All posts in EdTech

Drupal in Education Unconference 2012

Posted March 20th, 2012 by Bill

On Monday, March 19th, at Del Pueblo School in Denver, Colorado, around 75 Drupalists and educators met for a day of sessions focused on the needs of people working in education, and how Drupal can help.

Sessions ran all day, and some of the topics included how to manage hundreds of sites within an organization, responsive design best practices, how to use distributions within education, and how to ensure that sites are accessible.

One of our goals in planning this event was to carve out the space and time for people working within education to have substantive conversations with other practitioners, and to increase the communication between people working in different areas of educational systems. At a technical level, there are overlaps between some of the core issues people are addressing, regardless of whether they work in K12, Higher Ed, Government, in the classroom, or as part of administrative support. Philosophically, if we look at education as a process that unfolds continuously across people's lives, people within different levels of education can benefit from knowing more about how their counterparts are solving problems, and the rationales behind the systems they put in place. One of the things that struck me yesterday, as I talked with different people at the event, was the skill, talent, and focus of the people who came. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to sit in a room full of smart, talented people and listen to how they are doing their work.

In the conversations, there was also also a common thread of education as a social justice issue. The notion that a user interface should be evaluated from the perspective of how it empowers people to the need for multilingual translations (and how to best achieve them) were a couple of the ideas that I'll be thinking about for a while.

I'd like to thank the participants who came and made the day happen. And, if you were at the event and want to keep in touch with the other participants, please add your name to the wiki.

As mentioned earlier, the event was held at Del Pueblo School, and the space was generously made available to us by the Denver Public School System. Michael Wacker and Glenn Moses were instrumental in making this connection.

Also, get ready to mark your calendars. We will be organizing this event next year; we will announce the dates for the next event shortly after the dates for DrupalCon 2013 are announced.

Can Students Be Makers When Teachers Are Consumers?

Posted October 18th, 2011 by Bill

I recently came across a discussion initiated by a technology director in the first year of an iPad rollout. The release of iOS5 rendered some key apps inoperable; due to how Apple manages upgrades on mobile hardware, it can be difficult to adequately test new software, let alone schedule a bulk upgrade.

Given that pieces of an academic program can be rendered inoperable via an upgrade you are not empowered to stop/opt out of, how reliable do iPads feel?

While most of these upgrades are painless, do the opportunities offered by an iPad justify having the release schedule of an external company potentially trump or disrupt the schedules you, your teachers, and your students have worked out?

I'm definitely not advocating a return to a centralized, fully controlled environment, but just as I wouldn't tolerate anyone coming in and painting my kitchen without asking, I have an equally hard time being told that I have no say over the environment of a piece of hardware I (theoretically) own.

So, if we own the hardware we use to create, and someone else controls access to the tools we use to create, where does that leave us with respect to ownership of our creative work? If the only way we can make use of the work we have created is through a device that is a closed environment with respect to hardware, running software that is beyond our reach, how can we make any claims that we have created something over which we have control? In this situation, our data is accessible to us only if we keep paying for hardware we don't control, and keep paying for software we might not need or want any more?

We encourage students to be makers and creators; these exhortations lack the strength they could have when they are based on a foundation of consuming what we are given. By using a closed system, and allowing our programs to be shaped by the whims of an entity who is completely oblivious to the day to day needs of of the programs we have laid out, we model an external locus of control.

How can we encourage students to be makers when some of our behavior models straight consumption?

Image Credit: "Lock" taken by BlackmanVision, published under an Attribution-Non Commercial - No Derivatives license.

Plagiarize From Behind The Paywall

Posted September 13th, 2011 by Bill

From http://davideharrington.com/?p=594

To test Turnitin’s crawlers, I uploaded the document containing the New York Times articles to my website a few months ago. Google now matches many of the plagiarized phrases from Shoplifting to the New York Times articles on my website and some of the phrases to articles in the archives of the paper. Google also matches them to Shoplifting itself, which has been scanned into Google Books.

Turnitin fails to match the plagiarized phrases to any of these sources. I e-mailed Turnitin’s help desk, essentially asking, “What’s going on? Why can’t Turnitin find these things?”

A few hours later, a guy at Turnitin’s product support sent me a detailed answer that boils down to three basic points—the Internet is a big place and it takes our crawlers time to scan it; we can’t scan the New York Times because it requires a subscription; and, we can’t scan images of text like those used by Google Books. In other words, our crawlers are puny compared to Google’s.

If a student plagiarizes from a source that is not freely available over the open web, their chances of getting caught (at least via TurnItIn) are smaller. This includes content that is published on Google Books. However, books published at Project Gutenberg (which are text-based and not behind a paywall) would be found via TurnItIn.

There are other valid reasons not to use TurnItIn. TurnItIn demands the rights to use student-generated content for free in perpetuity; that's pretty offensive. But, the fact that TurnItIn isn't effective at detecting plagiarism from a large number of sources (aka, it doesn't work as well as it claims) should be another good reason not to subject students to this level of scrutiny and IP theft as a precondition for learning.

UPDATE: TurnItIn responded via Twitter that "Turnitin has tons of subscription content from pubs, journals, and library databases, but not everything."

I have requested some additional info about TurnItIn's criteria for indexing and not indexing content. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 2: TurniItIn responded: "We have a team that manages our content partnerships, but can't reveal all of'm. See https://turnitin.com/static/products/content.php"

Image Credit: "Steal This Computer Book 4.0" taken by Jordan and Lee, published under an Attribution-Non Commercial - Share Alike license.

Vacuum

Posted August 22nd, 2010 by Bill

Last weekend, the Los Angeles Times had an article of dubious worth on value added assessment, in which they pointed fingers and named names. I had something to say about it, as did many others.

But, from a post and thread on John Merrow's blog, it seems that many of the people that used to be known as the leaders are wildly out of touch. In particular, Grant Wiggins makes a stunning cameo, which could actually be a good lead in to a new program named "Misunderstanding By Design." Joe Bowers keeps a pretty good scorecard.

Against this rhetorical backdrop, Will Richardson sends us a nearly-elegiac prose postcard about the role of leadership in fomenting educational change. In it, he talks about how many people outside the echo chamber of online communities are not aware of the changes looming on the horizon - but in his piece, he also alludes to people having an alternative vision about what people should be learning:

(T)hey go back to their conversation. “It’s the schools that should be doin’ that,” one is saying, and all of a sudden, I’m tuned in, listening over my shoulder as I reach for a pack of Dentyne Ice from the candy shelf beneath the counter. “They’re just not teaching it as much as they should be.” I step away from the counter, buy a little time by pretending to look closely at the chocolate bars down below, wonder what the system is so deficient in, wondering, maybe…

“These kids just don’t know nothin’ about managing money,” he says, and I hear various sounds of assent from the others.

When I first read the Merrow post linked above, I was incredibly depressed - it was disheartening to see the extent of the disagreements between people who have been working for decades on improving education. But it slowly began to dawn on me: if this is what passes for vision, then we have a vacuum to fill. And while it would be nice to have a Secretary of Education who could do better than this, we need to play the hand we're dealt.

So, cue the music:

	Elvis Presley - A Little Less Conversation

	Found at skreemr.org

One thing we have going for us: virtually no one want the status quo (the only real exception here are, of course, companies that have a business model that depends on the status quo *cough cough textbook/test prep/testing companies cough cough*, but even they need to mouth the rhetoric of change, because the pace of change is a construct that will hold its value over time).

So, given that most of us want change, we need to listen to the changes people want. There are bound to be some good ideas in there, even among people with whom there appear to be broad disagreements. While "managing money" might not seem like a "21st century skill" people still need to know how to do it - and with minimal effort, I can think of a half-dozen project based lessons that could develop that skill.

More importantly, though, we need to act. How are you showing the value of the informal learning in which you engage? How does this make you a better educator? More importantly, how can this contribute to a better classroom, a better learning experience for students, and/or a better school? If we can't articulate and demonstrate these things - and, more importantly, if we don't make the time to enact and articulate these advantages - why should anyone take us at our word?

The Myth of the Edupreneur

Posted June 20th, 2010 by Bill

In many of the conversations around changing the current educational system, the rhetoric and approaches borrow heavily from the corporate world. In many cases, processes and strategies that have been used with inconclusive outcomes in corporate America are touted as solutions that will fix the problems that plague education: a short list includes merit pay (which worked really well among hedge fund managers), performance management, corporate-style layoffs as a means to eliminate "underperformers," and streamlining the means to outsource school management to for-profit companies.

Instability creates opportunity, and the current state of public education is nothing if not unstable. As a result, businesses are getting increasingly interested. Where business goes, marketing is not far behind, which invariably nets us a new buzzword: the edupreneur. The narrative around the edupreneur combines the mythology of the entrepeneur as a financial cowboy, an individual with the grit to take chances, bend the rules, and buck authority; with the equally potent mythology of the socially conscious company - a business venture with the ethics to, occasionally, put principles above profits.

I came across an example of this type of edupreneurial venture recently in the form of an interview with the founders of Notehall, a company that serves as a marketplace for students that want to sell their class notes. It's remarkable only because it is such a common example of what passes for an idea in the space where people actually believe the world of education is bereft of any creative or generative thought.

The blog post that contains the interview starts with a video of the company founders on a show called Sharktank (as an aside, I had no idea this show existed, and I'm a little upset to have had my bubble burst). The video is included here for your viewing pleasure:

The actual interview that follows is the standard breathless prattle that most of these things are; basically, PR talking points masquerading as actual conversation. But one line really stands out:

Question: What do you think education entrepreneurs need at this moment in the industry to be successful? Marketing? A good idea? A network?

Response: Mentorship/Network. A good team with an average idea will eventually discover a successful business if the right hands are helping guide them and see opportunities.

In a world where solutions are valued primarily for their ability to enrich a select few, and secondarily for their ability to benefit an undefined many, this philosophy defines what people consider innovative. In other words, a "good" innovation allows a company to find an unexploited niche and profit from it - the quality of the innovation is defined by the size of the profit.

To be absolutely clear, there is nothing wrong from profiting from your work. And, if you have an idea, a dream, a vision, or a talent that you want to expand into a company, by all means, follow the dream. But bring your A game. Don't delude yourself that the educational world needs another mediocre idea with glossy marketing copy. If people want that, they can trawl the vendor floor at ISTE. But classrooms deserve better.

However, when a company gets too invested in a single solution - or worse yet, a single technological intervention - to a complex problem, much money can be wasted.

This problem can be compounded in companies heavily funded by venture capital money. An interview in FastCompany between Anya Kamenetz and Phoenix Wang alludes to the financial pressures at play; this quotation is from the second page:

There are $600 billion in public dollar investments in education around schools. But there's a disconnect between the school districts who make the purchases and the students who are supposed to use it. So oftentimes what gets pushed down to students is not really aligned with their interests.

At the same time, private and institutional investors are really interested in emerging products, but they're constrained by institutional purchasing. VCs need big exits, so they end up taking less risk.

You generally will not find much argument about the need for learning being a lifelong need. None of us ever reach a point where we can afford to stop learning, growing, or expanding.

However, the needs of people interested in profiting off the process of our learning are completely dissimilar: they want the biggest return possible, over the shortest time period. This cultural disconnect helps explain why the ideas of the business world clash with the ethos of the education world.

And, as the international financial markets still attempt to recover from the greed and excesses of the banking industry, maybe we have it backwards: perhaps education should step in and help protect these poor business folks from their own lack of understanding about the world in which we live.

Social Media Has Changed Everything! Really! Except It Hasn't.

Posted November 7th, 2009 by Bill

I've stumbled across a few conversations recently where people have been trying to push the notion that, as a result of social media, the audience has changed.

Social media has changed what interactions look like, but they haven't changed the nature of interaction.

The idea that social media has wrought a change in human nature is laughable. Two things, however, have shifted: more people now have the means to join in the conversation; and the combination of better search and social networks make it easier to find the conversations that are relevant to you.

As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to engage in a one sided conversation. It has also become increasingly difficult to control your message, or even to stay on top of/ahead of where your message goes.

A recent and ongoing example: at the NYSCATE conference, a vendor selling filtering tools titled his presentation The Enemy Within: Stop Students from Bypassing Your Web Filters. As one might suspect, there were people who took issue with the title, and began leaving comments on the editable web page linked to earlier in this paragraph (also, on the chance that the company doing the presentation would attempt to control some of the PR fallout by deleting the page, I took a snapshot of it, available here).

This situation provides a perfect example of what has changed, and what hasn't. Here's our situation:

1. A vendor/sponsor does a session at an education conference. Someone (probably the marketing folks) comes up with a "cute" title -- this title also happens to be offensive, but in defense of marketers they are not often the best to spot these issues.

So, far, nothing new.

2. In the olden days before social media, the people at the conference would have been offended. Maybe someone would have brought it up during the session. Maybe someone would have written a letter to the company, or the conference organizers. However, the key factor: some people would have been annoyed. The people who were annoyed, however, would have lacked the means to convey their dissatisfaction to a broader audience.

3. Now, however, people are annoyed. They are blogging about it. They are posting about it on Twitter. And the wiki page created for the presentation is filled (for now, anyways) with comments registering this disapproval.

The disapproval is not new. The means for expressing it, and the means by which the topic can be discovered, however, have changed.

The lessons from all this:

First, if you're going to try and be cute, make sure you're not saying anything offensive. Nothing destroys cute like offensive.

Second, let your work be your publicity. Do good things. Talk about them. If you're worried about the balance between doing good things and talking about what you are doing, err on the side of doing.

Third, if you can't be fully transparent about what you are doing, be transparent about your reasons why. The intarwebs hate bullshit artists. Just ask anyone who tried to sell Vista or host a Windows 7 launch party.

But most importantly: realize social media exists, and realize that -- to a small but growing segment of the population -- it matters. Talk with people. This doesn't mean that you should hire a "social media guru," as this is the equivalent of buying digital snake oil. And if you are trying to figure out how or why the audience has changed, stop wasting your time. The audience hasn't changed. They can just talk now. And good companies doing good things will know enough to listen.

The meme, however, that social media has changed everything is all around us, and really, it is time it went away. It gets in the way of more people understanding how to use the communication channels that are currently available. It's also worth noting that an effective use of social media involves listening, a markedly low-tech skill.

It Hurts. Please, Make It Stop.

Posted February 21st, 2009 by Bill

Recently, via a listserv where I participate, I learned about a site called StudyBlue. This site was touted as part of a new set of tools supporting networked learning; my response is reposted below.

My response

Hello, all,

At the risk of being a curmudgeon, we need to look at the terms of use of the services we are using/promoting.

The Terms of Use of StudyBlue, available at http://www.studyblue.com/Terms.htm, contain the following language:

"By posting Member Content to any part of the Web site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing."

However, this site is one of the rare cases that has Terms that are worse than Facebook's (who at least pay lip service to respecting user's privacy decisions).

From the StudyBlue terms of service, from the link above:

"When you upload Member Content as Private the Company will not post the information to any other Member without your permission. However, upon leaving a class or course, any Member Content left uploaded as Private will be made Public for the life of the Web site. You may remove your Private Member Content from the Web site before you leave a class or course. If you choose to remove your Private Member Content before leaving a class or course , the license granted above will automatically expire. If you do not remove your Private Member Content from the Web site before you leave a class or course, the license granted above will not expire and will continue indefinitely."

So, if you create private content in a course/group, it will become public if you leave the course without deleting it. Moreover, on a quick read through, these terms say nothing about what happens if a user wants to delete their account. Under these terms, there seems to be no way for a user to delete their content, which is, according to these terms, licensed in perpetuity to StudyBlue.

Facebook recently enraged a portion of their user base by similar behavior: http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-... or http://is.gd/jDf4

The web opens up an array of options for teaching, learning, and connecting, but we need to remember that learning should be organized around the needs of the student/learner. The cost of joining a website should not be complete loss of control over your content, and as technology advocates we need to become more aware of the ramifications of data control and data portability within networked learning environments. In short, learners deserve better than the terms offered at StudyBlue, Facebook, Ning, etc. Why should a prerequisite of social learning be the loss of control over how your work is used/reused? By promoting sites that are predicated on an intellectual land grab of learner-created content, we perpetuate the lie that this is acceptable behavior.

Back to Basics

Posted February 16th, 2009 by Bill

In a recent thread on the ISED Listserv, there has been a thread titled "21st Century Computer Skills" -- the thread starts here, and continues for quite a bit.

While the thread meanders over a large amount of ground, it starts with the core question: Is knowing how to format a [column/paragraph/footnote/presentation/etc] in [Word/Excel/Keynote/OpenOffice/etc] an essential skill for a 21st Century Learner. At times, the conversation has veered into the usefulness/worthlessness of "computer" classes that teach typing, how to format docs in word processors, how to manipulate data in spreadsheets, or how to do function X in tool Y. Much of the conversation here has been fairly chicken/egg, with some people saying that students should be taught these skills in context (ie, In English/History/Math/Science/Art), and others saying that they aren't taught these things in context, and therefore won't know them without being taught them in a computer basics course.

This is an old conversation, and one that has been going on in schools for almost as long as technology has been in schools. However, this conversation is only part of the puzzle. In another response, a person describes the following scenario with Teacher 1 and Teacher 2.

Teacher 1: Assigns her class to submit an 8 page essay on "Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation".

In the strand, it has been argued that simply blogging or creating a wiki entry on such a topic is not the same as crafting a well formed essay using a word processor. Then there has been discussion about open source word processor or Pages or MSWord is best. To my mind, this misses the point.

Teacher 2: Assign her class:
a. Use whatever tools at your disposal to learn about:
- Abraham Lincoln, the man and the president and the conditions that led him to write "The Emancipation Proclamation"
- The civil rights movement of the 50/60's
- The election of Barack Obama
b. Present in a form that you choose, a synthesis of how the struggle for freedom by one people, is a model and symbol of struggle for your particular race, nationality, or religion.

Teacher 2 can allow her students to use Mac, Ubuntu or Windows computers to search the internet for articles, video clips, essays, blogs, podcasts, scholarly material, songs, poems or whatever.

Teacher 2 can allow her students to create podcasts of interviews with their own relatives, blog with/about interesting members of their faith, nationality or race, write a formal essay on a word processor, create a music video, assemble a photo montage, or anything else...

Scenarios like this are part of the problem with understanding what technology can or can't do within education. Creating a good paper on anything requires a solid grounding in process, aka, the basics. To create a good paper, a person will need to know/do:

How to do preliminary research to gain any needed background knowledge
How to differentiate between common knowledge (which does not need to be cited) and original thoughts/ideas/interpretations (which do need to be cited)
Proper citation format as required by the context of the assignments (as these can be discipline-specific)
Craft and articulate a clear thesis that will serve as the driving and organizing force behind the work -- and this step is an essential part of much academic work
Edit for style
Edit for content
Edit for verb choice
How to format/present the paper and any research
Etc, etc, etc

These elements are key to doing good work, in any subject, from high school (and possibly earlier) on into a ripe old age. With these elements in place, a paper is a great learning tool.

Teacher 2 in the above example provides a more "21st Century" type of assignment. We will merely note in passing that the final result of this assignment ("Present in a form that you choose, a synthesis of how the struggle for freedom by one people, is a model and symbol of struggle for your particular race, nationality, or religion.") veers perilously close to requiring a student to speak for their race; instead, we will focus on some of the shortcomings behind this assignment.

First, this assignment doesn't require core skills that are any different than the paper assigned by Teacher 1. While this assignment is more active (ie, potentially involving first person interviews), and will likely take more time to complete, the core skills are very comparable. Interview questions will need to be written and planned, and material will be prepared in response to a clearly articulated thesis.

But more importantly, this assignment fails to ask one essential question: why is one medium a better choice than another? When should a podcast be used? When should video be used? When should a paper be used? When, and how, should a blog or a wiki be used?

Different mediums have different strengths, and until we can articulate why a specific medium makes sense for a given message, technology will be viewed as an unneeded bolt-on to existing curriculum. With the assignment for Teacher 2, technology can be seen as a bolt-on; while it might be useful, it isn't essential. Until technology advocates can explain how different mediums can be used to support the process of learning, they should return to basics.

One of the core issues that I have encountered is that people have an incomplete understanding of how different tools can be used as part of the process. A wiki or a blog can be used to store notes, impromptu podcasts can be used as ways of storing ideas when on the run, and these various components can be used as part of a working portfolio while developing a project. The notion that we need one tool for a project -- or that each student will use the same tool in the same way -- is as quaint as the idea that schools need to dedicate an entire semester to formatting cells in Excel.

And with that said, a blog post or wiki page can be used to share and distribute polished writing as well as notes. A podcast or video can be rough, or something that is scripted, edited, and crafted into a coherent work. In short, any medium, from writing on up, can be as rough or polished as we make it.

But until technology advocates can make a coherent argument that demonstrates how different online tools can be part of a more efficient learning process, the conversation will remain stalled as we discuss whether we should teach students how to create 1.25 inch margins. I hesitate to call this a skill, and I certainly hesitate to attach it to a particular century. The essential skills needed for any learner in any century will always be dictated by the task at hand, and the tools available to solve it.

On Sustainability, Experimentation, and Knowing When To Break the Mold

Posted January 10th, 2009 by Bill

There have been a few posts I've encountered recently that have resonated with me. If I had more time to write, I could probably get a response together in a more timely way, but I'm more like the socially awkward person you meet who interrupts a conversation to respond to a comment that was made ten minutes ago. I don't really keep pace with the ebb and flow of the blogosphere.

But with that said, I enjoyed reading Clarence Fisher's post on The Death of Big Ideas. I then encountered Chris Sessum's thoughts on Investing In What Works, followed by Deborah Meier's post over at Bridging Differences where she talks about how "we can learn even from people whose work we often despise."

I include these posts to try and give a sense of what was swimming around in my head when I read Miguel Guhlin's comment; Miguel's comment is short, but it provides a good jumping-off point for some of the trends I have been observing in both education and the educational blogosphere for a while -- at least the last two years, possibly longer.

In many ed-tech blogs, there is a lot of talk about open source. Some of the people talking about open source even blog about open source, even posting solutions or thoughts about the specific issues they face. However, very few educators get involved in meaningful ways within open source communities within the actual open source community -- and by this, I mean that very few educators spend time engaging within the actual infrastructure set up by the open source communities to support users of the various open source tools. And to clarify, I am definitely not saying that every person using an open source tool should be actively involved in the community behind that tool. That's unrealistic, and, frankly, unnecessary; not to mention the very obvious reality that teachers have limited time to start with.

However, implementors of technology programs would have a lot to both gain and offer. The process of open source development, and the conversations within these communities have direct implications for education. When I was teaching, I supported classes using Phorum, Moodle, and Drupal. Each of these applications has different strengths and weaknesses, but the process of learning from and within the various communities around these applications made me a better teacher. So, when Clarence Fisher says (in his post, linked from above), "Blogs are not new anymore. Neither is Voicethread or flickr or wikis. But what about curriculum design, and power and democracy in classrooms?" this resonates with me for two main reasons: first, the lack of any support for this type of questioning was one of the factors that led to me leaving the classroom; and second, this open structure that Clarence describes is precisely what exists within the Drupal community. It's an amazingly liberating experience to be able to work in this space, and the irony is that the experience many edtech bloggers describe as ideal (in general terms: openness, transparency, and a flattened hierarchy) have been humming along smoothly for quite some time as part of the open source ecosystem.

On a practical note: folks implementing technology in schools could learn/borrow from open source communities. For example, tech integrators could learn more strategies for end user training, and about effective means of documenting the systems they build. They would also be able to contribute to discussions on usability, and would be able to get more conversant with how to set these various applications up within their own infrastructure. None of this involvement requires any knowledge of how to write code.

The challenge: for most of us, we need to chart our own path through the knowledge that is already present in open source communities. But, given that many bloggers describe charting an individual path through knowledge as the ideal for students, it's hard to see where that isn't a good thing.

In his comment, Miguel says a couple other things that merit highlighting:

So, with 250 Joomla sites around my neck, Drupal seems interesting but you don't switch over to a whole new system overnight when no one else knows Drupal in your organization (and I'm ignorant of that, too).

If any organization has 250 of anything (and I'm talking in general terms, from web sites to Matchbox cars) then it implies that a significant amount of resources has gone into building that collection. If an organization has arrived at that place more or less by accident, then I would surmise that there are greater dysfunctions within the organization that need to be fixed before even the best web presence could be used effectively. But before any change should be considered, a solid needs analysis should be done, and at the very least this needs analysis should account for available staffing, in-house talent, budget, organizational priorities, strengths and weaknesses of the current site(s), and whether the sites are meeting the needs of the organization. After these (and likely other) items have been considered, an organization is ready to address any questions about change.

And: if your current technology solution is "around (your) neck" things could probably be working more smoothly.

But when the dust settles, Deborah Meier really says it best: "Enough already, let’s have the courage to rethink what we have wrought instead of just turning the screws tighter on an indefensible system we happened upon." This applies equally to educational reform and tech infrastructure maintenance. Mistakes or non-decisions of the past should not dictate the terms of the present or the future.

While I appreciate offers of help, it seems like Drupal is for a district that hasn't tried anything yet but is ready to make the plunge.

Any tool adopted by any organization will have barriers to adoption, ranging from data migration, end user training, reallocating or acquiring infrastructure, to organizational expectations management. This is as true of Drupal as it is of any tool, regardless of whether it is open source or proprietary. If you start looking at numbers of what it costs to implement and maintain a piece of software on your infrastructure, using an open source tool can bring real cost savings (along these lines, I love it when people describe Sharepoint as a free tool). Educators have spent too long chasing the elusive free tool, only to be surprised when the tool goes away or shifts license terms. It's not like the cost of free tools has gone unnoticed or unremarked. But more on that later.

The notion that Drupal in particular -- or open source in general -- will complicate data migration doesn't hold up. If anything, open source tools leverage open standards more thoroughly, and allow for greater access to data, than their proprietary counterparts. For example, Drupal is far more open than Ning, Whipple Hill, FinalSite, Blackboard, Blackbaud, Schoolwires, or any of the usual suspects.

Also, what about the argument that Drupal installs should be hosted by web providers (e.g. Siteground) that have Fantastico and can support upgrades/updates, etc. relieving the load from school district staff which lack that expertise?

Outsourcing the hosting infrastructure (ie, servers, server maintenance, firewall, and internet connectivity) can make sense in some (not all) circumstances. However, a school should NEVER have their site on shared hosting. On most shared hosting accounts, your site is one of hundreds or thousands competing for server resources. A school's infrastructure should be on a VPS at the very least. On a VPS, your site is guaranteed resources. More importantly, the level of support for a VPS is generally greater than for shared hosting.

As for using Fantastico to maintain a site, I don't recommend it. Drupal's install process is not enormously complex, and should certainly be within the reach of a technically competent individual. The same is true for code upgrades. If a school or district lacks the expertise to do this in-house, or is unwilling to devote resources to get time/training to learn how to do this, then they should probably rethink their relationship to their web presence. For what it's worth, the ease of upgrading has gotten progressively easier over the last several years. Four years ago, with Drupal 4.6, upgrades made me mildly nervous. Now, with Drupal 6, upgrades are much less complex, to the point where they are approaching routine.

Controlling Our Own Destiny, and Next Steps

As two widely read educational bloggers have noticed recently, using a free proprietary tool has some risks. The tool can go away, or it can change its license terms (For what it's worth, I like both Google and Voicethread, IMO, both companies are completely in their rights to do whatever they want -- within obvious ethical bounds, of course -- to have their businesses succeed). This won't happen with an open source tool, as when you install and run an open source tool -- even on outsourced infrastructure -- you can always access your data, and with Drupal, your data is accessible in a variety of open formats.

Perhaps 2009 will be the year when people turn the corner and begin to take student privacy and data control more seriously. Perhaps 2009 will be the year when the educational blogosphere begins to stop its crow-like pursuit of the shiny thing, usually in the form of some new free tool that will really! really! solve everything. Perhaps 2009 will be the year when we finally, truly, learn that the medium is not the message, and begin to move beyond the language of school and educational reform into the hard, timeconsuming, emotionally exhausting, risk-laden work of true reform (and again, hats off to Deborah Meier -- if you haven't read her piece, go there now). Drupal can be an incredibly powerful tool in helping support and drive educational reform. I have long believed that Drupal has been poorly understood within the edtech community, but that's a different, albeit related story.

The potential of the educational blogosphere is incredible, not in the sense of a unified movement, but in the sense of an incredible diversity of opinion, and a sincere desire to help people learn more efficiently. However, as Clarence Fisher notes: "I haven't seen a massive, new idea in the edublogosphere for a good long while now."

In the meantime, if there are educators who want to get started using Drupal, come on over to the Drupal in Education group. Ask questions. Get involved. Make mistakes with us. Learn. We're all here to help.

Announcing the Launch of the FunnyMonkey Commons

Posted December 11th, 2008 by Bill

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.