Hello, all,
I came across this post today: http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2008/12/11/validation-of-my-crac...
It has a great quote from a student that highlights the strength of Drupal when used as a teaching tool:
I’ve been using Drupal for my classes as its flexibility supports my more constructivist approach to teaching. As one of my students wrote:
Comparing Blackboard and Drupal, I thought that the opinions and thoughts of the students are treated with respect by using the Drupal system. In other words, by using this system, students are like the main actors and actresses in movies. I thought that the features of Drupal were built around blogs and focused on connections and communication among teachers and students. On the other hand, Blackboard focuses on announcements and instructions from teachers to students.
Well put, Toshu! The focus isn’t on me imparting my wisdom to my students (thought hopefully my lectures were worth something!); it’s on their impressions and reflections about what they’re learning and the conversations that come from sharing those reflections.
Comments
Wow
That really is pretty cool, and it confirms what I've been thinking. Now I want to try it in my own class!
As a college going student
As a college going student this has motivated me a lot. I had an idea to convert my college notes to drupal so that juniors could benefit with them,but I am too lazy to do it. Now I am putting myself on right track.
<a href="http://www.iputech.com/" title="Connecting Indraprastha University >Connecting Indraprastha University | IPU Tech
Fantastic perspective
Fantastic perspective Bill.
I've worked with WebCT and Blackboard and I will never inflict that sort of environment on students again. In order to make a web environment work best the viewers need to become members of a community: Drupal enables community to form in ways that surpass the standard applications offered to educators.
My commercial business has relied on Drupal as a solution for the past five years. While I'm new to teaching, after looking at what resources are normally offered to instructors I see no choice other than Drupal if I want to provide a strong platform for my students to build their community.
Moodle and Drupal
We started off using Moodle and Drupal to support our government accredited qualifications. As time has gone on I'm moving more and more to Drupal. There is a lot of overlap in what both environments can do but Moodle is based more on a structured and controlled sequences of events in courses whereas Drupal seems more accessible and flexible. There are strengths to both systems and I think we will probably support free and open courses in both environments to suit different preferred learning styles. In the UK all K12 schools are supposed to have e-portfolios for learners by 2010. Many are spending a lot of money on proprietary systems that are really the equivalent of Drupal with some extra bells and whistles and integration with the monopoly proprietary management systems. (It seems management and admin are more important than learning ;-).) The advantage of using Drupal for e-portfolios, apart from savings on license fees is that the learners learn how such a system works. We can encourage them to take ownership of their portfolio and teach them HTML, Java script etc gradually as part of a technology course and provide them with accredited qualifications. This way they have far more control over their portfolios and they can transfer the skills to new systems as technologies develop because they have some fundamental understanding of the underlying principles. That seems to me far more educationally valid than keeping the pretence that no-one needs to know anything technical and the system will do everything for you if you throw enough money at it. I'd rather we produced citizens with the capability of being self-sufficient by using their technological learning that were constantly dependent on paternalist monopolies.
Ingotian - www.theingots.org
Accredited qualifications based on Drupal
Ingotian - www.theingots.org
Accredited qualifications based on Drupal