Frances Bell

Unfortunately there is less diversity than there used to be since Facebook seems to be making the world blue but who knows? the tide may turn.

This is a very interesting thread.  I thought about it from the student/learners perspective and thought there are some issues that may go beyond the functionality of the system/service that impact on social presence.

If we have invested time in building a network of contacts and establishing a presence (through what we post/like/etc.) we would not want to lose access to it when we change jobs/graduate, etc.  Many implementations of LMS do precisely that and this could explain learners' attitudes to socialisation within them.  Thinking of Blackboard, there are also obviously architectural aspects that make it difficult for BB to implement SNS-like functionality.  For example, I can't imagine what a new student thinks when they click on a name expecting to get a profile and what comes up is an email!!

I have experience of elgg (some time ago) and Buddypress (an extension to Wordpress).  My elgg presence persists (very grateul to Emerge project for this) but is frozen http://elgg.jiscemerge.org.uk/francesbell/weblog.  The buddypress we set up for students in 2009 is still in place (not sure for how long) but we moved activities to wordpress.com for subsequent cohorts because of lack of institutional support.  Benefits of using Wordpress.com are that:

• students are getting skills in industry-standard software not just a blog
• their content is secure and portable to their own blog if they wish to set one up
• it's easy to use and well-supported with training materials

Regarding social networking, I suspect that students use whatever SNS is popular in their peer group - today probably Facebook, who knows what in 5 years?  I have many reservations about Facebook but I would guess that from a student perspective their content and network will endure far longer on FB than on most institutional LMS whether Moodle/ Blackboard or whatever.  Please correct me if I am wrong.

Research shows that personal networks can migrate naturally from SNS to SNS (yours may be more active now on Twitter than on FB) but the sheer cliff of falling off your network at graduation could be very off-putting.  Many 30-somethings on FB started on college FB networks and are stiill there on FB the megacorp.

Suggest you start here Liam http://docs.moodle.org/24/en/?lang=en and browse around.  Roles define what you can see and do in Moodle - relevant to your 'control panel' view.

Rich qualitative single cases can shed light as long as they are 'critical' and grounded in good literature.  With complex organisational implementations, there is unlikely to be one 'best' technical solution (hence the limitations of comparisons that you identify), it's the human and organisational issues that can make or break an LMS implementation.

I checked out Google Scholar http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=Moodle+research&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp= and, with exception of Martin's 2003 article, there does seem to be little critical mass.

There is a much more substantive literature on F/OSS and researchers on Moodle software/ specific cases could mine this eg this excellent article by Brian Fitzgerald http://www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/su/courses/tdt10/curricula2010/P2-1-Fitzgerald06.pdf  The Implications section would also be useful for those orgs implementing Moodle.