All posts in Drupal

Building a Student Portal -- Response to a Question from Miguel Guhlin

Posted March 26th, 2008 by Bill

Anyone have suggestions on how to respond to this question? I welcome all brainstorming ideas...

We are ready to implement a student portal (with teacher and parent portals to follow) for our 1:1 campuses. We would like for this portal to be a web-based, searchable, "pretty"

While "pretty" is subjective, this is one place where spending a little time with either an ID or a graphic designer, or both, will benefit your site. "Pretty" has a frequently overlooked cousin, "Usability" -- sorting out your navigational structures (done in Drupal using the core block and menu items), and making sure your theme enhances these architectural decisions, will often get you both Pretty and Usable, which is a winning combination. Starting with a solid base theme, like Zen, helps you theme your site in a time-efficient way, particularly if you and your team are learning how to design/theme in Drupal. Drupal can be themed pretty effectively via css alone; if you have someone on staff who can work in php, there really isn't much you can't do. Also, if there is one element you decide to outsource, the theme is a pretty good choice.

More Good Things

Posted February 19th, 2008 by Bill

A few more things to look into:

It looks like RDF is coming to Drupal. This has some interesting implications for learning spaces, and doing things that you just can't do in Blackboard.

OER's: Publishing is the Easy Part; Now, Let's Make Them More Usable

Posted February 17th, 2008 by Bill

Introductory Notes

These are some thoughts in progress -- I've been thinking these things through for probably the last few years, but things have been getting more interesting of late.

Some of the blog posts that have helped shape my thinking here include:
http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044998.php

RSS Redux

Posted February 8th, 2008 by Bill

9:30 -- Re-read Brian Lamb's blog post.

9:33 -- Poked around Stephen Downes' site, reading over some of the documentation on Edu_Rss. Really, I'm hoping to find an OPML file. Bingo.

9:40 -- Create a database on educon20.org.

9:42 -- Go to Drupal.org -- grap a copy of the 5.7 codebase, and the following modules: FeedAPI, FeedElement Mapper, Views, Views Bonus, Tagadelic, and CCK. At a later point, if nothing blows up, I'll probably add in Similar Content.

Interesting Happenings at BYU

Posted February 2nd, 2008 by Bill

I saw this earlier today over at groups.drupal.org --

Kyle Matthews and Clint Rogers built a Drupal site in suppport of a web analytics class. The site aggregates student blogs and expert blogs; this way, everyone blogs from their chosen blogging platform, and their feed gets imported into the course site. In other words, people use whatever blogging tool they are currently using, and the software running the course (in this case, Drupal) adapts to the participant. This is a nice contrast to the usual approach, where all participants must adapt to the structure required by the LMS.

DrupalEd 5.6-0

Posted January 11th, 2008 by Bill

Earlier today, Drupal core was upgraded to version 5.6. This is a security release, and all users should upgrade.

For users with existing DrupalEd installs, you only need to upgrade core Drupal -- you do not need to use this specific package.

For new users to DrupalEd, this is the package for you.

Download it here to get started!

Thoughts on Sharing Lessons

Posted December 17th, 2007 by Bill

I'm writing these ideas out quickly -- there are sure to be holes in this, and gaps in this reasoning -- please point them out in the comments.

For some context on this post, see these two threads on Dan Meyer's blog.

Users working with online lessons will generally fall into at least one of the following categories:

People searching for lesson ideas (probably the majority)
People already creating content on their own blogs (a growing number of folks, but still a very small percentage, compared to people in category 1, or even teacher-bloggers)

DrupalEd 5.4-0

Posted December 6th, 2007 by Bill

DrupalEd 5.4 is now out.

This new release incorporates a security upgrade. Although DrupalEd was not affected by the specific conditions that triggered this upgrade, upgrading core is strongly recommended.

This release also incorporates some recent module upgrades. For the full details, read the upgrade_notes.txt file available in the download.

Download DrupalEd here.

News From The Drop

Posted December 2nd, 2007 by Bill

Over the last couple weeks, there have been some large shifts in the world of Drupal development.

The first of these occurred last week, when Raincity Studios acquired Bryght. For the three non-geeks reading this blog, Raincity is a Vancouver, cA based design shop, and Bryght was the first Drupal company out there. While I have yet to meet the Raincity folks, I know several of the Bryght guys, and they do amazing work, both for their clients and within the Drupal community. This partnership promises some great things for advancing Drupal development, and Drupal design.

On Aggregation, and Crow

Posted November 24th, 2007 by Bill

A mildly edited version of my response to Jim Groom's post over on the bava --

D'Arcy mentioned the need for this to scale, and he's right. With that said, I don't think we need to have scalability to 100K students as a first goal. The beauty of the small pieces loosely joined is that it's easier, and that it's a step away from the monolithic LMS's so beloved by so many --

Toward that end, it's good to consider what we'd need to carry from the blog to the aggregator in order to connect a student work with an institutional SIS/LMS. To start, I see two factors as essential: first, mapping a feed to a student, and second, mapping individual posts from within a feed to a course.