Category: Education

Drupal as a wiki

I felt like doing some web work this weekend and thought I would try my own take on how to make Drupal work as a wiki. My work colleagues are aware that I’ve been steeped in a fun Drupal project — taking the suggestions of the UW-Madison Teaching Academy and the Vice Provost for Teaching & Learning and designing their new website: Teaching & Learning Excellence at UW-Madison. It’s been a fun project and has whet my appetite to try a few more interactive websites.

Druwiki is nothing fancy. The main challenge is trying to keep some of what Drupal does so well, namely organizing content in taxonomies, while downplaying it’s more blog-like functions. I trust anyone who reads this blog to try it out, so I’ll leave registrations open for a bit if anybody would like to kick the tires. I’d love feedback, ideas, or to hear about strategies you’ve considered.

Stumbling into a “blicki”

I’ve joked about a “blicki” in the past (a merge of a blog and a wiki), and browsing around looking for the answer to one of life’s little technology questions, I stumbled by this post by Jim Groom of UMW. It looks like they’ve been doing some great stuff with WordPress, and have now integrated it with their support wikis in MediaWiki.

The Support pages are awesome, and this marks for me one of the most significant leaps forward over the last year. Namely, the Bliki has arrived people! … So support pages like the FAQ, WordPress Guide, and “10 Ideas for Using UMW Blogs” are all MediaWiki articles posing as blog pages.

Way cool!

IT consumerization & higher ed: legal and educational problems

An Ars interview with Oren Sreebny, “director of emerging technology for the central IT and networking unit at the University of Washington,” reveals an interesting confluence between law, technology, and education.

Q: [Regarding the] legal headaches that higher ed IT departments have to deal with. He said something like “We spend more time being lawyers than we do IT people because of all these government requirements.” Do you find the same thing to be true where you are?

A: If you were a typical corporation, it’s my impression that you’d have lots of control over your data, and you’d say “this stuff can’t move to the cloud, and we won’t let it.” But in higher ed you don’t have that much control over people, because it’s a more loosely knit confederation of enterprises, so it becomes more of an education problem than a control problem.
[emphasis original]

Certainly an addition to the “education problem” is that the laws aren’t crystal clear. Technologists either need access to lawyers, a legal education, or clear guidelines. This offers another perspective on nervous service providers.

Why privacy and copyright make small providers nervous

Another response to my assertion that FERPA has some scared tells me deserves a bit of clarification.

The trouble (and in some respects, benefit) of laws like copyright and privacy, which only become certain after long and expensive litigation, is that they are not completely explicit. Borderline cases leave small providers wondering whether they might be liable if they were sued–and this uncertainty leads some to steer clear of anything that pushes the boundaries.

My own theory is that FERPA was written in a protectionist paradigm, rather than a control paradigm. This means that certain categories of data are completely locked down, rather than giving the student or instructor the options to contol the data how they see fit. With fine-grained facebook-like privacy controls, it should be technically possible to let students control what is publicly released (indeed many do it anyway by doing things like posting a course video project to YouTube). The nervousness creates a situation where law (rightly or even by misinterpretation) limits what people might do with technology.