Drupal takes off
i’ve met a new colleague at GVSU named Charlie Lowe. Charlie is writing professor and he is also an open source geek (like me) and that’s how a person in IT got us connected. well as it turns out, Charlie is very involved in helping educators shift to using Drupal if that’s what they want to do. as you can tell from reading back in my blog, i made the decision to start using Drupal this semester early in the summer. i was well on my way — errrr — actually, i was pretty far from realizing some of the potential of Drupal. when you start using a tool and you aren’t sure of its potential, you sometimes have a difficult time figuring out what you don’t know . . . fortunately, that’s where Charlie comes in.
earlier this month, i met Bill Fitzgerald online at openacademic.org. he provided me with some guidance for using Drupal. little did i know at the time, but he works very closely with Charlie on a resource called drupaled.org, which is a resource i had been exploring for months now. Charlie has hooked me up with a bunch of other educators who are using Drupal and I am well on my way to using this tool more effectively in my teaching. whew!
one of the nice things they are working on at drupaled.org and at Bill’s funnymonkey.com is that they want to create an education distribution for Drupal so that an educator or an education institution could download and install a pre configured Drupal site. from experience, i can attest that most mere mortals would never be able to install Drupal and customize it for learning on their own. in fact, i am a geek and i needed a lot of help along the way just to save some time that i didn’t have — and i started months ago (loosely, of course). so, when the distribution is ready in the future, a teacher or an education institution will be able to download a pre configured Drupal site that is customized for education and that has much documentation to provide guidance. what a terrific treat that will be for my students who often ask me about the tools i use in my teaching because they’d like to replicate things in their own future classrooms. kudos to the folks helping out the educational community.
Tags: drupal, online learning, education, funnymonkey, drupaled, openacademic, LMS
August 29th, 2006 at 7:12 am
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September 4th, 2006 at 7:54 am
Hey Sean,
Looks like you got splogged above. Wordpress has some pretty good plugins for blocking unwanted comments–I recommend the “bad behavior” plugin, which seems to catch about everything.
I was also excited to see Charles Lowe join our community–I’ve been using an article of his for a couple of years now in my Teaching of Writing class. Hmm . . .I’m seeing some sort of brown bag offering, perhaps titled “Beyond Blackboard.”
September 4th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Yeah, i have been using spamkarma, which has some nice settings, but I think I am a little too loose in what I allow . . . anything to make me look more popular, eh? ;~)
I think a brown bag session would be a great idea. I don’t know many faculty in the COE who could venture past BB very comfortably, but the university is quite large, so we’d be bound to snag some folks. We’ll have to contact Kim and Glenna about this.