Notching Up Ning

Ning just got better!

A while ago I posted a review of the new Ning for Dummies book and commented how this book gave lots of useful pointers to using this popular tool to create learning communities.

Well, a few days ago, Ning announced that they had added over 90 app-like widgets to the tool, so-called Ning Apps.  So I thought I'd take a look at some of them to see how they could be used to create further learning opportunities for site members.

In summary, there are five main categories of Ning App:

1. Collaboration
2. Communication
3. E-Commerce
4. Fun and Games
5. Fundraising

I started off by looking at those that concentrated on collaboration.

As well as Google Docs and the many programs that make up the Zoho range, I particularly liked the VoxBox application.  This application produced by a company called Sapplica enables you to:

• Create suggestion topics and solicit suggestions
• Allow community members to add suggestions and rate on suggestions
• Create polls and participate in polls

Staying with polling, there's an app version of PollDaddy, a comprehensive polling and survey tool.

Encouraging community contribution of material found on the web and then appraising it, is facilitated by the NewsShare app, a version of Slinksetwhich allows your network to share and rate what's interesting online. Your members submit, rate and discuss all the new and interesting links they find. The result is a source of all the best news and content from around the web according to your community.

The last app to catch my eye in this category was ClackPoint.  ClackPoint (currently in beta) provides live audio, video and text chat for your social network. Users can call in either directly from the web page, or by using a telephone and entering a PIN (with both US and UK phone numbers).

In the area of communication, there are video-based chat group chat rooms from Zorap and Tokbox, amongst other chat services.

If you run paid-for events for your community, then you might like the EventBee app, which enables you to offer a complete end-to-end event management service.

Now I know that offering games and puzzles on websites can generate a lot of activity, whether or not you regard the games as part of the learning experience.  So if you think the same, there are six pages of apps in this category including both word and number puzzles.  You can even create your own virtual world within your Ning site - SmallWorlds.

Thinking about it, even if you don't have a Ning site, some of these apps and their parent products would offer a good range of e-learning tools.