Huge blogging post

Haven’t posted about blogging for a while, so here’s a huge one.

Despite a lot of talk about blogging in the classroom by many edublog-type sites, it is clear that the idea of actually assessing blogwork for assignments is still a new and evolving one. I personally haven’t really tried to go beyond looking at the blogs as a form of portfolio or journal to track the progress of a project.

Nonetheless, the web is hardly lacking in excellent student-written blogs, the type of which many teachers would like their own students to emulate. Here are a few:

• The best of Berkeley Blogs
• BBC – Essex Student Bloggers
• AustraLearn Student Bloggers
• The Write Weblog

Of course, the above blogs can also help to inspire teachers about the potential of student blogging. And after perhaps a “bad day” of student blogging, it’d also help to remind ourselves of the reasons why students should blog.

Finally, I can’t say I was surprised to read about this Blogger problem. I’ve actually had the experience of a difficult-to-explain blog link appearing on screen during a demo of Blogger to students, and I’ve been wary of it since. This, along with news of Blogger outages not too long ago, makes me really glad that I’d made the move to WordPress at the start of this year.

largest Moodle deployment by far

It’s amazing just how far Moodle, an open source Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) project, has come. Several polytechnics in Australia have embarked on the largest deployment of Moodle to date. Four universities are likely to migrate to Moodle (probably from WebCT or Blackboard?) by July, and 10 secondary schools are already using it. 

While it is good to read about how money is being saved for channeling towards other educational needs too, I do wish that a "blueprint" for such deployments exist so that the rest of the world might benefit from their experience. Heck, I don’t even know of any local school using Moodle locally!

On to Drupal Part 3 – Configuring the portal

Drupal’s installation process wasn’t as newbie-friendly as Mambo’s – you’d have to manually edit a configuration file, but once the install wizard got started, it was otherwise straightforward to complete. Immediately upon a successful install however, I was getting some strange messages about QUERY LOCK TABLES write. The Drupal Handbook suggests that I should ask my host provider to grant global loack tables privilege to my account; alas, my host simply said that was not possible. Thankfully this post on the Drupal forum (I just love the Drupal community already!) gave me a workaround that works! When I first logged into my Drupal test site, I was amazed by just how quickly everything loaded and how "clean" the interface is. The administrator interface isn’t what I’d exactly term "newbie friendly" though, and it took me quite a while to figure out how to get things done. The number of options available is overwhelming and can be intimidating for a new user, and I think this is where a newbie-friendly user-guide (complete with screenshots etc) would come in handy. New words to grapple with, like "taxonomy" (categories) and "nodes" (articles, news, any posted content etc) didn’t help either. Still after spending several hours playing around with the administrator interface, the different options available and installing different modules, I came to appreciate Drupal’s power and flexiblity. And I really think all that time I needed to learn about using Drupal was time well-spent, because the experience has really opened me up to many possibilities. Anyhow, here’s a quick run-down of what I did to create my school’s English web portal (still under construction and not yet launched!)

• Enabled the aggregator moduleI was then able to create a block to display news headlines from BBC World News. Hopefully some students will get excited enough by certain news headlines to click on them and actually start reading news websites.
• Installed poormanscron Helps to automate checking of news feeds (above), among other things
• Installed image & imageassist modules To make it easier for students to upload and insert in-line images into posts
• Installed tinyMCE module (and the actual tinyMCE too!) I’m still not sure why a WYSIWYG editor isn’t installed by default? Students most definitely expect to see one in this day and age!
• Installed profile Added an "Additional information" section and appropriate fields for students to enter their class, personal website and full name (as most students would probably come up with funky-sounding usernames)
• Installed members module The members listing feature that’s built in is too rudimentary so this module was needed. It also allows me to list a student’s full name and class next to his username. Disabled anonymous read access so that should give students more motivation to actually register.
• Installed menu_otf module I enabled this for pages, so that whatever pages I create can automatically be added into a menu item. Definitely beats having to add them one at a time after creating all the pages.
• Installed path module Mambo’s SEF-enabled URLs like website.net/content/view/18/42/ weren’t enough for me – I needed easy-to-remember URLs like website.net/articles. With path module installed, you can!
• Installed flexinode module By default, you can only post two types of content in Drupal i.e. Story or Page. But I also want my students to contribute bookreviews, articles and news. Solution? Installed flexinode and I was able to create Article and News content types. The upside to this ( as opposed to creating categories for them) is that when students log in to create content, they will be given the option of creating Article, News and Story – each with their own categories (i.e. in Drupal-speak, that would be "terms in the taxonomy vocabulary"), which in the long-term would make it far easier to index written content.
• Installed quotes module Nothing like a quote a day to inspire students to achieve greater literary heights. Will be taking them off Quotable Online
• Installed bookreview module Nope, didn’t forget about this one. The cool thing about this module is that it also comes with all sorts of fields that would be relevant to a book review e.g. ISBN, author etc.
• Installed spam module Heck, even this blog gets lots of spam, so a spam filter on a school portal is most definitely a necessity. Hopefully, after the filters have been trained sufficiently over a period of time, my student editors won’t have to spend so much battling spam.
• Installed a phptemplate theme I’m no designer, so I picked the available phptemplate that I liked best and did minor tweaks to the graphics. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find the time (or someone!) to come up with a different/more unique design over the holidays. Right now though, I think it looks quite nice. There aren’t as many templates as there are for Mambo or even WordPress, but I’m sure that’ll change in time. Especially since a handy theming guide has been published.

There were also other tweaks I had to do though, and you can read about them here (many thanks to all who replied in those threads). There’s still one issue with the template that bugs me, but I’m sure that with the active user community, the solution will surface soon. Yes, I do admit that was a LOT of work to get the portal up and running. The modular approach of feature implementation in Drupal does bring some level of complexity with it, but if that’s what’s needed to get up and running the way I want it, then I’m all for it! Also this approach helps avoid unnecessary feature clutter (which, arguably, might end up causing even more confusion for the user). Still, I expect usability to be improved quite a bit in the near future, judging from recent efforts on this track.

On to Drupal Part 2 – the Exploration

As it turned out, a new release of Drupal had just been released when I took a second look. This came as a stroke of good luck for me as I would not have liked to go through the hassle of upgrading from 4.5.x to the current 4.6 etc after building a siyr.

As I browsed the features page, some tings screamed “Hey, I could use that!” to me :

• Collaborative Book – this ought to make indexing of content much easier
• Friendly URLs – this goes one step further than Mambo‘s own Search Engine Friendly URLs by enabling easy-to-remember URLs
• Role based permission system – still rather primitive in the current version of Mambo, but very flexible here
• Version control – allows for easy roll-back of articles etc

And of course, there’re the integrated comments system, forums, news aggregators etc which should come in really handy if I needed them.

The above features fit perfectly with my vision of a webportal where students can contribute articles, reviews, stories and post comments on them, with different groups of students being able to edit, approve or moderate different types of content submissions.

Added to that was this blog post showing Drupal to compare most favourably against PostNuke and Mambo.

It was settled then..I pointed my browser at the Downloads section and started the install.

On to Drupal Part 1 – the search for a portal CMS

When I checked out the leading CMS packages on OpensourceCMS a few months ago, I settled on Mambo for my own website because of its active user/developer community, and most importantly, because it’s also incredibly simple to use. Eventually I even recommended Mambo as a CMS for my school, and it now powers my school’s website.

But when I started working on a project to develop my department’s portal, it soon became clear to me that Mambo isn’t the best CMS for everything. Mambo is excellent for powering easy-to-use corporate-style websites, but its features when it comes to a community-driven portal is limited at best. I researched the portal-type CMSes out there and at one point even considered the likes of phpBB, which power some nearby schools’ own portals, but I simply needed more flexibility.

And then I came across the blogs@UPEI and weblogs.ucalgary projects which had one thing in common..Drupal. Now I had tried Drupal before, and dismissed it as being overly complicated. But when I saw it being deployed in such a massive scale, and then saw some really good examples of Drupal-based community sites, I thought “Maybe it’s time I take a second look.”

I was pleasantly surprised by what I found..

(to be continued in Part 2!)