KINSHIP King's Social Harmonisation Project:Developing a pilot social network in medical education

Bernadette. A. John1, Sophie. M. Strong1, Prof Patricia Reynolds2, Dominique Borel3, Catherine Brossard3, Dr Stylianos Hatzipanagos4, Elena Hernandez-Martin5, Prof Alan Read6

1School of Medicine, 2Dental Institute, 3Modern Languages Centre, 4 King’s Learning Institute, 5 Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning, 6 Department of English; Kings College London

Platform evaluation

The Kinship (Elgg) prototype platform was developed and supported with mentorship from Brighton University, who have an Elgg institutional social network with 90,000 registered users. Kinship is hosted on a commercial external, UK based cloud server (so UK Law applies to the content created), mindful of College regulations and the TEL strategy. It has been piloted with 700 medical students for 3 months.).

Suitable open source platforms were evaluated for relevance in (Elgg, Ning, Buddy Press, Mahara) . The core functional design of the 4 popular platforms is not identical. Mahara has comparatively high developmental costs. Elgg is primarily a social network whereas Mahara is primarily an eportfolio – so whilst both have similar features, simply listing a set of functions doesn’t indicate how well each platform executes these functions. Ning, although popular is obviously different because it is a paid application hosted on a proprietary website.

Preliminary Findings and Discussion

A working social networking platform, built in Elgg has been developed in keeping with College guidelines. It enables secure authentication using students’ own College logins and is simply accessible via http://kinship.kcl.ac.uk. Early usage statistics and student feedback in Medicine have shown that the site has the potential to create and enhance a genuine sense of community for our students, who are more likely to be living off campus than ever before and studying at various sites, scattered across London.

In order for an institutional social network to offer a viable alternative, it must have the ability to develop at a pace - this can be inexpensive if using an open source platform.

Students have high expectations of the functionality within social networks and the long established, active community of Elgg developers, collaborating and sharing their extensive catalogue of plugins is a valuable characteristic of this platform. Elgg is written in a popular code termed ‘php’, so it is a large number of developers.

Plug-in Plug-in adjective adjective Computing (of a module or software) able to be added to a system to give extra features or functions: a plug-in graphics card(oxforddictionaries.com)

Next Steps:

Clarify what user preferences are with regard to functionality, privacy settings and access

Establish institutional support required to enable adoption of KINSHIP by KCL

Secure funding to enable roll out across the college

References:

Hatzipanagos, S. Warburton, S.  Reedy,  G. (2010) Technology-Enhanced Learning Benchmarking Report. King’s College London.  Hatzipanagos, S. Warburton, S.,  Blackmore,  P.  (2009) A review of e-learning at King’s College. King’s College London.

Oxford Dictionary. 2012. Oxford Dictionaries. [ONLINE] Available at: http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/the-oxford-english-dictionary [Accessed 14 June 12] Stanier, S. 2009.  Communty@Brighton : The Development of an Institutional Shared Learning Environment. In: O’Donoghue, J. ed., Technology Supported Environment for Personalised Learning: Methods and Case Studies. [s.l.]: IGB Global, 2009, pp. 50-73.