Group items tagged

ompelling affordances for group collaboration

Participants can sign up or sign in and set up profiles for any particular Ning, parts of which carry over to other Nings, achieving familiarity with minimal repetition of data entry

crucial components of many educators’ PLNs

Nings have c

Webheads in Action used to enroll participants in its free bi-annual WiAOC international online conferences in a Moodle, but for the last one, moved the community over to a Ning (http://webheadsinaction.ning.com/). This Ning now has over 350 members.

Because Nings were free and robust for collaboration, they were an ideal tool for educators seeking to jump-start communities on little or no funding.

Alec Couros sees this kind of thing happening more and more in the crystal ball future and suggests that schools and educators would be better off investing in self-hosting using FOSS, free and open source software (Couros, 2010).

general consternation

a number of issues

One is for how long Internet users can expect free services

other side of the coin is the nature of teaching, where hard-pressed teachers with little time and less budget tend to cobble together whatever resources they can muster

Monetization is rarely a consideration for teachers and educational technology specialists

, whose main aim is to find platforms that will support learning through sharing.

Pearson, who have offered to sponsor Nings for educators at the Mini level, the lowest level of Ning

almost all continents on the planet are excluded from the deal

Kevin Hodgson has been writing some interesting posts about the Ning thing.

the only reliable alternative to Ning is to host your community yourself, or at a trusted institution

http://tinyurl.com/alternatives2ning).  This document remains the most comprehensive source of advice on what to do about replacing Ning that exists anywhere on the Internet

Alec Couros (2010) decided to crowdsource some answers

back up your Ning

there are a number of sites offering Ning-like look and feel which will (attempt to) import your content, or some of your content, from Ning

designed to work as a social-network portal for Yahoo and Google Groups.

see: http://webheads.grouply.com/

A tool that works well for capturing blog content is Posterous

another free site that lets you set up a Portal with features similar to those of Ning.

another social networking portal which will do much the same thing

Other sites encourage you to restart your community afresh

Stevens, V. (2010). The Ning thing. TESL-EJ, Volume 14, Number 1. Retrieved on today’s date from http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume14/ej53/ej53int/.

Posterous Targets Ning

Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning theory for the digital age. Elearnspace. Retrieved June 27, 2010 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm.

Good, R. and Bazzano, D. (2010). Ning Alternatives: Guide To The Best Social Networking Platforms And Online Group Services. MasterNewMedia May 3rd, 2010. Retrieved June 27, 2010 from http://www.masternewmedia.org/ning-alternatives-guide-to-the-best-social-networking-platforms-and-online-group-services/.

If you wish to write anonymously on a Ning thing document, you can do so at Alec Couros’s crowdsourced Google Doc here: http://tinyurl.com/alternatives2ning

Multiliteracies