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Jon Dron et al.
further in enabling the selective publication of diverse content from a profile, but these are solely
meant for special-purpose presentations of portfolios and are not in themselves meant to assist the
dynamic process of social learning.
4. Context switching
The problem of overlapping social spaces could be reduced considerably if we were to reduce the
overlap, not just in an aggregated group space but also in the network and set spaces to which that
space leads, maintaining continuity and connection throughout. However, to do this without imposing
a pre-ordained hierarchy is difficult to manage without breaking the fragile and egalitarian
connectedness of the network space. Ideally, learners themselves should be able to control the way
that social spaces overlap and shift between their changing contexts as and when desired.
We have built a tool to extend the Elgg social framework that allows learners, both individually and in
groups to shift easily between different personal and social contexts, to aggregate different things in
different ways for each aspect of their learning (and, if they wish, social and working) lives. The tool
can present different facets to different, specified, groups of people, from entirely private workspaces
to entirely public facades. Each facet can have an entirely different content, appearance and layout
from that of every other, and they can overlap as much as needed.
4.1 Configurable facets
From an individual’s perspective, facets appear as a list of pages of a personal profile. Individuals can
add as many of these pages as they wish, and adjust permissions, layout and appearance as they
wish. By moving pages up and down the list, they can make different facets appear by default to
different people. A visitor to their profile will see the first facet to which they have access. So, for
example, a learner might create a personal page limited only to friends at the top of the tab set, then
professional portfolio accessible to the general public next down the list. Friends will see the personal
page, anyone else will see the public portfolio.
Figure 1: A configured facet showing option to choose other facets
4.2 Configurable widgets
The content of facets is constructed using configurable widgets. Elgg and the Elgg community provide
a wide range of these and they can be used to display many different kinds of content from within and
beyond the system, including blog posts, group membership, pictures, wiki pages, bookmarks,
external RSS feeds, arbitrary text, podcasts, files and so on. In order to provide greater control for the
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