I have long encouraged my students to use Moodle as a social engagement area. To that end, I have a social matters forum in each course site. I require students to write a short introduction (2-3 sentences they don’t mind others knowing) and I give a long list of possible topics, so that students need not include information they are uncomfortable sharing.
The section of otl201 devoted to instructor strategies mentioned this as a strategy to increase social presence in the course.
The introduction (and a response to someone else’s intro) are the only posts I require, but I often alert students to social events that are happening on campus and around town, so they can see the forum’s purpose as an outside-class activity. Often students take up the practice of notifying others. However, more often, they choose to use a group created in Facebook for that purpose. This gives them more flexibility of who they choose to include (most often excluding the instructor–ouch!–but also including those within their comfortable social circles. It will be interesting to see how such practices might adapt/evolve in the context of continuous-intake courses where many participants may be the only ones at their particular point in the course being taken.