There are now 17 of us from Best Practices signed up to this group.  Thanks to all of you for joining and to those of you who've said a little about yourselves in the Welcome forum - looks like an impressive array of e-learning expertise so we should be able to figure out the pros and cons of ecto between us.

I've tried inviting all of you to be my friends - I think if you click on my name from the group listings you can either accept or decline?  Claire invited me to be her friend and that's how I accepted the invite.  (Thanks Claire : ) 

Haven't figured out yet how to view groups that friends have formed or whether this is the intention of ecto?  

Ecto looks like a really good option for online delivery as it's a Web Based VLE that combines some of the features of Social Software with the content delivery and student tracking that we tend to associate with more traditional VLEs.  So we thought it would be a good idea for the Best Practice community to trial the application and evaluate it as a learning and teaching tool.

The best way to try it out is to use it so to that end, we've set up this group and given it the purpose of producing a guide to ecto. We can then post this back to the Best Practices site. I'm thinking that using Vcasmo might be one way to produce such a guide - if you haven't seen this, it allows you to combine PowerPoint with video or audio into a web-based flash animation. Very easy to use and Free. Here's a link to an example of something made using this application.

Whatever kind of guide we produce, I guess in the first instance, we post it to the Content area here in ecto to see how that all operates?