Thinking Out Loud, aka The Broad Gaze
Thoughts on the social impacts of communication policy and educational technology.
Google Chrome users of some of the Drupal sites I designed have been having difficulty posting. It took me some time to track down a solution, but it appears in this thread. Seems that all you have to do is open a new tab and try the post again.
Hope this helps someone else as well!
A Penn State colleague who we were fortunate enough to meet at (and before) Drupal Camp WI blogs about how we might keep the momentum of this event going. He’s right that there are a number of similarities between our schools, and hopefully this will be an incentive to keep the connection alive. Sharing ideas about technology was great, but the real take-away was the idea of forming a Drupal in Higher Education consortium. What makes this idea special is that we, as universities, face challenges that are different from other sorts of Drupal users–both technological and political. I’m not sure whether it would be attached to other Drupal camps, the CIC, or just be an online group (one thing that ComETS has taught our campus is that events are key to keeping connections alive). I wonder if a good way to start might be to find out who is interested, and then to find out what the strengths/needs of each are. We found a lot to agree about–even regarding the role of central vs distributed systems–so it would be a shame to let geography keep these good ideas from coming to fruition.
I gave 2 presentations at Drupal Camp WI over the weekend. One of them has been on my mind for quite some time. When I first started learning Drupal, I could tell that there was a certain “thing” that was the hurdle to understanding the platform–once you get it, everything is more or less easily. I described the session as:
There is a “thing” about Drupal that makes it hard for beginners to get started, yet at the same time provides much of the platform’s flexibility and power. It’s also a “thing” that is easy for seasoned developers to forget after awhile.
This session will broadly cover site organization using content types, taxonomy, and views. We will cover strategies for planning a site and how you might “translate” needs into a structure in Drupal. If time is available, we will build a simple site using these modules and talk about how to search for additional modules when what’s there doesn’t fit the plan.
This session is for people who starting their first Drupal site, or for anyone who is considering Drupal for a project.
Fortunately for myself and those who couldn’t make the camp, most of the sessions were archived. Watch the video here, and check out my slides below.