The world has changed (in case it hasn’t been brought to your attention lately!)!!
At UTS, in the Faculty of Education, all new Doctoral students will be using elgg Spaces as a Research Journal!!
This is huge – when only 3 – or was it 4 years ago? – my work with weblogs in education was.. well, viewed with suspicion or skepticism!!
Now we are embracing them as part of the Doctoral process and the contents will be submissible as part of a portfolio of evidence! Wow!
I did a workshop with the students on Saturday – and once everyone has logged in (a few technical hitches) – they’re all preparing enthusiastically for the writing tasks ahead of them!
It’s exciting – and thanks to Alison Lee for acknowledging the value and added dimension weblogs can provide the students throughout their doctoral process!
I’ll write more on this as they progress…
Digital Dialogues 
Glad to hear that you’re using ElggSpaces, it’s a fantastic platform. We’ve been using Elgg at Claremont Graduate University (California) for almost a year now, and my lab’s been using it as a research platform to understand how to better support doctoral education. We’ve actually developed a plug-in that helps people assemble more of a portfolio on elgg through an easy to use wiki. You can see a class project example at http://claremontconversation.org/tcourse/tndy4010/page/ . I’m ironing out some bugs before it’ll be suitable for the latest version of Elgg, but you may like using it on Elgg Spaces. Also, if you’re interested in researching how students are using the blogs (& feel like being a co-author on some papers), I’d love to talk in more detail.
– Nathan
Hi Nathan!
Thanks for letting us know about your work with Doctoral students – I’ve passed this on to our Doctorial Co-ordinator who will be really interested!
I’m actually in the process of completing my own PhD on the use of weblogs in adult learning – I’ve been using weblogs in my practice as a lecturer and corporate educator since 2000 and really looking forward to submitting my thesis… nearly there!
Please get in touch if you’re interested in co-authoring papers!
Cheers
ABB 😉