Posted by kyle_mathews on June 11, 2008 at 8:40pm
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.
Comments
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
Update
We are still working on this, we now offer a limited capacity hosted service (currently free - limited number of instances). We're working on developing the Drupal version of social media classroom some more, and also bringing the whole thing forward to Drupal 6. We've added Kaltura support, and will probably also add http://vozmob.net/ modules once we make the update to Drupal 6. We'll also be adding in openmicroblogging, RSS, ability to embed Freemind mindmaps, and personal learning portfolios that map to tags.
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Open Source Ecology
P2P Foundation
Sam Rose
Hollymead Capital Partners
P2P Foundation
Social Media Classroom
Any progress on this? Collecting Drupal SLE Distributions...
I'm presenting Drupal as a Social Learning Environment (SLE) at Western Mass Drupalcamp at UMass/Amherst (http://drupalcampma.com/) at 3:00pm today. Hashtag will be #drupal-sle and I'm hoping that if anyone reading this knows of Drupal SLE distributions they'll post here and tweet there.
Kyle, of course, has been developing Eduglu for BYU, and Bryan is development ELMS for Penn State. Any others?
-Bram
http://gamefacewebdesign.com
VoiceBox
VoiceBox works pretty well as a social learning stack.
http://www.voicesonthegulf.org/ is an example of an early alpha VoiceBox site that has been supporting writing about the Gulf oil spill for the last 6-8 months.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey