here and here (where it's called a "roll your own myspace network").
However there are challenges for using free services like Ning. A lack of control over advertising on free sites is one example talked about here:
Ultimately using 'free' tools must be considered within the constraints of audience and their sensitivity to advertising aswell as the real costs involved in setting up free things. The question might well need to be considered (and answered): Is it ultimately going to be 'cheaper' and more controlled to spend some money and time and on using a 'free' alternative such as Drupal or the like that will allow the user to set up (and potentially grow) a site on a domain of their own.
No comments:
Post a Comment