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Yesterday I received an email from Ning’s CEO Jason Rosenthal announcing the “exciting new developments in Ning” (which include the phasing out of free Ning) which will be rolled out in July. The mid-range price plan Ning-plus at $19.95 per month works out cheaper than the current offerings. The equivalent of the current Free Ning (Ning mini) will now cost $2.95 per month, is limited to 150 members and no groups, but will allow you to have no or your own advertising....

Tomorrow’s finally election election day (an event that seems to have been coming since May 2009) and we know that whoever gets into power will have some very difficult decisions to make. None of the three parties have really told us were the money’s going to come from or the cuts are going to be made, but here are my predictions: There will be a hung parliament … I’m hoping that it will be lib-lab ruling coalition, but fear a lib-con one....

… I’ve been mostly developing a new version of my project allocation tool in Drupal (permissions, CCK and views,.. oh my!); re-launching the annual research project selection round in Blackboard; and re-launching Social Engineering as a self-hosted Elgg site. In the meantime, last-year’s research projects have been winding down (submission deadline was yesterday and vivas are in two-weeks), and we’ve been winding up to asking colleagues for the 500 or so new projects we are going to need for 2010-2011....

Today, I’ve mostly been playing with Cloudworks (cloudworks.ac.uk). There’s a nice introductory slidecast from Gráinne Conole on slideshare.

While doing some research (i.e. Google search) on Drupal for social networking in education, I was intrigued to find out that the educational social network cloudworks.ac.uk was originally developed using Drupal. See Gráinne Conole and Juliette Culver, “Cloudworks: Social networking for learning design“, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2009, 25(5), 763-782. If Drupal was good enough for JISC and the OU …