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4.3 Differentiated friends
Jon Dron et al.
Elgg lets users enable access control that is private, public, logged-in users, people they are
following, and the various groups of which they are members. It also supports the functionality of
collections, which enable an individual to subdivide those they are following (in some systems these
are known as ‘friends’ or ‘contacts’) into subsets that can be used to control access to posts. We have
built a plugin to make it explicit at the time of following what kind of relationship is being specified
using relationship tags, or ‘r-tags’ – friend, colleague, classmate, etc. There are no limits on the tags
that people may use to describe these relationships and use these to grant or deny access. This
makes it very simple for access to be granted to (for instance), friends, teachers, classmates in a
course, employers, family and so on.
Figure 4: Relationship tags
5. The benefits
Context switching provides a centre for learners and groups to organise not only groups but also
networks and sets in the learners’ own manageable spaces. Contextual profiles are only ever one
click away within the system so it is impossible to get lost when following links to personal, networked
or set spaces. Each facet adjusts dynamically to the social content provided by its widgets, updating
with new relevant posts as they are posted, yet the learner retains control over exactly which
elements are displayed. When visiting another learner’s profile, visitors can choose which facets they
see, if they have permission to do so. So, should they visit the profile of someone who is a friend as
well as a member of other classes or communities, they are able to see only those facets the friend
wishes them to see in each specified context, greatly reducing the confusion and potential for
becoming lost in social space. Similarly, owners of groups can create facets for users, networks, sets
activities, roles, presentations to the outside world and much more, with widgets displaying specified
activities of users outside the group and within it, making them far more self-contained and intuitive to
navigate, combining the parts of networked and set space that are most relevant to the group in a
given context. The result is that a community with the context switcher in place can switch between
networked, group and set modes of engagement without any central authority determining how it is
organised.
6. Conclusions
The system we have presented here is just one of many possible solutions to the problem of shifting
and overlapping social and learning contexts. As we implement, evaluate and refine the toolset we
expect that the solution will evolve and we expect to see increasing recognition of the importance of
context in other social systems that may lead to approaches that are better or more suited to learner
needs than what we have described here. Our purpose in highlighting the importance of shifting
contexts is to help others to recognise ways that the current generation of social systems for learning
need to move beyond a naïve, single-faceted view of the people that use them to a richer more
human set of tools that support the complex context(s) in which we find ourselves, in which multiple
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