Blogs

It seems like I blinked a minute or two ago, and I was on a plane returning from an amazing conference in New Orleans. While it doesn't seem possible, my calendar doesn't lie. Today does appear to be January 5th.

Over the last few days, Robert Douglass and the team from Acquia were kind enough to publish a podcast we did down in New Orleans at Do It With Drupal. We talked about Drupal in Education, and Drupal for Education, and, well, Drupal. As always, it was a pleasure to catch up with Robert. On a personal level, he is one of the nicest people on the planet. The fact that he is also an amazing developer is icing on the cake.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be tieing up some loose ends. Look for a partner product to The Commons, information about the upcoming DrupalEd 6 release, more tutorials on setting up portfolios, and some aggregation and distribution goodness. We're also polishing some curriculum for online training on setting up and administering Drupal sites. In short, we're all pretty excited about what 2009 holds in store.

We are happy to announce the launch of the FunnyMonkey Commons a resource that is part intranet, part course management, part collaboration platform, part blog.

Using the Commons, people within your school or organization can:

Store files. Maintain a private journal. Podcast. Share videos. Create image galleries. Create and participate in classes. Share bookmarks. Author curriculum. Collaborate within informal working groups. Sort information with tags. Learn within classes. Learn from peers.

Work on the web the way the web works.

As Private As You Want

The FunnyMonkey Commons (or the FMC) comes with precise access controls. A site administrator can make a site fully private, thus ensuring that only people from within your organization or school can see what's happening inside the site. However, for sites that want to publish information on the web, finely grained permissions make it possible for users to blend public and private content. In short, people can publish what they want, when they want.

Tools to Support Communication, Teaching, and Learning

Using the FMC, people can publish text, audio, images, and embedded video.People can share bookmarks. People can send private messages, and collaboratively edit documents privately before sharing them publicly. People can create varying types of collaborative groups, ranging from a formal class to an inter-departmental faculty working group to a club to a study group, and different types of groups can be added as needed. Within the commons, people can connect as needed, and communicate using the medium that makes the most sense for their work.

Flexible Design

The base theme used for the FMC (as seen in the screenshots, here) has been designed for this platform. For the geeks, this means that we start with a framework that displays cleanly in all the major browsers (Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer), and that uses valid XHTML and CSS. For the aesthetically inclined, this means that we have a starting point that can be customized to match the precise look and feel you need.

It's Your System. Run It How You Want

When you set up the FunnyMonkey Commons, you are storing the work and the creativity of your community. The FMC runs completely on open source components; in practical terms, this means that you have full control over your data -- unlike other systems, there are no limits on where you can host your site, and no limits on getting access to your data. While we provide hosting for groups who want it, we also support organizations who want the Commons to run on their own hardware. It's your system. You set the rules.

The FunnyMonkey Commons is proudly and happily built using Drupal. For more information on the Commons, take a run through some screenshots. For information on purchasing the Commons for your school or organization, please contact us.

There are some risks to using an external service.

Just sayin, is all.

OT: for those confused by the url of this post.

I left this comment on the SLENZ blog in response to this post, and it is currently in their moderation queue. As an aside, do they seriously have comment moderation, on a comment with no links, in December of 2008? Seriously, throw in a Captcha, get Akismet, or get Mollom.

The text of my comment is below:

The argument that transformational change can occur in a closed system like Second Life rings hollow, given that they can close you down at their whim. If this was happening in an environment where you had real control over your data (like OpenCroquet or OSGrid or OpenSim) you might be on to something. But building courses in second life has a lot in common with attempting to build equity in a rented apartment (and yes, you get the middle class metaphor free of charge).

Also, re “the whole process of the creation of the SLENZ project has appeared to have been democratised, transparent and allowing input, albeit guided, from all.” — I love reading lines like this, because they describe what open source communities have been doing for years. Yet, somehow, when an academic notices it, or a technique gets applied to education, it becomes revolutionary and new. The same argument can be made about the similarity between MOOCS and open source communities.

While this was not included in the comment, I figured I'd include my favorite video that lays out some of the bigger issues with Second Life. It's an oldie, but goodie:

Drupal for Education and E-Learning is now available from Packt Publishing. This book covers Drupal 6, and describes how to build a community site to support teaching and learning. This book is designed for people new to Drupal, with no prior development experience. The hands-on, step-by-step instructions guide you through installing Drupal, configuring contributed modules and themes, and working with some of Drupal’s most useful and powerful modules, including CCK, Views, and Organic Groups. The book also covers site maintenance, upgrades, and backups – these essential steps, while not as fun as site building, are essential for keeping your site and data secure.

Additionally, the book covers some of the basics of when to use different types of resources in the classroom. Frequently, people talk about incorporating video, or audio, or social bookmarks, etc, into the classroom, but they never discuss effective uses of these tools. While this book is not exhaustive in these discussions, I attempted to create some context around creative and effective use of the social web in a learning environment.

On a related note, we have also decided to be more organized and systematic with regards to putting out occasional tutorials. They will be collected under the tutorials tag, and can be seen at http://funnymonkey.com/tutorials (or subscribed to via rss).

For people new to Drupal, Drupal in Education and E-Learning includes details on:

• Drupal terminology;
• User creation;
• Role based access control;
• Installing modules and themes;
• Using taxonomy to categorize posts
• Backing up and upgrading your site.

For more experienced Drupallers, the book covers:

• Using CCK to extend content types -- instructions cover sharing media, images, links, text, and files;
• An overview of Views 2, including adding new views, using the new access control mechanisms of Views 2, configuring multiple displays from a single view, and cloning and modifying existing views;
• An overview of Organic Groups, including instructions on how to use groups to support informal and formal learning;
• Extending user profiles to support connections between users;

Using the menu and block system to simplify and streamline the navigation of your site.

For more specifics on information covered in this book, the Table of Contents gives a solid overview.