Classroom

Last week, I had the chance to talk with Jeff Robbins at Lullabot about using Drupal in Education. This conversation has been unleashed upon an unsuspecting world in the form of Drupal Podcast 66: Bill Fitzgerald & Drupal For Education. It's a pretty free ranging, mildly technical discussion of some of the different ways that Drupal can be used within different educational contexts.

I spend a fair amount of time talking about using Drupal in Education, and every time, I am struck by the different niches Drupal can fill within educational organizations, ranging from courseware to portfolios to constituent management to online magazines and newspapers to public facing web sites, and other uses in between. And as I have these conversations I realize, again and again, that using Drupal in Education is difficult to approach as a unified topic, as each of the sites listed in the previous sentence has a unique set of needs, and therefore a unique set of design requirements.

Anyways.

It was great to be able to talk with Jeff, and thanks to him and the folks at Lullabot for making some space in their podcast lineup to talk Education.

From an Op-Ed in the June 1 online edition of the NY Times by Brian Greene: Put a Little Science in Your Life

Over on his blog, Miguel Guhlin asks:

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.

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

From Michael Feldstein, via the OLDaily.

It looks like Blackboard paid for Google adwords to have ads for Blackboard appear when people searched for "Open Source LMS" --

Image via Michael Feldstein

Unfortunately, the Blackboard ads appeared under the heading "Open Source LMS" creating the appearance that Blackboard is an open source product.