Thank you Ismayil!,

To be clear my/our requirements as I imagine them would be for an "Elgg advisor" to help us create a useful online supplement to my/our little home education network with a view to opening it up to other home educators in future. Though this immediately brings up privacy issues. Also it brings up issues of children having online accounts which is kinda new territory for everyone I guess... I imagine we'd do this through a combination of bi monthly meetings and ongoing feedback online over the next 6-12 months... How would you imagine going about things? I am unfamiliar in this area please let me know whatever is appropriate.

I have already sought out the experiences of other home educators and indeed intend to go on doing so as part of an ongoing feedback/improvement (uservoice - style) loop both in real life and online via google/facebook groups. I would be glad to hear of home educators within the elgg community if that's what you meant? Their experiences would of course be invaluable. I saw something interesting with http://cubview.loyolahs.edu/ 

As for our requirements, that in itself is an open question but of course I do have a couple of concrete examples of the kind of thing I hope we might synthesise, which I intended to illustrate with the examples of MyNightOff and Schoology.

I'll try to be more specific about how I'd like to see those adapted:

My Night Off as a model is a little too simple, but the core idea is perfect. It is essentially is a way of keeping tabs on who has looked after who's kids for how long. It is in effect a time bank. Simple but the effect is very binding, socially. and for home educating single parents, the benefits are massive. There is the ability to put in a request for next Thursday evening 6pm-2am and an email gets sent asking is anyone free. As home educators we need this to be able to take account of slightly finer gradations of activity than just babysitting, as different activities have different value. (eg spending 2 hours on public transport taking a baby to and from a drop off is quite different to running a 1:1 photography class with a teenager for two hours)

Moodle & Schoology as models, on the other hand, are a little too complex with their levels of grades, faculties, etc although an aspect of that does certainly appeal to homeschoolers. The user roles of Parent, Teacher and Student are quite different in home education, more appropriate might be Guardian, Organiser and Inquirer for example but even then these roles are also much more fluid than in a school setup (eg. Inquireres often being sudo-organisers and Guardians becoming Enquirers). 

We could also do with a way of coordinating preparations for future events but I have no model for this other than perhaps Basecamp but I am not at all familiar with that any more.

Those are the main 2 models I've unturfed, I know there are many many others out there and so I'd just like to reiterate the importance of a feedback thing to get a strong idea of what other home educators want.

As far as installing goes...

I had installed elgg using site5.com's webApps and am waiting to hear from them why I got this in my browser when i visited the url crazyhomies.org 

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '[' in /home3/crazyhom/public_html/engine/classes/Elgg/Di/ServiceProvider.php on line 20

I think I saw an explanation involving FTP but I don't really understand it... I look forward to trying out Elgg's features once I get going.  

Hi, welcome to Elgg!

I believe that parse error indicates you're running an older version of PHP than is supported in the current version of Elgg.

Thanks Matt, 

All set up now! So any thoughts about the timebank / moodle / basecamp scenario I mentioned above? And this is the appropriate area to be finding an Elgg adviser right? 

Simon