eJournals for reflection and identity development

There is a lot of competition for digital-identity creation tools and environments and I question how many online identities people can maintain. Do I update my LiveJournal, my personal elgg site, the elgg eportfolio site, my JISC project blog, or the discussions on the Brookes WebCT courses or the Open University FirstClass course-sites? Which sites do I syndicate to others? Do I do most of my writing in LiveJournal and then syndicate it to 1, 2, or 3 other sites? Or, do I fragment my identity, keeping LiveJournal for my virtual third space conversations, elgg for my work-related reflection and my institutional e-portfolio for CPD? There is a lot of overlap.

I have used LiveJournal and elgg. Steve Warburton recommends SocialText. PebblePad should be checked out. ePortfolio software is central to my concerns here, particularly, the Open Source Portfolio and our version "Petal". Any blogging tool can also be used for an ejournal. I use TypePad for this blog. And, as Google continues its quest for world domination they are integrating more and more services which will greatly extend the capability of their Blogger/BlogSpot tool. JotSpot is excellent and extensible, especially if wiki-style collaboration is desired, as in our project wiki. As always the pedagogical context and purpose are really more important than the tools used.

Six Apart owns both TypePad and LiveJournal and both platforms are excellent. Combine them with a desktop tool and you are on to a winner. I recently switched to ecto because it supports lots of blog apis and keeps local copies of my posts. It is my very favourite new toy.

The global LiveJournal community includes millions of users (6+ million, I believe, of which maybe 10% are in Britain). There are about 50,000 separate LiveJournal groups. These range from Christian sewing circles to those with interests in deviant sex and everything in between. The preponderance of groups appear to be made up of American adolescents, but the tool should not be damned by its users. The LiveJournal software is open-source and anyone could set up a LiveJournal server. Having said this, the up-time and response-time of the hosted service is impressive given the number of users.

LiveJournal and elgg basically perform the same functions, but elgg, while emerging from a UK HE tradition and having a more educationalistic look and feel is not as well realised, yet. It is not as easy to make private groups in elgg as it is in LiveJournal. You can set up groups in LiveJournal that are "friends only". "Friends only" journals and "Communities" are, to my mind, closely analagous to course modules, and you will see lots of LiveJournal Communities that are named things like Econ101 and are being used for course-based discussions. elgg allows the uploading of any file-type to a "my files" area. LiveJournal only provides a picture hosting "scrapbook" but I expect this to soon provide for any filetype.

Another advantage of LiveJournal is the third party developer community that is writing clients and skins. I have used xJournal (and now use ecto) because it allows me to blog offline on my laptop while on the train and at conferences etc and then upload when I get a connection. For me a journal that can only be written to when online is not really useful.

Questions to be asked include:

• how public/private are the journals to be?
• what kind of grouping and sub-grouping will be needed?
• will you want people to collaborate closely?
• how much interoperability/exportability will be needed; i.e. will students be able to "take their journals with them"?
• are the journals to be integrated into a VLE-supported course?
• will the users be uploading artefacts?
• will the journals be used as a "logbook"
• what kind of assessment/evaluation of the journals is intended?

Comments

[Jeremy]

Don't Elgg and LiveJournal have quite different purposes? Uploading/sharing files and pulling in RSS resources seems to put ELGG in a different class.

[David Bryson]

The number of offline tools make blogging a lot easier for example on Macintosh platform have MacJournal, or if using joomla for blogging a tool called Blog-X 2.0 which is cross-platform or easier still in some respects the add ons to Fireworks or Flock for blogging like ScribeFire.

I use Moveable Type on my website and will be moving across shortly to MT4 and I think there could be a good link to be made between blogging, files and images and creation of portfolios for CPD or PDP. The loading of files restriction of systems like LiveJournal can be overcome by file storage applications/sites like box.net.

There is a need for simple systems which anybody can use which is blogs as several of the eportfolio systems are overcomplicated as more features are added. The high level of ability to use IT should not be a stumbling block to portfolio use they should be as easy as writing and basic computer usage.