Drupal and Education Open Space: Call for Participation

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mixel's picture

Education is increasingly recognised as a major and growing need for the growing Drupal community. During DrupalCons educational BoFs are very common, but we may need more structure to collaborate on the diversity of challenges for education.

This is a call for participation in an open space (unconference, barcamp) on Drupal and education to coincide with the DrupalCon in London and take place on (Monday 22nd, the day before conference launch). We need at least 20 people or we cancel the event and stick to BoFs. If there are 20-40 people the event will be half a day. When 50+ people sign up we make a full day event of it, if it is not too late to organize this of course. Please fill in the questionnaire if you think you can attend or if you don't think you can attend but are interested in the topic.

The opens space will follow the typical barcamp/unconference format with discussions centered around topics of interest (within the theme) rather than formal presentations.

The overall theme can be divided in three main categories: 1. Drupal and education as business; 2. Education to grow the Drupal community, and 3. Drupal as a platform for (Drupal) education

1. Drupal and Education as a business

Next to the common site building for educational institutes, there are general two opportunities for business related to education: training and Learning Management Systems (LMS). The LMS relates to our issue 3 "Drupal as a platform for (Drupal) education".

Training

It is becoming increasingly important to assess Drupal skills of and provide training for those for whom Drupal is a 9-5 job rather than a passion. As the demand for Drupal talent grows, so does the supply of training. It's not just Lullabot or the DrupalDojo anymore. Aquia's impressive database (http://training.acquia.com) lists some Drupal training event for almost every day. But this does not seem to be enough and efforts are needed towards a Drupal curriculum and/or certification like Acquia Training, DrupalKata or its offshoot, the Drupal Open Learning Inititiative.

2. Education to grow the Drupal community

While the Drupal community is growing, it is aging too. As a community, we should be able to support those that are trying to join the Drupal community but may find it intimidating (like young people and women). And yet one of the driving engines behind Drupal's phenomenal rise in the CMS world has been its ability to attract new talent from the outside. The few who received "full admission" into the community have proven to be a tremendous contribution. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has been one great initiative that continues to bring new vigor to the Drupal world. Yet, when Angie Byron, the undisputed guiding light of the Drupal community today, started her GSoC project in 2005, there had only been one Drupal conference with 50 attendees and a list of presentation that could fit on a single page. In evolutionarily logistical terms, the Drupal community could have maintained cohesion just by picking each others' fleas. But we have long exceeded the Dunbar number! And no longer a band but a tribe (soon-to-be a nation), we need to look for other means of community maintenance. More formal ways of inducting members into the community (such as education) are necessary. GSoC can only socialize a handful of new Drupal developers a year, now we need 100s or even 1000s. We may have to carefully look at more "traditional" models of schooling and see how to sensitively introduce them into the Drupal universe without damaging what makes it unique. Another possibility is encouraging and extending support for more "rigorous" research and scholarship (which is just a special case of education) into not just the Drupal engine but also its community. . It is hoped that other models will emerge through the discussions.

GSoC and other educational facilitators

Part of educational challenge may be solved by e-learning, thinking of sites like Drupalize.me, LearnByTheDrop, MasteringDrupal, etc. However GSoC shows several organizational challenges too, like recruiting students and mentors, finding good challenges (reminiscent of Problem/Project-Based Learning) for the student (not too hard, but still useful), organizing mentoring hours on IRC, etc. Educational challenges are very different from training. Challenges need to get students inspired, confident and responsible to take on the challenge. Also the revenue stream is very different, it is not a business but a community concern and requires institutional support like GSoC. Options should be explored to extend/expand GSoC or find alternatives.

Drupal in the curriculum of schools

One way to find institutional support may be to collaborate with existing education institutions like schools. There are many schools (basic education, further education, higher education, academia) and each may require different target to introduce Drupal in the curriculum. We should look how to collaborate on bringing Drupal into the curriculum of schools. This would also require making connections with existing accreditation authorities and would vary from country to country. Perhaps even a project translating a base Drupal curriculum to make sense to the educational systems across several systems might be eventually needed.

Research as a special case of education

Research is just a special case of education. It is about knowledge creation instead of knowledge transfer. Research related BoFs in Chicago indicate that research with best practices are looking to Drupal to leverage their work. If we could collaborate more with such research initiatives, it may open another sector for Drupal or it may lead to more organized R&D for Drupal.

3. Drupal as a platform for(Drupal) education

Lastly, we should not forget that any educational efforts will require a platform through which learning will be managed and facilitated. That Drupal should be such platform may seem like an obvious choice. But we should keep in mind that despite some successes, the Drupal out-of-the-box experience as an LMS (VLE, etc.) is not always ideal. As yet, a successful and lasting distribution of Drupal for education is to emerge. That it should contain features of current distributions such as DrupalCommons or the Conference Organising Distribution is obvious. But perhaps a new distribution DrupalLearn that would facilitate creation of classroom projects and individual portfolios that can be found in Mahara, Elgg, etc. A reliable support for SCORM is also necessary. A DrupalLearn distribution could build on the DrupalEd distribution using the power of Features, Views, OG, Panels and Rules along with additional code. This gathering would be an ideal space for discussions on what existing code is available for Drupal as a platform, what else is needed, how Drupal compares to other platforms and where to choose integration with existing systems over custom code.

Comments

As a discussion page can't

mixel's picture

As a discussion page can't have co-organizers, let me mention that Dominik Lukes and Isabell Schulz are helping out. This event will have a minimum organization, but we'll be working on a more permanent place for educational events if this goes well ... but first thing first, go an fill out the form please.

Date for Drupal and Education Open Space

Mar's picture

Hi,

I just came across this post over another site: http://www.mixel.be/node/100 where it says that Drupal and Education Open Space is to be held on 22nd June. I would like to promote a bit this event because I think is really important, so I want to be sure that the correct date is 22nd August just before DrupalCon London. Am I right?

Thanks!

Mar Rodriguez

Ok, change the post at my own

mixel's picture

Ok, change the post at my own website, Indeed it should be August, thanks for pointing that out.

Won't be in Lon-don but this

btopro's picture

Won't be in Lon-don but this sounds like a great idea. I was complaining a few years ago that there isn't enough education exposure at the event itself (drupalcons) and that it's a huge community. Something else that might be a cool idea to explore is using open Atrium as an LMS platform http://groups.drupal.org/node/144979 . There's also a few edu distros floating around with Open Scholar, ELMS, and (now defunct) eduglu worth mentioning.

Hoping for the best

mixel's picture

The call of participation is also a test to see how many people are interested. So it would be great if you could fill in it in the questionnaire, there is an option that says you are interested, but cannot come to London. Who knows if this gets enough attention/success we may want to have more DrupalEdu events during other Drupalcons or maybe as a stand alone Drupalday. (Hoping for the best ;-)

Rad

scottrigby's picture

Good topic for sure

Although I can't make it to London this time, I did fill out the survey (and listed some thoughts there). Will encourage others to do so as well :)

Bummer

add1sun's picture

I'd love to attend this but that is also the pre-con training day, so the people who are actually doing training in Drupal won't be able to attend.... :-/

Learn Drupal online at Drupalize.me

Same here

vcardoso's picture

I'm very interested on this topic, but I'm also attending to a training session.
If there is a BoF I'll surely drop by.

mixel's picture

I'm getting this remark from several people, but so far only one has actually mentioned it in the questionnaire.

The problem is if you really want to get something done during Drupalcon, you need it before the event so that we can be more detailed or focused discussion during the BoFs and maybe get some work done during the code-sprint day.

I'm aware that this way there is a conflict of interest with training and CXO, but I'm guessing that this still can be complementary. Still what is the alternative? We can't do it during Drupalcon (it would not be in the venue, but in the College next to it) and after Drupalcon it seems a bit pointless as everyone will go away as soon as we get some consensus. So in a way the current Drupalcon design is making it impossible to have a best case scenario (which may not be a bad thing btw).

For people that cannot attent because of training, I'm more than happy to provide a summary in the evening.

We have been thinking of many aspects for an DrupalEdu event, but after all I think it is important to try it out and learn from it. We really need to do something about education, it has been a topic as far back as I know (which is Drupalcon Brussels) and we clearly need to do something, in Chicago it became impossible to attend all the related Edu BoFs as several where happening on the same moment.

Looks like a good idea. I am

heather's picture

Looks like a good idea.

I am the volunteer training team lead for DrupalCon, and so I am committed that day- as are many other who would care about learning Drupal.

I will run an open space BoF on another topic during the conference. Hopefully some folks can cross-pollinate from your bof?

Best wishes!

cross-pollinate ftw

mixel's picture

Part of the need to create an open space was that Drupalcon Chicago had to many BoF in some way related to Education. I'm hoping the open space would only be a start and indeed get cross-pollinate to BoFs. Do you already got an title for your BoF? What will be the focus?

No title for the bof yet, I

heather's picture

No title for the bof yet, I think one will arise out of the related presentation. That might be a beacon to yet more people.

Congrats for this initiative

camorim's picture

Hi mixel

Congrats for this initiative. Year after year we talk about this need, but situation does not change.

Heather go to talk about the issues you pointed at the beggining of this discussion http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/how-do-you-know-gal-kno...

It will be great if you use the session and the BoF to discuss main problems and how to go in near future.

Like many others, I'll have a training session, so a summary is welcome. I believe a Drupal Education Day is very important and a required step, in Europe and in United States. DrupalCon format is inadequate and squeezed for so many subjects and issues if we think in "all Drupal".

Good luck

This is fantastic! I am

misscs's picture

This is fantastic! I am definitely interested. It is a shame that some of those interested won't be able to attend because of pre-conference training but I really agree with Mixel that before is better. I second trying to reunite again in the evenings to provide summaries. additionally, having notes in public place.

After one week

mixel's picture

After running the call for one week I've got 16 responses :

9 people like the open space 8 people would prefer a full day
3 people are in the training and like a BoF
4 people have expressed their interest but can't come to London.

Several people have respond to me directly, most remark that they would love to join the open space but are in the training. As this is clearly an issue for many people we should think about ways to avoid this without getting into other overlaps or problems. As mentioned it could have a complementary values, but we are aware it is not at all optimal.

I'm going to keep the call open for at least another week please help me get exposure so that more people will fill in the questionnaire.

If you can't come or if you're in the training but you are interested in the topic, please take the minute to fill in the questionnaire so that we can have a better view on your opinion. It is our goals to serve anyone who is interested in DrupalEdu and give them a way to make that easer.

Over a week we shall reconsider what to do based on the feedback in the questionnaire.

What can be bad about running

heather's picture

What can be bad about running the full day? Like you pointed out, it's a great opportunity for a team to work.

Later they can present their discussion/ideas to the people who missed it and get feedback/debate the ideas. Might be a good way to have the dialogue.

I was bummed out that I couldn't be there before, but logically- it makes sense to get the most of the opportunity. Why lose the chance?

Budget?

mixel's picture

Your right. I thought one objection is budget. Still your right 1/2 may be a bit too little to do some actual work.

The idea of a dialogue is great, lets find a way to organize this. At what time does the training end? Should we try to create an evening session for the dialogue? (after dinner or before...)

I'll be helping with some

jrbeeman's picture

I'll be helping with some training that day, as well, but would love to be involved in the conversation.

Interested

rachel_norfolk's picture

Hi,

I'm interested in the idea of learning more about using Drupal as an LMS - we built www.paincommunitycentre.org last year and used things like the Quiz module and it went well but I would have like to do so much more...

I'll try to fill in the form now but I'm free on Monday so far...

Rachel

A, sorry for the confusion

mixel's picture

A, sorry for the confusion with "form" I mean "the questionnaire" (the first link in this post)

location location location ;-)

idcm's picture

I am confident that folks in the United States are interested but the cost to travel during the most expensive time of the year will prohibit many from participating. London in August - the highest priced airline tickets of the year ($900-$1100), ouch! Add hotel and registration and ... not in the cards for many budgets.

I hope this can be continued to Denver where many on this continent can join in.

Cindy

Definitely interested, won't be in London

bonobo's picture

Love the idea of the Open Space, and am also a big fan of cross-pollination. From working with folks in different sectors, there are more similarities than differences, and folks from different sectors can learn a lot from one another.

FWIW, the BoF's in San Francisco actually worked out something similar to this. The first BoF was used to identify different stakeholders/interests, and subsequent BoFs were focused on stakeholder groups.

mixel - regardless of how many people respond to the survey, I'd feel pretty safe moving ahead with the open space, and I'd be glad to help continue this in Denver. FWIW, this type of event/community outreach is a logical way for the community to grow.

update

mixel's picture

Just an update after yet another week.

I'm in the process to get things organized. I'm taking two things from the feedback here:

1) creating a dialogue after the event with the training people
2) figuring out if full day would be possible if it does not affect the budget.

I will use this post to keep you posted, hope to give more specific info soon.

Some post-event lessons

bonobo's picture

Some post-event lessons learned notes would also be awesome.

I'd love to see events like this become part of every DrupalCon, and it would be great not to reinvent the wheel every time.

Time permitting, would you consider posting some notes to the group after the event?

ultimatum by association

mixel's picture

It seems I'm not allowed to organize this if we don't get the 20 people confirming to come to the open space.

We've got until end of this week so please help met get more people fill in the questionar.

I'll be twitting this with hashtag #DrupalEdu, any help getting the call know is appreciated !

I wouldn't say you are not

kvantomme's picture

I wouldn't say you are not allowed to organize it, just that you'll need another way to make it happen - which will be much harder of course. Don't make the DA look bad ;)

--

Check out more of my writing on our blog and my Twitter account.

If access to the room is

bonobo's picture

If access to the room is contingent upon X number of people committing to an event two months before the actual event (something that is really inconsistent with the way people usually make their way to events like this, both inside and outside the community) then I'd say that a key pillar of support is being removed.

In my experience, having a motivated organizer on the ground is a huge factor in making an event like this happen. Given the work mixel has done to get this off the ground, it would be nice to see it supported.

Does it?

mixel's picture

Hi Kristof,

I was just referring to our original plan, don't forget to read the "if" ... but your right, I'm not a diplomate, could written it softer I guess.

Any how, what is new is the deadline. I've suggested the 20 people rule (to ask for a clear commitment). So I'm guessing I'm to blame "if" this event doesn't happen.

As Bonobo mentioned I was hoping the "2-4 times higher than the number of signups" would be convincing enough.

That's really too bad

bonobo's picture

That's really too bad, and it goes completely against the way these things usually play out. Most attendees aren't even thinking about DrupalCon activities yet, and in events I've run like this in the past, the number of attendees is anywhere from 2-4 times higher than the number of signups.

agreed. Last time I went to a

btopro's picture

agreed. Last time I went to a drupalcon (DC) I wrote on the board for an education bof and ended up spending almost the whole day in 1 room because people just kept pouring in. I think we had about 140 people sit in across 4 education-based bof's and those were just the ones I threw together. People will only be organizing for this stuff shortly before if not when they get there in a lot of instances, especially people new to the community. If you need 20 people to hold a spot for something that will have a lot of people I'll "be there" for you.

Things I want to clarify

mixel's picture

Ok, just some things to clarify, as my comment above wasn't clear enough. The DA has given us the opportunity to have an open space. If we cannot get enough people to answer the call than we lack the force to make an open space useful.

I'm not very clear in communication it seems and I'm surprised how negative the reactions are … this was never my intention.

The whole idea of a call is that we can evaluate the responses. It will be this response that define what is going to take place. Last week no one was responding any more, so suggesting a deadline is not a negative thing. If there is truly little support for an open space and more people wanting to have a BOF, than so be it. This is a community thing we want to coordinate; it requires a critical mass to be useful.

I've seen the growth of Edu-BoFs and so this call got created. With BoFs of more than 140 people, why only 30 people answer the call? Maybe I'm not the right person to give the call, maybe the BoF kind of event is what the community wants, maybe we need a different description of the call, maybe we need a different way of broadcasting
the call.

Please keep the conversation positive, how do we solve the low responses?

I agree with the general

vcardoso's picture

I agree with the general opinion that it's very difficult to have a good forecast of how many will show up. Only a minority has the habit, or even the conditions, to organize themselves with 2 months in advance. I like to have my agenda well setup so I consider myself on that minority, book everything in advance, ...

So, im my opinion, no matter what you do, it will be very difficult to overcome this issue of the low response. It is not that there is no one interested, it's only that people cannot commit themselves in such advance. At best you'll get a handfull of singups and 5 times more when the event occurs.

As already indicated, I'm not availabe monday due to be enroled on a training session. But for a BoF or a meeting on Friday (code sprint day) you can count me in.

A really good initiative

simonsurtees's picture

We (i-KOS) run Acquia Drupal training courses in the UK so this is definitely something we're interested in. As I'm volunteer for DrupalCon Evaluator day, and my colleague Nick Abbott is training we can't attend on Monday 22nd, but count us in for any other time.

Nick would be a great asset to this discussion. His background is in teaching and for the last 2 years he has worked extensively on developing a Drupal distribution which is perfect for schools to use. We work with a few educational establishments (mainly Universities) and use our distro as a demo to showcase Drupal, and based on their feedback I agree there is a clear need to raise the profile of Drupal in the Education system.

We're also seeing a clear shortage of good Drupal talent in the UK, but this is mainly due to training; as we know there's a heck of lot of good coders here! Even good PHP people sometimes struggle to work in the 'Drupal way' to start with. I know that Acquia are working hard on addressing this by creating a comprehensive syllabus of training materials - so that more developers can be brought into the community.

Hope to see you all @ DrupalCon

www.i-kos.com/training

report

mixel's picture

After a month running a "call for participation" on an open space for education (#DrupalEd) it is time for some evaluation. I've used some of the Google charts, but had to copy past all this. Considering that visibilitie is the biggest problem I'm posting this as a comment in groups and as a blog for Drupal planet.

My main conclusion is that we need a lot more visibility to get people interested. During the first two weeks much attempts were made to make the call visible and this created a steady flow of people filling in the survey. During the third week, we did no effort of making it visible and none was added ! This created a surtain panic resulting in a new attempt to get visibility and so again several people submitted. Have a look at the graph for yourself:

Number of daily responses
Only local images are allowed.

Now, in total 17 people have respond to be at the open space. Most people that want a blog have mentioned in the comments that they are in the training, so I'm inclined to think that also 17 people have expressed there interest but can't come. This is interesting why would this be 1/2 ? The other question that arises, is that if we can get 140 people in BoFs during Druplacon on DrupalEdu, why did we get such a low responds for the call? These are things we should figure out, it may help us understand what the problem is with de diversity of DrupalEdu project. Remember the whole setup of the call is to support the community building of DrupalEdu.

What sort of platform would suit you best
Only local images are allowed.
One-Day Unconference (1 day before DrupalCon) 11 32%
Half-Day Unconference (1 day before DrupalCon) 6 18%
BoF Session(s) (During DrupalCon) 8 24%
I cannot make either but I'm interested in the topic (keep in touch) 9 26%

People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

Considering that only 34 people have responded, I'm not sure if we should conclude much from the other data, but as we have it. I'm happy to give you my view on it. On the one hand most people are ambidextrous, doing most of the background issues given as option. Most people we reached were people already doing DrupalEdu stuff, which is normal as we mostly targeted people in Drupal-groups. Clearly the bigger interest is to creating Durpal as an education platform, after all we stay platform builders.

What is your background in this topic?
Only local images are allowed.
I provide (have provided) Drupal training 17 53%
I want/am planning to provide Drupal training 12 38%
I have participated in Drupal curriculum design 5 16%
I want to participate in Drupal curriculum design 8 25%
I provide Drupal services in the educational setting 15 47%
I want to provide Drupal services in the educational setting 12 38%
Other 8 25%

People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

What topics are you interested in?
Only local images are allowed.
Education in Drupal for Community Building 19 56%
Providing Drupal training 17 50%
Drupal curriculum 14 41%
Drupal certification 13 38%
Drupal as an educational platform 25 74%
Other 5 15%

People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

More than just visibilty

bonobo's picture

There are a couple things you're running into:

  1. Many people who are active in the community aren't thinking about DrupalCon yet;
  2. In some ways, this is probably seen as "competition" for the paid training; I suspect that if this had been publicized as a pre-conference event on the DrupalCon London site, you would have seen more traffic to your survey;
  3. Many people who have a casual interest and might attend are probably not going to make the time to complete a survey (also, these people are probably not thinking about DrupalCon yet)

In short, I wouldn't interpret these numbers as a lack of interest, as that flies in the face of the steadily increasing interest in Drupal within educational contexts (and the increased sophistication of these sites over the same time) that we have seen in the last several years (and certainly for the 6 years I've been active in the space).

I think there's a sweet spot between when to advertise an event, when to hold an event, and when to follow up after the event (in the form of BoFs, etc).

I've actually been thinking about this for Denver (as I won't be in London) and I'd like to see something like this for Denver:

  • A full day Education-focused session, split into: a half day orientation/getting started/this is what you can do; followed by a half-day of working sessions (where people actually co-work/brainstorm solutions to real projects that are working on)
  • Follow up BoFs during DrupalCon
  • An Education Wiki where people share notes from what they worked on/what they learned (possibly facilitated by having a scribe in as many working sessions/BoFs as possible)

Outreach for the Denver event should start within the Drupal community shortly after London, and should be spurred by targeted outreach to important stakeholders outside the Drupal community 3-4 months before the event, and to individuals 2-6 weeks before the event.

And, a good question to ask of DrupalCon attendees: How far in advance of the event do you purchase travel tickets and make hotel/room reservations? Because, the answer to that question will inform the sweet spot about when to really push outreach to individuals, as we want this event to be a known factor when people are making travel reservations.

feedback from London for Denver

mixel's picture

Its good that you are thinking about Denver already, it should be the goal to keep DrupalEdu nurtured in the annexes of Druplacons.

For now I'll be focused on making the London event as good as possible, but we should definitely consider Denver afterwards.

If you can't make London, come on out to Madison!

dmcw's picture

Mixel - great idea and I really hope you're able to make this work for London! Moving forward, I'd love to see more events that bring the Drupal in education community together. All of the successful BoF events show that we've got a lot to talk about!

We've been trying to do this regionally by planning pre-camp conversations and training sessions as well as a strong education track at each of our DrupalCampWI events. I've often thought of DrupalCampWI as a regional get together for conversations about Drupal in higher-ed. Both bonobo and btopro have come out to Madison in previous years, and I think we've managed to build some connections and community.

If you can't make it to London, but can make it to Madison, come join us July 21-23 in Madison. I'm sure it will be a great time to continue conversations like this one, and help build the foundation for more drupal-ed community building!

keep us posted

mixel's picture

Don't forget to make some publicity during DrupalCampWI about the DrupalEdu event in London ;-)

Absolutely!

dmcw's picture

Absolutely!

It's on the schedule

mixel's picture

Great news,

I've just been informed that the open space is now on the session schedule for london: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/schedule

We shall create an announcement later to inform where and how the open space will happen.

Cheers

I am interested

badesemowo's picture

@mixel, I will be coming in from Nigeria for DrupalCon . We recently started Drupal Trainings in Lagos.
I am interested in interacting with others too especially in the sphere of learning / development.

By the way: I found this via the event schedule listing on the conference schedule

Drupal as school site platform

jpamental's picture

Hi-

I'll be attending DrupalCon (and presenting on web typography on Tuesday), and work as platform architect at Schoolyard. We design and develop sites for independent schools based on a Drupal platform we've been working with for about 18 months. We have 8 sites live with another 10 or so launching by the end of the year (maybe one more live before London...) and are now including a responsive design as part of the base offering. I know you reached out at one point to ask about our participating and while I think I responded I couldn't find it so wanted to post again. We'd be happy to share what we've learned about Drupal and it's fit within a school environment.

I fly in @ 7:20am so may be a little late but should be there for most of it.

Cheers,

Jason Pamental
Platform Architect
Schoolyard

http://thinkinginpencil.com & http://schoolyard.com

Jason Pamental
[ @jpamental ]

OT: Responsive themes

bonobo's picture

We're actually in the process of developing a responsive starter theme for Hexagon.

We've used Hex as the base for a variety of education-related sites (and some non-education-related sites as well); the responsive base theme was a logical next step for the theme.

We'll be releasing it out as a full project shortly, in all likelihood before DrupalCon London.

Cheers,

Bill

Great stuff!

jpamental's picture

Hey Bill-

Can't wait to check it out. I'm planning to do much the same with ours - it's a Zen starter theme done up with HTML5 and lots of responsive bits. Currently it's a D6 version, though I'll definitely work on a D7 one soon.

Cheers,

Jason

Jason Pamental
[ @jpamental ]

When and where

mixel's picture

With only a week to go, let me give the place and time for the open space

It will be in Croydon College, which is just above the Drupalcon venue.

We have room 273 for from 9 a.m. to 12.30 a.m.

For the feedback to the people in the training, we create a DrupalEdu BoF.

For tweeting, just the #DrupalEdu tag.

Hope to see you next week !

BoF schedule

vcardoso's picture

Just to be sure, the BoF is the one scheduled for Tuesday 23rd between 10h45 and 11h45 on room 331-part 1?
We have to schedule a meeting during the Con and would not like to overlap it with the BoF (that we absolutely do not want to miss).

Time

Ingotian's picture

On the main web site it is Monday 22nd from 9-00am to 12-30, Rm 273 Croydon College.

I'm definitely going to be there. We are a UK accredited Awarding Organisation and use Drupal as the heart of a community learning site with some custom modules so that students can provide evidence of their achievements (e-portfolio style) linked to assessment criteria and self/peer assess. Teacher assessors can agree or disagree the assessments based on the evidence. If they agree an on-line mark book is automatically up dated and when this is completed we can check the evidence independently on-line and authorise printing a certificate, also on-line. If the teacher/assessor disagrees the self-assessment they leave a comment telling the student what to do next. We have been successful in 3 EU Transfer of innovation grant applications supporting development and translations into multiple languages. I'm interested in any EU based partners that might be interested in applying for EU grant funding to develop Drupal end-user or developer certification. I can help with getting other partners and the application. Grants are normally around 300,000 Euros with 4-5 partners.

Ingotian - www.theingots.org
Accredited qualifications based on Drupal

Just to be sure

mixel's picture

The open space is on Monday room 273 (Croydon College) between 9h a.m. to 12h30.

A "recap BoF" will happen on Tuesday room 331 (Drupalcon venue), between 10h45 a.m. and 11h45 . (I've booked part1 and part2).

The BoF is particular to cross-pollinate with people in the training and other folks that could not join the open space on Monday.

I'm hoping for more specialized BoF during the rest of Drupalcon.

notice CHANGED room number

mixel's picture

There has been a change in the room number for the open space on Monday (Croydon College) it will be room 256.

I'll make sure to be there a few minutes before and give you last minute info using twitter (keep checking #drupalEdu).

Hope to see you soon !

i have been doing drupal

dasjo's picture

i have been doing drupal training with free and open source software communities all over central america and would be interested in joining the open space on monday.

here is some info about the tour i'm just finishing in advance to attending drupalcon london
http://dasjo.at/drupal-tour-central-america-gira-drupal-centroamerica-2011

Central/South America

Ingotian's picture

Hi Dasjo, I'm going to Ecuador to give certification training to a large training company in mid September. Maybe we can talk about it on Monday.

Ingotian - www.theingots.org
Accredited qualifications based on Drupal

Another attendee...

h2cm's picture

Hi mixel and all, I'm heading to London this evening, so would like to attend tomorrow.
I work full-time in community mental health and mentoring student nurses.
Also (still !) planning to create a new Drupal website.

Hope to see you all tomorrow.
Safe travels.

Peter Jones
Lancashire, UK
http://hodges-model.blogspot.com/
Hodges' Health Career - Care Domains - Model
http://www.p-jones.demon.co.uk/
h2cm: help2Cmore - help-2-listen - help-2-care
http://twitter.com/h2cm

Will be there

fgm's picture

Just to mention I will be there tomorrow. I've been doing Drupal training since 2008 (mostly module development courses), both at the community level (DrupalCamp, DrupalDevDays), and as part of our regular business.

Gonna get there as well

willhallonline's picture

I am gonna come along as well. I have done some work with schools and trying to train others in the goodness of Drupal. So see you all tomorrow.

how is it going?

heather's picture

I hope you guys are keeping notes together.

This is a handy tool for collaborative note taking!

http://ietherpad.com/

Feedback after drupalcon

mixel's picture

Dear people,

We had a lovely time @ drupalcon with many issue close related to #drupalEdu. Time for feedback, now this is only my view, any people participation are invited to give their own view.

The open space was a success we had 30 people in total and we extended the 1/2 day to a full day ... thanks to Isabell for the extension !

The BoF had a dramatic low number of participants, although 23 people demanded a BoF 6 people showed up (2 participated in the open space). This to me proofs my point, we need more structure to make #drupalEdu work, it will not happen spontaneously.

The reason why it does not happen spontaneous is because the complexity of the problem, is spreads to many other issues and problems. There is a dyadic relation between all the concept and so a synergy should be possible, but it is a complex whole. We had several small groups during the open space and even then the topic could easily drift of focus. One big topic coming up is that we need a bigger open spaces on #drupalEdu. I'm hoping to deploy ways of doing this and that we can grow the open spaces during the Drupalcon. We shouldn't wait too long to organize this for Denver, I'm willing to help, but let some one else take the lead, after all I'm not sure I can get there (it depends on finding the fonds).

I had many one-on-one discussion after the open space and from it some more concrete plans emerged. With a few people we created a battle plan and we expect to create a collaborate-blog in a few weeks. Give us some time to properly describe the plans. With a few people in the code sprint we created a request for the infrastructure issue queue: Damping the drupal learn curve with mentoring and resources http://drupal.org/node/1261188. The request is more general as we could be, but we didn't want to focus too much on one or the other concrete suggestion.

Let me get back to the open space, I clustered the issues as follows. One group discussed Drupal as LMS, one group focused on curriculum, certification and teaching the teachers. Some people were interested in evangelism and strategic marketing in classic education. We had some very energetic university students that called themselves "Drupal fan boys". Personally I like this a lot, this links for me to an earlier blog (we need to talk to student organizations and not just the teachers).

During the first discussion we had an holistic view on education, talked about educational script and crossovers (learning drupal versus drupal for learning). Some one called it "Designing Learning experience", which is a nice way of putting it. Lastly, let me give you some of the links that poped up during the discussions:

http://www.khanacademy.org/
https://www.schoology.com/home.php
http://schoolyard.com/
http://www.pedagogicalpatterns.org/
http://www2.plymouth.ac.uk/distancelearning/steve.html
http://keycompetencies.tki.org.nz/Monitoring

#drupalEdu - hope this helps

h2cm's picture

I've been posting about Drupalcon London each day and including mentions of the tag; mixel suggested I added the link to the blog here. (Sorry comments are messed up, there's a contact widget) If I can help publicize developments here let me know pleased to help:

http://hodges-model.blogspot.com/search/label/%23drupalEdu

http://hodges-model.blogspot.com/search/label/Drupalcons

Great to meet up - safe travels!

Peter Jones
Lancashire, UK
http://hodges-model.blogspot.com/
Hodges' Health Career - Care Domains - Model
http://www.p-jones.demon.co.uk/
h2cm: help2Cmore - help-2-listen - help-2-care
http://twitter.com/h2cm

Curriculum and Training

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