A Social Software Weblog reader, Ben Werdmuller, writes:

"..One of the things being talked about in academia at the moment is how to use social software to assist learning in higher education. This goes beyond "e-portfolios", which are more or less online CVs with embedded examples of work, to create a network of people who share reflections and objects in a learning environment.

David Tosh and I wrote an academic paper last year (ed. note: I found links to two pdfs on Stephen's Web) discussing something we called the "learning landscape"; essentially the above, with weblog components, file repositories, and so on, all linked together with tags. Click on the "music" tag and you see users interested in music, users who count music among their skills, users who have written weblog posts about music (and links to those specific posts), and available files relating to music. See Profiles where 'interests' includes 'music' for an idea, although it's still a bit limited.

So here's where I really blow my own trumpet: Elgg has been up since November as a closed alpha, where we've been adding new features and fiddling around with it for a core usergroup of academics. On Friday we released Apcala, which is open to the public and runs on exactly the same software, which we will later make freely available. This one isn't (just) for academia; we're trying to create a community where anyone can come in and share whatever ideas and objects they like…"