A couple months ago the talented Dave Tosh and Ben
Werdmuller released their ELGG software as open source, which means you can run your own and participate in the development.
Dave and Ben have been working hard over the past year, and the result is quite
impressive. One way to describe ELGG is as "a deeply clueful approach
to eportfolios", but really, it's a general-purpose blogging community
system that is easily applicable beyond the educational realm.
It feels a lot like a pumped-up version of the popular LiveJournal
platform in that it supports customization, social networking, faces,
friend aggregation and group-forming, but also other tasty goodies like
file sharing and fine-grained access control. If you're looking for a multi-user weblogging option, you should definitely consider it.
You can try ELGG out from the main site, or, if you're a teacher, you may be more interested in getting an account at TeacherEd, a budding community of teachers who seek to connect and share.
"You know, it's funny - I read so much about teachers trying to find
ways to get students' attention, and when they find a device - a communication device - that captures students' attention, they want to ban it."
