At Reach Further it's one of our fundamental beliefs that bringing people together helps solve problems. Our vision is "bringing people together online, to share, to work and to learn". Whether you call it social media, social networking, Web 2.0, online communities, the blogosphere, ebusiness or any of the other buzzwords, what it's about is bringing people together to share what they know and to solve one another's problems in a variety of domains from elearning and education to diversity in business. There are many people working hard to apply social media principles to the non-profit sector in working for social good - American Beth Kanter is one and David Wilcox in London is another. One of Reach Further's projects is a community for elearning researchers and professionals around the world. We manage the ELKS (E-learning and Knowledge-Sharing) community for the Beyond Distance Research Alliance at the University of Leicester, on behalf of the UN's Global Alliance for ICT in Development, with partners from Sri Lanka, Chile, Uruguay, South Africa, Sweden, Italy and the UK, and members all over the world. ELKS is a global group of practitioners and researchers sharing information about how learning technologies can be used to bring education and training to all the citizens of the world, rich and poor, and to provide a vehicle for us all to learn from one another. It isn't all about low-cost and low-tech elearning options but those are obviously crucial. Webinars and free courses bring together academics and teachers from all over the world. Topics might range from how to use wikis so that Universities with minimal bandwidth (and minimal electricity) in Africa can collaborate internationally online, to how to use e-tivities in discussion forums as simple portable elearning objects. Our next webinar will be about mobile learning, which has revolutionised learning in places where there is no traditional IT infrastructure:

Mobile technologies for education in development contexts - challenging the obvious, with John Traxler, Reader in Mobile Technology for e-Learning, Director, Learning Lab, Conference Chair, mLearn2008 Ironbridge, Associate Editor, International Journal of Mobile & Blended Learning (School of Computing and IT, University of Wolverhampton). Date and time to be confirmed [UPDATE: Tuesday 21st October 11am - 12 noon]. Please join ELKS to find out more.

If you are a practitioner or researcher in elearning in HE anywhere in the world, or with an interest in elearning anywhere in the world, you can become a member of the ELKS community by contacting us. All we ask is that you contribute as much as you gain. This is a post for Blog Action Day - Poverty (October 15th 2008)