Please forgive this but my brain hurts.
I am an intermediate level IT person. I have coding experience, but my main focus has been on UI and Accessibility issues since I stop full-time coding with VB 6 & ASP technologies. I am no stranger to user groups and discussion boards, but I will confess to a lack of patience with them. Which brings me to my suggestion/rant:
I have been pouring through this Education board for months/weeks looking for information that is NOT related to high education. Based on a poll I've found there is a significant number of Drupal uses with Senior level high schools. However, I have found little discussion as to implementations at that level. PERHAPS, it would be of benefit to create a sub-group of Drupal Ed for 'non-higher education' threads. Looking over the categories for this group, it is hard to find a match for what meets the needs of public/private schools.
I have fought on-and-on with others in an effort to implement a Drupal solution to several schools with my area. However, the first step to breaking the enertia for them is made especially difficult by the fact that they can't SEE things that they need right there. Yes, I realize there are examples of things, but the are hard to find. {here is comes, y'all} The other big open source CMS makes a very compelling argument simply by BEING THERE! Drupal is not "THERE"...it is complex and hidden and full of techno-bable. So even though the major university here in town is a HUGE Drupal supporter - even they can not seem to get over the hurdle of availability. Open Source may mean 'free' but Drupal in its format here is not 'free'. It takes serious time just to FIND things.
Here are my suggestions for how to help spread the love:
1) Drupal in Education Area specifically for Schools (non-institutions like colleges, universities, etc.) - this does not have to be mutually exclusive, but I've had several interested teacher tell me it was 'too much trouble' to dig for the information that meet their needs. . . .which are pretty basic right now. Basic right now, but with an open mind could get complex enough to use stuff for High Ed
2) Advertise the Distro -- just need to get the word out. Someone has surely put together a generic distro that will work for 85% of the schools as a "starter". By starter, I mean just a simple website CMS with limited hooks for teacher classroom management. I'm a Google Ed Certified Trainer and I can tell you, I would love to recommend Drupal to more of my clients -- but the complexity of it is prohibitive. I've seen more schools go with Google based on teh simplicity of it...nothing more. They went there knowing it was inferior, but didn't have the resources (time!) to deal with the complexity of Drupal.
3) Make it simple -- Google Apps for Education has a standard package of stuff available for schools to use..free and easy. They are killing me (good for business, bad for my kids) because it is so far below what could be done if we there was a small set of people to just recommend/put together a HS distro or Elem Distro. It should be easy to install and configure and ready out of the box. THEN let the school's pay for customization and enhancements - or find local usergroup to help.
I feel as though I have trying to find something incredible simple here, but keep missing it. So - if this magic bullet does exist and I just can't find it - then that underscores my point. I am in a school district with one of the top 20 schools in the country- kids can leave the school with Cisco Certifications, but I can't get anyone to buy-in because of the complexity.
I apologize for the rant, but after weeks of teachers/administrators/PTA folks asking me and other volunteers to help out - I am completely frustrated! This should not be rocket science!!
Comments
K-12 Drupal
Hi -
I think we should definitely talk. I'm the platform architect for Schoolyard, and we have a Drupal-based platform we've put together for independent schools that does if not all, certainly a big part of what you're describing. While we've talked about making some part of it a distribution, I simply haven't had the time to learn how to do it properly or to figure out what parts of it we want to include. But we are committed to the Drupal community (I'm in London presenting at DrupalCon this week) and want to find a way to make something available.
Where are you located? We're in Providence, RI. I do think it's important to have a separate forum for K-12 schools (at the very least). That might be a good place to start. Then we should take a stab at what that base set of requirements is and go from there.
Cheers!
Jason
Schoolyard: http://schoolyard.com
Jason Pamental
[ @jpamental ]
Reverse engineer, and rework as needed
Hello, Jason,
Building an install profile will likely require some refactoring - while that can be daunting, it's also a Very Good Thing, as it forces you to nail own the architecture.
We described pieces of our process at http://funnymonkey.com/building-features-for-install-profiles and http://funnymonkey.com/features-dependencies-and-ui
You could also look at how the whole kit is pieced together - code.funnymonkey.com contains all of the features, as well as the downloadable tarball. Looking through the profile could help get some of the process sorted out for you.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Green Schools Alliance
Jason, I would like to talk to you regarding our Drupal website for the Green Schools Alliance. It's not live yet because we need to fix a few features. It's a K-12 network of schools guiding schools to fight climate change, become more sustainable and lower their energy costs. My email is veroniquepittman@me.com. Cell: 914.482.7051. Have fun in London. Let me know or text me when we can speak. Thanks, Veronique
Be happy to speak with you!
Hi Veronique-
I'll be back in the US over the weekend and could be in touch next week. Thanks for reaching out!
Cheers,
Jason
Jason Pamental
[ @jpamental ]
Monday only day available
Next week is ONLY time I cannot connect via phone or internet. Monday is only day. Can you call then? After Sept 4th though I'll be back.
Veronique
9144827051
Drupal developer needed for K-12 site
Jason, I would like to talk to you regarding our Drupal website for the Green Schools Alliance. It's not live yet because we need to fix a few features. It's a K-12 network of schools guiding schools to fight climate change, become more sustainable and lower their energy costs. My email is veroniquepittman@me.com. Cell: 914.482.7051. Have fun in London. Let me know or text me when we can speak. Thanks, Veronique
Agree
Hi simidone2,
Not a 'rant'. All good points. I've had to build several K-12 sites the long way, i.e., picking through existing modules, pushing the limits of views, og, etc. High time we Drupalers collaborated on a workable K-12 distro.
We've been planning to roll our efforts into an installer once we got a little further along. The site is live and working well, and we are polishing off the last few features now. The main features of our site are deep integration with CiviCRM, an online registration process, custom home page, og groups for all classes, and of course lots of custom views.
Credo High School: http://www.credohighschool.org
Anyone interested in a BOF on K-12 Education at BadCamp, Berkeley, CA, Oct 21-23?
-Ron
Great conversation
First - totally agree and should have said so: all very solid points and obviously got a good conversation started. Ron- well done on the features and integration for Credo - congratulations!
Bill - thanks for the links. I'll definitely check them out. Also missing your input this week at DrupalCon in the Edu discussions I've been to. Monday was pretty interesting and I hope some good things come out of it. I know I'm going to follow up with Mixel about what we discussed.
Cheers,
Jason
Jason Pamental
[ @jpamental ]
Good points, Don't Be Discouraged
semidone2-- I think you make some good points but don't get discouraged. It's quite true that "Drupal" doesn't sell itself well. But this is not a new point about Drupal (in fact, it seems like a discussion that comes up every time a DrupalCon nears).
One of issues I think come from the fact that Drupal is less a product and more a platform (or framework). What I mean by this is that Drupal itself is just the base from which sites and distros and ultimately "products" are made. Drupal is a mix of bricks and tools.
I tell all my students who are learning Drupal to learn and build from Distros. I expect them to learn to use fields/cck and views, because these are the basic toolset of Drupal development and site building but when it comes time to build more complicated sites, one of the best starting points are Drupal distros like Commons, Atrium, OpenScholar, Open Enterprise, Voicebox, etc. I myself have been able to build an entire collaborative learning space using first EduGlu and now OpenAtrium: http://teachers.language-corner.org/demo
And while I won't be the one to build it, I think there are some great starting points for a k-12 distro, for example checkout this module http://drupal.org/project/school_administration which might in combination with a preexisting distro and new theme get you close to what you need.
Utopian vs business case
I'll more or less confirm what you are posting about OP. The community here is very higher edu focused not because we're the only ones using it though. Let's back track 4 years, I was told by many people that using Drupal in the education space was stupid and didn't make sense. A month ago we had our first Drupal camp (internal to the university audience only) and had over 120 people participate. Higher Education is just really starting to back Drupal w/ over 200 college / universities often promoted as using Drupal in marketing material from Acquia and others.
I say this because it's been a very grassroots, "hey did you see what XYZ is using for that? It's drupal! Let's check it out" type of movement for Drupal into the higher education space. It's not an educational platform and let's be frank it's not business focused at all. This is the equivalent of using Apache to run a web server, you get it installed and you have a web server...but that in itself is not a business product, it's a means to creation of business products and solving use-cases. It's far more utopian in nature (which I don't mean negatively) where "hey, we're all just building the web at the end of the day, let's standardize on that".
The reason for the background information is this: It's very hard in K-12 to point to other extremely well regarded schools either nationally or in the area and say "well they use Drupal". IT staffing in K-12 aint what it is in higher education (though it's getting pretty scarce there in some areas) and so there's even less room for error when often times with open source it's more of a "play around and see what you can piece together" type of learning style.
I would like VERY MUCH to get K-12 more involved and more active in this community but it's a lot harder to highlight that and take something tangible to management. I know in higher edu articles being written about the fact that PSU uses Drupal helps provide justification to small, mid, and large schools all looking to others forging the way in this space. I could see administration in k-12 look at the same article and not be able to relate at all based purely on scale / scope.
I made this post a few weeks ago and it seemed to catch on fire a bit -- http://groups.drupal.org/node/165144 but potentially the title was wrong. While the focus is on higher education (most often times) there are lots of edge cases of education using Drupal. Now, I still think that it would be nice to highlight visually the 200+ colleges / universities using Drupal even just to provide an argument to management elsewhere, but that's not to say that I don't think K-12 plays a key role in that community / new site.
I'm taking some time off to realign my own agendas as I've been working at the expense of other aspects of my life but I'm going to start drafting a document as to what is important in this new community space. I'd love to talk further about ways we can effectively highlight the K-12 community in a way that will get buy-in from other K-12 developers, teachers and administration.
You aren't in this alone in this fight and I'd like to help build a more visual community to showcase that fact so we can help move forward together. The discussions that I've had with people on IRC in the new #drupal-edu channel are fantastic. Already many users getting together and helping solve the common goals of education, or at least pointing other developers in the right direction to save time / money.
Now, does anyone know what's up with http://drupaledu.org/ ; I think we really need that name space to get this reorganized / shared community more visible but the text there makes me think it got hacked or something.
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
Glad you mentioned it...
I was just talking with Mixel about drupaledu.org today at DrupalCon, and that's the plan: set up drupaledu.org as the clearinghouse for the various efforts and aggregator of feeds from Twitter, etc. Hopefully we'll have an update very shortly!
Jason
Jason Pamental
[ @jpamental ]
Drupal K-12 Group
http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-k-12-schools