It's by no means essential to run a social learning platform for yourself when you can easily adopt existing services, like Facebook, Ning or Twitter. There are also great free guides to using these tools, like as those provided by Jane Hart.
Moodle is a great Open Source LMS. It's well supported and actively maintained by a committed, expert community. But it's very focussed on what it does best - e-learning. It may be used in more or less every sector that requires on-line learning, but it feels most at home in the tertiary sector rather than supporting younger learners.
We've been approached in the past about looking at environmentally-friendly hosting. We've been long-term partners at Rackspace, and have been pleased with their own carbon offset schemes and environmental policies. Their Green IT award in 2010 was a testament to that.
Last time, I asked how you can use a combination of fit-for-purpose technologies, while avoiding building an unwieldy intranet solution for your organisation.
There are some great sites for e-learning professionals (I'll be blogging about them over the next few months) but Jane Hart's Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has always been a particular favourite.
A lot of people have contacted us lately to ask for help in bringing back together their web tools. Over the years, they have chosen what feels like the best web app for the job. But as time has gone by, they realise that they are left with a Frankenstein's monster.