The last two weeks leading up to the National Youth Gathering were a little insane. I think they’re pretty well wrapping things up so I can look back now and laugh about the whole process.

Read the whole story at IT Projects » Blog Archive » National Youth Gathering.

iTunesU is a large, ongoing, strategic initiative. Many people will be involved in the process of planning, designing, developing best practices, and creating content. Therfore, iTunesU has it’s own location to coordinate and document all the efforts.

We’re working on developing a community site to better connect with prospective and accepted students. Many students are use to interacting with social networking sites, and college applications are well suited for a layout similar to profile creation. So we’re combining the best of both worlds to create a space where students can apply, get to know other students, and have all their questions answered. After a bit of searching, we landed on elgg, an opensource project which has a strong level of adoption in HighEd.

The install process was not too difficult, though I had to take two passes at it. I believe my issue was one of permissions or file ownership–something along those lines. The whole site was installed and ready to go, but the only thing that would load was a completely blank page with out any errors. So, I wiped the directory, walked through the steps again, and everything loaded.

The I.T. & Marketing crews are testing it out right now. On our side of campus, there weren’t any major errors, just a number of instructions and vocabulary hat need to be tweaked to reduce confusion. We will need to work out a few processes to bend elgg for our purposes, but it really is a solid platform with plenty of room to customize. I can’t wait to get in there and start hacking things up.