StigmergicWeb

I’m preparing to migrate the EdTech Posse website from Drupal to Wordpress. I’m too lazy to hack SQL, so I’m going to do this the quick and dirty way. I’ve downloaded a copy of our current RSS feed, and I’ll import that into a shiny, fresh installation of WordPress. This should be fairly easy.

Or the whole thing could blow up in my face. Oh well, there’s nothing like a fresh start! ;^)

In either case, I’m hoping to make the migration tomorrow today (Aug. 31). Cross your fingers.

I recently updated the NBCHS website to Drupal. Although I had planned the change for some time, the final impetus for getting it done was a mass IP address renumbering throughout the school division, which broke some of our existing links and DNS entries.

So far, the site is pretty basic. I haven’t changed from the default Garland theme, but it looks pretty good and matches our school colours. I’ve only added a few modules - Marksmarty, Pathauto, Scheduler and Webcal. The Drupal part of the site has a bit of content that I’ve brought in from existing pages, but is mostly used to link to existing content. The best things about using Drupal (so far) is the ease of adding important information for the community to the main page, and having the daily announcements set up so that it is easy for other staff in the building to edit. My goal is to avoid being stuck with the webmaster role in which everyone in the school gets me to add content. I’m planning on working with some of the early technology adopters to start using the system, then demonstrate to others that it is worth their time to learn how to add content. Teachers don’t have a lot of extra time to spend learning new technology skills, unless there is a benefit to our students.

I have a few other plans. I don’t think we are ready to offer blogs for every student, but I hope that teachers would start by at least using a blog as an assignment page. I’d like to see some of the student groups starting to use the site. I’d really like to start adding some photos to the site, although I’m not sure about the best way to handle that.

Drupal 5.0 released

I’ve set up a few sites, like openthinking.ca, with Drupal. This latest version looks fantastic with a new default theme that can have its colour scheme configured from within Drupal. The usability of the administration of a Drupal powered site just improved by an order of magnitude with the revision and enhancement of the administrative features. There is also (finally) a web based installer script similar to WordPress installation. These improvements should lead to a lot more Drupal sites.

Inevitably there is a significant Drupal release just as I start working on a Drupal project. Drupal 4.7 is a joy to work with, and I’m looking forward to playing some serious testing as soon as I can. Drupal 4.7 RC Announcement | drupal.org

I’m working with a teacher in the school who wants to give students a chance to do some authentic, self-directed writing (music to any edu-blogmeister’s ears, I’m sure). I’ve set up a site using Drupal. On the first day of student writing, we’ve already had some issues about appropriate levels of self-disclosure in the students’ writing.

What we would ideally like to do is to have the students be able to describe each blog entry as public, restricted or private. Public posts would be available for all the world to see (and I’ll have the link to the class blog up as soon as the teacher is a bit more comfortable with the process), restricted posts can only be seen by users who are logged in, and private entries can only be seen by the student and the teacher (who has the role of editor for the site). I have the taxonomy set up to describe all posts as such. I was working with the taxonomy access control module, but I have set it up so that private entries can’t even be seen by students.

So - am I on the right track? What do I need to do to get this happening?

BTW, I was originally thinking of just e-mailing some Drupal geeks I know and getting their answers, but I thought that some others might be having the same kinds of questions.

UPDATE -  After a bit of experimentation (and much cursing) I’ve found that the node privacy byrole module seems to do the trick very nicely by allowing authors/editors to pick who can view (and also edit) the posts, and the interface and logic of the module is extremely elegant. Right now this module is only available for Drupal 4.6, but it looks like it will be upgraded/ported for Drupal 4.7. Thanks to D’Arcy and Harold for suggestions (and I will take a more serious look at Elgg in consideration of my next project).

Charles and Dries have a good writeup describing Drupal in It’s about the Community Plumbing: The Social Aspects of Content Management Systems. Not only a description of Drupal, their essay also addresses the unique context of development of Drupal and other open source content management systems. The tools are not only the product of the open source development process, these tools (like Drupal, but also others such as Plone) become the substrate that the development and user communties grow in.

I’ve had some great feedback from my podcast Why Schools Need Drupal, as well as the generic high school site I am prototyping using Drupal. Dries Buytaert was even kind enough to encourage me to repost the blog entry from the podcast on the Drupal site and promote it to the front page. One net result of all this was that the podcast was downloaded over 1000 times! Now I’m really starting to feel some pressure to come up with something decent for the next podcast ;^)

I’ve been asked a couple of times to give a bit of a description of the setup of Drupal to create the generic high school site, so here it is. The theme and all modules listed are described in more detail at the Drupal website:

• The theme is SpreadFirefox - nice and clean design, and standards compliant
• Modules enabled:
  • book - for collaboratively working on school policy document, or other documents
  • comments are turned on, but only for teaching staff so they can comment on policy or other items. Other users cannot see the comments. I thought this would provide a nice backchannel for communication between staff
  • events - information about What’s happening this week? is available instantly to everyone. Any teacher can add an event.
  • flexinode - used to create school specific information forms. This hasn’t been extensively developed yet, except for an event node.
  • organic groups - I thought this might be useful for grouping information together for various groups within the school, such as for staff-only information, student clubs, etc.
  • poll - a good way to get feedback from students, and also to generate interest in the site
  • upload - allows documents to be attached to entries. Many schools have a large legacy of forms that could be made available online by converting them to pdf format, then attaching to site entries

As the development continues, I’ll put some more notes up here (as well as on the generic high school site as well). One area that I am not currently interested in is turning Drupal into a course management package, for two reasons. First, there are many great open-source packages that already do that (Moodle is a terrific example, and one that I have used quite successfully). Second, I think that course/curriculum delivery is not the most important function of schools; I think the communications and knowledge generated by the people within schools is far more interesting and important to everyone within the school. Hmm - that might make a good topic for a podcast sometime.