Droid’in

As some of you may have seen on twitter (or from my making fun of people ).  Yes, I am a proud owner of a Droid.  Now before I jump off the deep end either direction, let me lay out a few points.  The Droid is not an Iphone.  Stop making the comparison, please, the rampant fanboyness is obnoxious.  If you have an iPhone and love it, yeah, I get it, it’s an iphone, congrats.  If you have a Droid, suddenly you’re not holding the phone to unseat the iphone.  Here’s a few bullet points so that I don’t have an annoyingly drawn out review.

• I started to get excited about the Droid because it looked like it could keep up in title bouts with the iPhone in all categories.  That said, it does, no questions asked.
• Bitch as much as you want, Verizon’s network is super fast and reliable.  I can’t believe how fast the connectivity (and I use that word on purpose) is on the Droid and it’s definitely not just the device causing it.
• Droid’s level of integration with the web is unparalleled.  If you’re an IT professional or a tech savy business / web 2.0 user, why don’t you have this phone?  Data flows naturally.
• Trust me, I’ve been extremely critical of Verizon and AT&T historically but I have to give credit where it’s due.  Verizon…FINALLY has jumped on the open platform bandwagon.  Data is treated as data (outside of texting) and this is as close to making verizon a ‘dumb pipe’ as we’ve ever seen in the past.  Free GPS, amazon mp3 downloads, google voice for free txting / call routing / visual voicemail.  If you’re into open source then there’s no reason you shouldn’t be taking a look at this phone.
• This phone is not for everyone.  I mention the user groups above intentionally because this phone is definitely not for everyone.  This phone is essentially a micro-pc that’s connected to 3G.  The operating system is a lot more like an OS and a lot less like a happy user interface for a phone.  The Iphone is mass market, anyone can use it.  I don’t think I can say that about the Droid.  It works for me because I “get it”, it definitely won’t for everyone.
• I wish I had real numbers but I probably have replaced 50% of my laptop / desktop usage with this device as well as reduced the amount of time I’m actually on the internet.  The push based updates that I have now coming from 8 or so programs tell me when I have reason to interact with the internet instead of coming back and checking my email a few times an hour.

Here are the things I dislike about the phone / need to be changed:

• Camera processes slow and is really inconsistent
• There are some buttons that seem illogically placed and menus that aren’t there that seem like they should be
• On screen keyboard (especially the landscape one) I ABSOLUTELY HATE.  I got the phone for the physical keyboard but it’s far worse then the iphone keyboard which I can actually manage (I have an itouch to play with for comparison)
• App selection is ok. Definitely not as robust as the iPhone yet but I think that will improve over time
• It only has 3 home screens.  While I absolutely love that you can put widgets on the screen….why the hell are there only 3 screens to place stuff on!?  I keep looking to hope there’s a way of getting an app to make more but 2 is definitely not enough.  I’ve heard the Hero has 7 which I think is a bit too many but i’d rather have too many then not enough.
• Multitouch, while available (yes… I assure you it is cause I have an app that uses pinch gestures) isn’t being implemented anywhere
• No way to integrate twitter to the same degree that gmail and facebook are (with contact syncing / mashing).  Twitter is hugely popular so I’m shocked this isn’t there.  There also don’t seem to be any apps that sync / mash contacts which is kinda annoying
• Home screen is kinda jerky in animations, nothing else seems to be though which is odd.
• Seems to have some of the same hanging issues I’ve had w/ my itouch in the past.  You’ll push a button now and then and it’ll just hang out.  It would be nice if there was some kinda processing status indicator (like the mac colorwheel when things are hanging.
• Music player is pretty junky.  It works but that’s about it
• No way to manage media w/ a computer.  While I love that it just mounts as a drive and you can drag and drop data freely, it needs some way of managing sync of files.  Ultimate solution in my mind — Dropbox App.

Here are the things I love about the phone and why it’s set apart from the iPhone:

• Widgets.  No reason apple can’t allow them, they’re just lazy :p.  Widgets make life so much easier when you have the right ones
• Notications pane.  Top menu pulls down to look at everything that’s going on and you can configure the hell out of most apps as to how it alerts you
• L-O-C-A-L-E.  Wow…just wow.  App you have to download but it lets you down identify contextual situations.  What’s that mean?  If I plug my phone in at home it will launch a certain app to display the dock mode.  Unplug at home and it’ll disable it.  Get into the Dr’s office or two work buildings on campus it’ll switch to silent ringer and vibrate on it’s own.  You can come up with all kinda different situations and make the phone do different things accordingly (even auto tweet or wake up your work computer based on different contexts)
• Physical keyboard.  It’s not super easy to touch type but I really like it because it’s a full sized keyboard.  I’ve already gotten pretty good at typing and can bang out full emails pretty quickly and accurately + it’s a lot better on my wrists.  Certain people refuse to use touchscreen keyboards (like me) so this is a huge benefit and requirement of a phone.
• Google Integration — I already route everything through Gmail and voice so this is a no brainer.  Enter username / password to set the phone up the first time and it pulls everything.  It’s near instantaneous syncing too which I can’t believe, it’s almost like the phone is just a terminal to net data.  I’ve updated contact info online in gmail and had it show up on the phone in under 10 seconds.  Same with gmail.  I’ve gotten a notification of new message on the phone, deleted it on the computer and the phone recognizes it and stops the alert not too long after.  Redonk
• Navigation / Voice Search — I’ll lump these together casue together they rock.  Voice search is on iphone but voice based, google maps enabled, navigation system?  Don’t think so.  The Nav system is awesome.  It has some issues to work out and i’ll still have a paper backup if going someplace i’ve never been before but right now I’d put it’s accuracy at about 90% of my routes taking me where I actually want to go.  For being Free and still beta, yeah, I’ll accept that   Especially when street view gets in the works and you can tilt the phone around to see what you should be looking at in the real world…yeah… it’s creepy cool.
• Open Philosophy — Don’t get me wrong.  Apple does a ton right.  But have you ever realized how much their workflow makes you a slave to them?  You like their music player so you buy it.  It makes you use their program to get music on / off of it. Up until recently they made you use a format that only worked on their systems.  All the data that goes onto your ipods can’t be pulled off with any ease.  They own you in the media department.  Development is in their closed system… yeah… I could go on and on.  Even the plug to connect is something only they make.  How communist are they?  Contrast that with the droid.  Data all lives on and off the phone.  Mount as a drive. MP3 and a lot of other music / video formats. usb mini plug. ANNNNDDd an app store where google doesn’t pull stuff down to make their carrier happy (yet at least ).

It really makes it into a dumb terminal and I couldn’t be happier for that reason   I highly recommend you at least give one a look, I’m extremely happy I did and glad I didn’t get stuck with AT&T (don’t even need to go into how much I dislike them here ).  Thoughts? Where’d I go off the deepend?  All I know is I love it and it’s the first technology I’ve used for work purposes in a long time that directly has a positive impact on my life.  I’m so much less stressed now that I have this device (relative to not having a mobile, connected device).

Above the Trees (A tall man’s perspective on elearning)

After recently drawing up the plans for a new module to bring online Rubrics to Drupal; I paused, looked at my white board and said “when is it I was able to finally begin looking this far ahead?”.  For years (2.5 to be exact) I had been merely keeping my head above water.  Implementations of new features into courses were in an on-demand fashion with little planning or  sustainability planning in mind.  Courses were in a vaccume environment where no one course affected the planning of another.  Then we reached a critical point; how to manage all these courses w/o an infrastructure / network / controller to do so?  So one was created.  With a network came standardization, sustainability planning and most importantly blah blah blah….

ENOUGH ALREADY PEOPLE!  I’m sick of hearing about systems to develop and push and manage e-learning.  I’ve been working on these systems the last 3 years and you know why?  Because I thought that ultimately, with better tools comes better learning materials and with better learning materials comes better learning outcomes.  Well, that may be the case but from a developer’s perspective all I’ve ever done is enable people to (on good faith) put that ball in motion.  As a result, nothing I’ve ever created has directly impacted the learning of a student and I’m willing to bet nothing you’ve created has either (if you do what I do).
You make systems for people to help students.  Or you install / write code so that people can bold text properly in their Wyziwig text editors with the hope that better formatted web pages with (OOoooo) Tables and hyper-links will lead to better learning outcomes.  Well not to tick any instructors off but a lot of times your material isn’t the most memorable thing for students taking your courses.  I’d like to think I would know having taken online courses before in recent years.  Here’s the million dollar question I charged the rest of my unit with the other day.  Have you taken on online course?  It’s rather funny because you’d think in being experts at telling people how to design them (and some designing them the last 8+ years) that they surely would have taken some online courses themselves.

Not a single one.  So, being an “expert” in the field of taking online courses, having taken an infinite % more of them then the rest of my Unit (and maybe your’s), as well as being someone who is involved in the political and design implications of systems I’d like to share some of my experiences…

• Content w/o multimedia is boring — the Web and Web 2.0 world is all about speed.  What are the two most costly events in a computer program? Input and Output.  It takes a long time to generate content and a long time to absorb it.  The web and life are moving too fast to sit down and read you’re (while very important I’m sure) 4 page-scrolls of text.  I’m sorry, I wish I could say people are reading it but I’ve seen how long they stay on pages (thank you Woopra) and they ain’t all speed readers.  Utilize other forms of media w/o making it overkill. It doesn’t have to be high production quality / pricing either.  There’s a lot you can do with a 15 dollar subscription to Jing.com, a computer with a webcam, and minor knowledge of copying and pasting embed code.
  
• Update your material frequently– The web brings down costs.  Cost of entry, cost of knowledge (in generation and consumption), cost to develop content and cost of ownership.  But the trade off is that typically the information is here today and outdated tomorrow.  We live in a 24 hour news cycle; a government falls on the other side of the world and 5 minutes later we have reports given live streaming video reports with the new administration.  10 minutes after that it’s old news that everyone’s heard and onto the next puppy or kitty that did something cute somewhere.  The dash in the attention span is shrinking and the degree to which material is relevant is shrinking as well.  We can no longer have course materials that are more then 3 years old and still hold the same credibility as material created a month ago; it’s impossible.  A lot of people live by “Publish or Perish” in education, if you’re not getting your name out there the assumption is you’re doing nothing.  The same applies to the web and web materials (especially in an OER model where people can find out how old materials are potentially).
• Twitter is recycled, on demand powerpoint; CUT IT OUT — I’m getting sick and tired of hearing people either complain that they arne’t doing enough with technology because they aren’t using social media in their courses or talk about how amazing they are and how the paradigm has shifted.  For the longest time we (techy people) would poke fun at instructors who said they were using technology in the classroom only to find out it was powerpoint.  The same will become trust of social media.  “I’m using facebook for my class”  really? Who cares.  Rule 1, students like their privacy and don’t want their social world overlapping with their academic one.  Rule 2 points back to the previous point about updating your material because honestly, how sustainable is a course model that includes social mediums?  They’re typically free, so there’s no reason for the owners to care if they should go away (other then their business model didn’t work).  But say it did just switch to a pay service, now you have a course with key components tied to something that people would have to pay to access.  Don’t think bosses and administrations would be too key on that.  Seriously though: use web 2.0 technologies very cautiously and put a lot of thought into where they’ll be 2 years from now becasue the rate of collapse in technologies, being able to plan “ahead” now means 1 to 2 release cycles of a course / product, not 4-6 years as previous projections would have been for industries.
• Like it or not, we are a business — e-Learning is one of those investment opportunities where you spend money up front to obtain a sustainable, long term income. A “Teach a man how to fish” business if you will in higher-education.  But our clients aren’t interested in that aspect typically.  They’re the one paying to have access to the instructors and that money trickles back down the pipe.  It’s important to remember that because I see a lot of people still thinking that Institutions are immune to the ills of a poor economy.  There are a lot of opportunities to become a leader (search drupal elearning) but there also needs to be the realization that our end users are suffering big time.  They’re having a harder time finding student loans, harder time finding even part time jobs, and their time is becoming more valuable as money becomes tighter across the board.  No longer can there be the seemingly frivolous expenses for online education (as I said before, you’d be amazed at what even jing can do to spice things up)
• Lastly, Remember the goal of elearning — Students.  It’s all about the students.  Somehow that gets lost along the way for many.  You’e building a system for learning management and to get information out to people but it doesn’t really hit home that what you’re doing is enabling people all throughout the chain.  You’re enabling IDs to work with faculty to organize their content better.  You’re helping multimedia people integrate new media solutions so that IDs / Instructors can implement higher quality material without any additional knowledge.  You’re allowing instructors to better communicate feedback, assessment, and academic direction to students.  And that’s what it’s all about, enabling the students to receive that knowledge in as pure a form as possible, hope that you can transfer as much as possible in as short a time as possible and impact their lifes in a positive way with that knowledge.  Sure you might not be helping them learn how to plant crops in the correct order in order to feed their family (unless you work on the Green Mountain project…then maybe you do ) but you’re helping students save their time (and productivity hours which = money) in order to help them better themselves.  Never lose sight of that.

So….you may be wondernig where does this leave things?  Where are we going? Where is elearning going?  Well… as a few bullet points before I leave it up to the blogs to take me out of context …

• Drupal in E-Learning Consortium is coming.  A more well defined plan will be outlined here as a result of discussions with interested members (here, other blogs, phone calls, drupal ed group, conferences) and I hope to be in talks with some other Uni’s about what this would actually mean and how it could benefit all of us (again, keeping financial times into account).
• The Assignment Studio and Rubric modules will be available for download on Drupal.org in the coming weeks.  Just need to clean them up a little bit but they should be good to go in their current state for at least a beta if not full release
• My next two projects will be a site branding module to help create a consistent look and feel across all sites with it installed and a site_manager module.  Similar to the course manager as talked about in the past, this will allow people to manage far more then one drupal site, from 1 drupal site.  You’ll be able to define a network of sites (given that you can access them on your DB user account) and verify / change settings globally across all sites that have that setting / module enabled.
• STUDENT GEARED WORK — Finally, the thing that got me to write this in the first place.  It’s all about the student so I’m going to finally start putting together some stuff that’s just for them.  Specifically in the form of visualizations for data generated by the assignment studio / rubric modules, as well as creating a console to demonstrate their activity within the course alla tracker, statistics, browscap and a bunch of other fun things.

Dear Web utopians — FREE ISNT FREE, IT COSTS SOMEONE

Tr.im is dead.  I never used the service but it FINALLY gives me the chance to raise the concern most seem to overlook when relying on a free service: what happens when it goes away?  In a downmarket it’s no longer a question of if it’s when.  Just look at youtube.  “OMG ITS SO COOL” isn’t good enough to the guys paying to run the servers and keep a staff on hand to manage the beast if it’s not generating income.   This video sums it up rather nicely — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CqRcCHk_Pc (look for the google heatmap analysis).  There have been similar stories on CNN and fox news talking about the culture of free on the internet needing to change.

Need another example?  PANDORA will be scaling back it’s free portion and creating a pay service.  How many people got an iphone and said “PANDOA = FREE RADIO ANYWHERE”; soon, not so much.  Relate this to education, don’t get too tied to off-site services if you can’t do them inhouse.  Perfect example, youtube / vimeo / ANY OF THE media services out there.  How deos Flickr make money?  Or…gasp, Twitter?  What is the financial model for twitter?  And would you participate if it was a pay modle? Cause I hate to break it to everyone but how does free benefit the guys providing the service?  What we’re doing?  Moving towards youtube / vimeo / flickr.  Why?  Offload the strain on our machines while we still can, keeping in mind that we can’t become beholden to any of those services just in case.  I will say for Vimeo though that it has a for-pay model in place (which we pay into) and it’s fabulous.

Going to reference this video again but http://vimeo.com/5493202 “please charge for your services; stop making things free”.  People will pay for a service and it also gives the service provider incentive to keep it running

Unofficial Drupal in Higher Education Online training announcement

So it’s been awhile since I wrote about anything happening with Drupal in education and decided I’d clue you all in on what the future holds for us.  For the Fall semester there will be two exciting new modules released from the e-Learning Institute under the ELMS umbrella.  The first is the Assignment Studio which allows you to manage grades and helps establish a standardized way via taxonomy terms that students can submit their work.  It’s mostly a routing module to help you understand how you can setup an assignment submission system in Drupal and then an intense GUI to make it all very easy to manage.  In past builds we’ve been able to handle 2 instructors / TAs grade 40+ assignments (per student) for a class of 150.

This is all made possible via the second module that will be released called the Rubric module.  I’m particularly happy with the direction that the rubric module has taken simply because it has real instructional backing in the naming conventions used.  It’s also going to be setup on a standardized architecture w/ another rubric project on campus so (theoretically) you could use either Drupal or a Flex app to manage / display / assess work.  Great UI going on with that project as well and it’s probably 85% completed if you’ve been keeping up on my screencasts.

The last thing, which I’m most excited to tell you about, is an idea that’s come up in the past over at the institute and now is going to come to fruition.  We’re always grappling with three big issues:

1. How do we get instructors to implement new technologies effectively?
2. How do we ensure that these new technologies are stable yet push the envelop in education?
3. How can we get into the OER “marketplace” when because our courses we develop need to be locked down to course section?

Solution : I wil be creating a course (with help from the rest of our team) that essentially covers how we do business.  There will be (at the moment at least) 3 main modules to the “course”.  One on Drupal, one on Instructional Design, and one on Graphic Design.  This will help me get my feet a bit more wet with instructional design, get something out in the OER realm, and teach people about topics that we’re working on day to day.

I became inspired by this video http://vimeo.com/5493202 in which the speaker suggests that as a web 2.0 business you need to sell your byproducts.  Our byproduct is an effective and advanced e-learning unit that produces high touch, high polish courses.  Now, I know that as part of a university we can’t really “sell” what we do but we can certainly help others learn from what we’re doing well (and not so well) in the past.  This also gives me the oppurtunity to utilize some new teaching technologies that remain widely untapped in our courses.  For example, we’re just recently getting into using Vimeo for instructor introductions to our courses.  I’ll be demonstrating how to do it as well as others in the unit if our course gets big enough.  Another example of a technology I’ll be using to demonstrate concepts is The Pulse (http://www.livescribe.com/).  With this I’ll be able to draw diagrams of how our architecture works internally (Drupal + our modules) and speak at the same time.  This will help with context which I hope will help with knowledge transfer as it relates to the topic.

At the moment the Assignment Studio / Rubric modules are my #1 priority (as well as integration into our courses) but I’ll be working on this course when I need to take a break from code.  Any thoughts on topics you’d like to see covered or level of detail?  I’ll appriciate any / all feedback so we can meet your needs.  Our technology test bed can be your next best OER resource

Drupal For Universities Consortium — Interested? Come to the table!

As initially stated in an earlier post — http://btopro.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/how-to-follow-with-such-incredible-momentum/ — there is growing interest for Drupal in Higher Education and a body of some kind to help with the direction we all take.  The goal of a Consortium (as I see it) isn’t to create a physical product, cost money, or resources in order to get going.  I see the point of such a body is to create a set of standards for how Drupal can and should be deployed in Higher Education.  I’ve deemed the group Drupal for Universities instead of Drupal in Higher Education because of the unique scenarios that we all face in the University sector as a result of our scale and scope.  This isn’t to say that College’s can’t join in, it’s just that the focus will be steered by Larger Universities with a collection of Colleges.

Here are some groups that have expressed interest thus far and I hope to talk to in greater detail with — Arizona State , BYU, Madison Wisconsin, SUNY Empire, PSU (duh).  I also know of several other big schools that are using Drupal who I think would be great to talk to in more detail including VT, MSU, MIT, PIT, CMU just to name a few.  Now is the time to organize and I think some virtual sessions along with the occasional physical one could be of huge benefit to us all.  Currently, there are user groups at many universities which all need to mobilize and get everyone talking about what they’re doing locally.  Here’s some common trends to universities that I think we can standardize on via Drupal:

• Webroot or Drupal folder organized similarly to how we’ve got things — all virtual, pointing to either a drupal5, drupal6, or drupal7 folder.  This way we can support more then one Drupal version while looking like they’re all coming from the same place (/courses/abc123 — is drupal5 while /courses/new456 — is drupal6)
• Common Infrastructure starting at Drupal6 with a Virtual Hosting environment not being required but definitely facilitating resource sharing.
• One site that is capable of scaling and controlling the other sites within that setup (hopefully with expanded functionality to what we currently have available)
• Naming conventions and best practices for managing scalability issues
• A common base of modules that everyone agrees are essential to serving education (Views, CCK, WYZIWIG API, Outline Designer, etc)
• An optional set of modules that most agree are good to have and document what they can be best used for to serve our “clients” (IDs, students, instructors, etc)
• A website that is a common resource for everyone.  Using the information in https://elearning.psu.edu/drupalineducation/ as a launch pad but then taking the documentation / resource to where ever the Consortium takes it.
• Resources for how to help grow Drupal user groups locally and how to help others help themselves

There are a multitude of reasons why this could be so helpful to so many but ideally there would be a suite of modules that could be agreed upon need to be created to help foster Drupal in the educational sector and that those projects could be worked on collaboratively across university lines.  I can only develop and maintain so many in a vacuum and I’m sure many out there also have these potential issues going forward to create and maintain essentially proprietary pieces of an open source project.  This can help us avoid the pitfalls of current, closed source LMS / CMS that are embedded into many universities (many names, all closed, all huge).

Grassroots is how this movement is going to take off and it’s how it is currently!  Please, if you feel passionately about Drupal and it’s usage in Higher Ed, pass this link on.  Not just to give me traffic but to drive traffic to this idea and get others on board!  If you’re interested please leave a comment below, re-post / like to it, tweet it.  Grassroots is the best way to spread a movement that has been largely grassroots in it’s spread and popularity.

Moodlemoot

Preface — This is as it’s happening, raw reaction to MoodleMoot and presentations there in.  I am trying to gain more experience / knowledge with Moodle to make an informed decision about whether or not they do things that we should be investigating.  This could be particularly harsh, you have been warned

This will be on going but thus far from MoodMoot I’m unimpressed with Moodle.  Now, I didn’t like Moodle coming into things having played with it a little bit.  But after seeing others walk through how to modify aspects of Moodle sites (all of which look the same minus minor color alterations and logo graphics) I can securely say that I’m horrified of this product.  Mile long pages of settings to change text?  PHYSICAL .php files laying all over the place?  Discussions of how to submit bug tickets about the gradebook and other components mid-semester / during usage?!

WHAT!?  Are you kidding me!?  This can’t be a serious way people work.  Common slams on Drupal:

• Usability
• Complexity
• Security

My new and improved list of common slams on Moodle:

• EVERYTHING LOOKS THE SAME
• Complexity through lack of usability — this is like looking at Drupal 4 branch in terms of what things mean and do
• Form and function — .php files laying around instead of having everything be modular; example: to change a status message generated by moodle.php, I need to go to moodle.php in an admin menu and physically edit the mile of options (ummm….String Replace Drupal module to do this that’s 1 very small page)

Wow… more to come as this keeps going on but I’d like to dig my eyes out at the thought of people moving to this.  There’s no way this product is mature enough for me to mess with it.

How to follow with such incredible momentum

Drupal Camp Wisconsin came to an end today.  I’ve been here 4 days and have probably spoken during official meetings, unofficial meetings, and presenting at DrupalCamp for around 32 hours.  It’s been a very long, very fun, and very critical 4 day stint here in Madison.  I’ve been able to talk to so many people about so many good ideas as well as share with them the solutions that we’re crafting both in terms of module usage and our infrastructure stuff.  Here’s some of the critical take-aways:

• Madison has A LOT of the same CMS culture, problems, enthusiasm, and need for leadership and direction that we have
• Madison has a great network of people, all willing to work together and share ideas
• Everyone was very interested in all of my projects, especially the infrastructure management tools / information architecture that I’m building
• Madison’s going to be getting copies of my IA to play with, hopefully we can standardize on it or on parts of it to help foster collaboration futther
• We discussed and agreed on the idea I proposed of a track of Drupalcamps, specifically geared towards major universities
• The seeds of the Drupal in High Education Consortium were planted and look to have Penn State and Madison as it’s first two member organizations

This has lead a few of us to use terms like “momentum” when describing what this relationship has at this point in time.  We both were able to relate to one another’s problems and agree that we (and probably other universities) can benefit greatly from collaboration in this area.  This is my action plan at the moment as to what to do with all this “momentum” that’s been drummed up:

• Attend the Drupalcamp in Pittsburgh and get in touch with the universities forming it to meet with them and have a similar show-and-tell like we just had with Madison
• Form the Drupal user’s group in the Centre County / Penn State area and begin meeting like they did out here
• Begin planning for a Drupal in Higher Education consortium and come up with some ideas for what our action plan is (most likely a base level flavor of D6 standardization in tool set)
• Get in touch with MSU, ASU, VT, PIT, CMU, and anyone else I can find contacts that I have and look into similar meetings
• Begin planning for a DrupalCampPSU event

The idea of the consortium isn’t to say “YOU ALL WILL USE THIS STUFF IN DRUPAL” and standardize EVERYTHING we use; but, because of the problems faced by major universities (lots of students, lots of colleges, lots of decentralization, lots of funding cuts, lots of need for “free” solutions, lots of Drupal interest).  For all these reasons I propose that we standardize on a set of modules that enable the infrastructure component that we are currently using.  A few modules / ideas right now that I think would be good to standardize on based on our discussions this week as well as my own feelings on where to take things:

• Views / CCK – really, who doesn’t use them anyway but also some types / views could be built out through collaboration to meet common needs
• Infrastructure management – what the course manager will become, allows us to grow and expand quickly as well as possibly share resources (fast!)
• Some base Roles that we can all agree on based on our contexts being similar (staff, faculty, student, admin, instructor, etc)
• Aggregator and some other feed related modules (possibly feed api) so that we can syndicate and share our content in common ways
• WYZIWIG API – Not that it HAS to be used but all of us have to make Drupal more usable from a staff perspective.  Editor type doesn’t matter, frame work for it does
• CiviCRM or at least some implementation of handling staff bios / student profiles.  A lot of sites need to store data to this end and it would be good to agree loosly there

Again, the goal of these discussions is to come up with a framework of best practices for all of us to follow and not a strict specification.  This would get too close to forced adoption systems and closed source projects that have driven us to Drupal in the first place. I need to stress this as much as possible because I don’t want this to fail and I don’t want it to surcome to the same issues and be hated as so many closed source implementations are in higher education / large corporations.

Those that follow the best practices as closely as possible will benefit each other the most as we can share information and resources a lot easier but there’s nothing saying you NEED to follow it to the letter.  For example, you want to use Organic Groups and we don’t standardize on that in our package / best practices? Go for it!  As long as the IA driving it is the same then the individual sites don’t matter.  So, in closing, the attack plan would be:

• Standardize on a common Information Architecture based on the idea of one site that can control all the others and loosely knits them together
• Come up with a group of recommended modules and identify their best usage
• Standardize on a few other things like roles and module sets

“HELLO WISCONSINNNNnnn”

Sorry, had to say it at some point.  Very excited because tomorrow I’ll be in Madison talking to the U. of Wisconsin about Drupal and the work I’ve been up to over the last 3 years now.  I can already tell it’s going to be a tiring yet fruitful trip as it’s two days of talks followed by two days of DrupalCamp WI (which I’ll hopefully also be talking at sessions).

My big push while there is not only to see what kind of resource and information sharing we can do, but also get the prospect of a Drupal in Higher Education Consortium out on the table.  I’ve been talking to some major universities over the past year and after Drupalcon DC 09, really was about to identify a few who fit into one of three groups:  Interested in going out direction, going a similar direction, or completely divergent.  I’m happy to say most seemed to be either interested in going our way or are already working towards a similar end goal.

From talking shop with others I know that Pitt and VT are very interested in using Drupal and have started to create some sites.  Arizona State University and a few others that I’ve talked to or read about informally also seem to be developing either systems or modules that align very well with the Course Manager module that I have sitting in the wings.  Course Manager is really like the controller for our Drupal sites and it loosely stitches them together into a CMS-light architecture.  ASU’s work seemed to be in a similar direction so it would be great to meet up with them in the future.

For now though, my focus is WI and figuring out what they’ve got rolling and what we can get rolling.  The fact that Bill Fitzgerald will be out there too also seems to indicate to me their level of seriousness in going towards some more complex Drupal solutions.  Bill’s got more of the consultation side of the equation, started the Drupal in Education group, is the maintainer of the DrupalED distro, and also wrote the book, so he’s got SOOOMME street cred .  I think I’ve peaked their interest because I’m doing so much work that’s intended to help all of us and have been so active in the community the last year.  The goal of being open has been to foster collaboration and communication so if more relationships like the one we’re (hopefully) forging with WI happen, giving everything I do away (and spending countless hours writing it that way in the first place!) has all been worth it .

Hope to see you at Drupalcamp WI, should be around 100 people and hopefully you’ll see me there unable to shut up!

Quick and Dirty Course Setup

Felt like throwing together a simple module recipe for course creation.  Of course I push ELMS as a collection of modules and settings to run a course management system (or at least manage courses…).  Here’s a quick list of the major modules living under ELMS hood that can get you up and developing a course quickly:

• Outline Designer (Thickbox 1.2, Prepopulate, Ajax required to work)
• Menu Block (great compliment to DHTML Menus and the Book module)
• Nice Menus (use this usability “hack” to make books appear in cool nice menus http://groups.drupal.org/node/16912 )
• DHTML Menus (A must have usability improvement)
• WYSIWYG API (most people like clean text editors so use this with FCK or TinyMCE to do it quickly)
• IMCE (for file / image upload and insertion into your content
• IMCE Wysiwyg API bridge (You’ll need this module too to make it work with the one above)

Using these 3 key modules you can create a quick and dirty framework for course content development.  Adding in some of the core optionals like color, book, comment, tracker, statistics, and upload and you’re most of the way there already!  Pixture is a great little color-wheel enabled theme that I usually use as my base for site creation to get up and running quickly.  Maybe throw in a few roles like “student” and “instructor”, maybe add in an initial book page to your first book so that the outline designer lets you build out the rest of the “course” quickly; who knows!

This may not be a complete recipe but the key to learning is doing.  And not just passive learning, active, hands on learning.  Experience is the best way to learn anything so,  I’m not going to just spoon feed you everything on this blog.  Trust me, I know Drupal is frustrating.  It’s one of the most difficult and frustrating learning processes that I’ve even undertaken (and still can be when learning about new projects).  The point of this blog though is to teach and give people enough knowledge to find direction so they can go off and become experts instead of constantly having to reference them!

Just know that if you learn enough about how these few projects work above that you can start rapidly building course materials!

I am now not just another Drupal Zombie

I think people know (or at least it should be pretty obvious from everywhere my screen name shows up) that I am a Drupal robot.  I sleep, eat, and breathe Drupal and I push it every chance I get.  So it’s a little strange to me to be writing my first post in WordPress.  This is my first time even using WordPressin any way which is hilarious since I make so many arguments against it just from the standpoint of the power of Drupal.

Taking a step back I can say that in my limited experience, I see why WordPress != Drupal from first hand experience (finally).  Here’s a few comparisons between the two as I look quickly and get my first impressions.

WordPress First Impressions

• Very obvious what I should do, update my first post to not say “Hello world!”
• Wow this looks like a flexible blog
• Slick interface, like the buttons; they are very non-threatening
• Words + Icons are easy to understand

WordPress Dislikes

• Didn’t expect the publish / update post button to be over on the right hand side (I don’t think that way about forms, probably from Drupal)
• Has more of a Portal feel to it just from the layout and positioning of things
• While I know it has lots you can do to expand it, I think it’s painted itself into a bit of a corner as a single-user, blog centric platform

Drupal First Impressions

• What do I do?
• Oh, admin ok, wow there’s a lot of options here
• WOW this is flexible; I think I can make anything with this…if only I knew how!

Drupal Dislikes

• Can be very confusing
• Need to read up on what’s going on in the community, what modules do what before really knowing what you can do
• Steep learning curve (rewarding, but steep!)

Is my point scewed? Yeah.  Do I still need to play around with WordPress more here (as well as locally)?  Hell yeah.  But I think what I’m finding by looking into this is that it’s a great, simple blogging platform that can get you up and running quickly.  This is what most people want to do who are trying to join in the conversation going on on the web.  For those want something more powerful, flexible, and thought of as a system, not just a website — then Drupal’s still for you.  I think I’ll start using WordPress for my blogs cause it’s so much easier to setup quickly then Drupal (I don’t love Drupal’s blogging only kind of environment / default install either where as this seems grreat).  For powerhouse sites / projects / systems, yeah; Drupal is still King here.