edna has released a new and exciting service for Australian educators in beta format at http://me.edu.au
The new system provides an online professional network where educators can identify their professional interests, join communities with similar interests, and view and respond to the activities of their online colleagues. It incorporates features of social networking sites to build professional communities. With further releases in the first half of 2008, me.edu.au will become a comprehensive personal network and resource.
From today those already registered with the edna service will find that they are required to choose a name for their profile and to decide whether their profile will be public. The profile links to edna’s Single Sign On which now allows users to access five services:
- Groups - http://groups.edna.edu.au - uses Moodle
- Sandpit Groups - http://sandpit.edna.edu.au - try new tools in a Moodle environment
- Lists - http://lists.edna.edu.au - email distribution and discussion service that uses Lyris
- ednaURL- http://url.edna.edu.au - a URL shortening service
- me.edu - http://me.edu.au - a online professional network for educators
The thread that binds all of these together is the edna Single Sign On.
me.edu.au allows people to establish public/private profiles, to decide what details will be public, and to share contact details, set up a personalised portfolio, an image, and list external feeds where colleagues can see activity on the web. The Communities tag cloud allows the user to select and join communities of interest.
My View is summary of the edna Groups the user belongs to, while My Public Profile shows where the user can be found, and allows the person to leave messages about what they’ve been doing. Clicking on the name of a member of one of the communities you’ve joined takes you to their PUblic Profile.
So much to play with….
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I think it will also be interesting to see what people achieve ~within~ the “walled garden” Graham. Whether we can use it to set up professional learning communities for example, how useful it really is for social networking among educators, what other tools we need to add to it. Or is it just duplicating something we already have.
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[…] Been playing with edna’s new service for Aussie educators, me.edu.au. Kerrie Smith alerted me to its launch the other week and although I am an infrequent user of educationau online services, I wanted to have a closer look. Basically, it’s social networking for teachers and it doesn’t seem restricted to only Australians as you can see if you look carefully in my image. There’s a whiteboard and a tab that allows you to join various community forums. I found Jo McLeay in my wanderings, and tonight I added Simon Brown and Russel Montgomery from my twitter network. It’ll be interesting to see where this all goes and whether any educators who spend their online time within this walled garden will branch out a bit more onto the open web. […]
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