http://grou.ps
(this entry was first designed when Grou.ps was free, but now it charges money — not much, but enough to mean it fails the free test. However it is still the best available and there may be free accounts still available for some purposes)
The basics
Grou.ps gives distributed users a rich environment in which to build content, collaborate and share ideas. “GROU.PS is a do-it-yourself social networking platform that allows people to come together and form interactive communities around a shared interest or affiliation. The functionality of any online group is limited only by the members’ collective imagination and ambition. The GROU.PS platform is used to create a wide variety of community sites, including online gaming forums, e-learning classrooms, fan clubs, charity fundraising campaigns, college alumni societies, and event planning portals. In short, any organization seeking to aggregate and organize people online can greatly improve its effectiveness, engagement and appeal by migrating to the GROU.PS platform. By giving any user the ability to create an easy-to-use, yet powerful, social network, GROU.PS is propelling online collaboration, communication and content sharing in a new socially-aware direction.”
There are many features:
Some of what you can build into groups
Knowledge networking
While there are many applications (as discussed in this site) which serve specific cognitive engineering purposes – for example visualisation tools – or which deliberately promote publication and sharing of content (blogs), one of the key underpinning requirements of knowledge networking is a place where people can create communities and share ideas, without any specific requirement for how they do that. Curiously, however, the boundaries of such group locations are becoming porous and more complicated — the web is becoming a place where aertefacts and conversations mingle.
What is great
Extensive tools to manage a community (ranking, rewards, moderation of posts, status of users). Excellent online communities require a degree of ‘curation’ and Grou.ps has many features to encourage and reward participation.
Another academic’s review of Groups is less enthusiastic.
Alternatives
Posterous, in its new incarnation. Private Facebook groups could also work. Ning is the natural alternative but may require payment – it is a sign of the emerging market for Web 2.0 education that Pearson now sponsors ning groups for education in the USA. It could be that, in higher education, it is better to use a learning management system as the group environment, enriched with the tools discussed elsewhere on this site. Socialgo can also be explored.
