Social Media Classroom
public
group: Drupal in Education
kyle_mathews - Wed, 2008-06-11 20:40
I ran across this today. Howard Rheingold, long-time writer/thinker on impact of virtual communities won a grant from the Digital Media and Learning competition sponsored by HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation to build a custom distribution of Drupal called Social Media Classroom. The goal is to create a "private, easy-to-use, flexible environment for blogging, chatting and aggregating [student's] social bookmarks"
There's a screencast here explaining the project.
Sam Rose is the chief developer on the project. Are you around here somewhere Sam? I'd love to hear (and others too I'm sure) about the custom modules you're developing and when they'll be released and how progress is going on the project.
Ical feed
Similar goals
This is truly interesting topic. I'm working on something similar to create a social learning environment to be used for our hypermedia courses. I 'm confident that Drupal can be used for all the required tasks.
At the moment organic groups seems to offer everything for individual courses and their yearly presentations (Autumn 2008 etc). A few things are still open, like to use Drupal 5 or 6. Some of the modules have not been ported to 6 yet (at least Panels, Views and Organic groups are required). Most important aspect of this whole thing is to offer lecturers easy-to-use interface for creating new groups which present individual course. It should be so, that when a lecturer wants to create a new course, he can just create the group and start writing pages for it (schedule, practices, lectures etc) without any hassle and options. Book module will offer a good way to deliver material for the course which students can comment on. OG Blueprints hopefully eases creation of new groups by providing templates.
Integrated knowledge environments
Good summary, Kyle. I'm at the Campus Technology conference, and we're reading that Howard and his developers are opening testing to their students soon. Looking forward to learning more.
As you know, a number of us are interested in the organizing principles which are driving this integration forward:
www.ikeproject.org
-Jay