By Barbara Dieu · December 10, 2008
Hot off the press, Bill Fitzgerald’s (FunnyMonkey) Drupal in Education and e-Learning, a book designed for people new to Drupal, with no prior development experience. Bill explains in this podcast interview with Jeff Robbins (Lullabot) how Drupal is being used in universities, high schools, and other educational institutions.
Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim are using it with Youth Voices, a meeting place where students and their teachers share, distribute, and work in a variety of creative endeavors, from blogging to video production and discussions of video to digital photography. They were interested in embedding and sharing video on the the site so they put Bill in contact with the Voice Thread team. The result of this collaboration was an extension that can already be downloaded and will likely be bundled with the Embedded Media Field module.
At Dekita, we worked on Drupal from scratch as from August 2007 and prepared it to host the Social Media in ELT EVO 2008 collaborative session that ran from January 14th to February 24th, 2008. In spite of the team being a bit put off by the “hysterically hierarchical” wiki structure, thanks to our ghost in the machine’s help, design and expertise, we managed to navigate forward and experiment with the various basic modules offered.
Differently from Moodle, an LMS platform which tends to replicate the school classroom control mode with its hierarchical, calendar/teacher driven course management, Drupal allows for both teacher-directed and student-directed learning.
Drupal Ed (and other experiments like, for instance, the Social Media Classroom) may provide a compromise or a transition phase towards change between the traditional LMS systematization of education, with its requirements for structure, control, accountability and manageability and the PLE’s informal, individual and peer network agency model.
Comment [2]
• • •
By Barbara Dieu · May 16, 2008
In the article Who Comments on Blogs, and Why?, published on March 15th 2007, journalist Stephen J. Dubner (co-author of Freakonomics) admits that although he enjoys reading blogs and has quite a lot to say, he hardly ever comments. He challenges non-commenters to answer his question and gets 135 replies in the span of more than a year (last comment is from May 13th).
Incentives seem to be the cornerstone of modern life. On the Web, memes, friendship and love chains and challenges abound. In the educational arena this is exemplified by the Comment Challenge, coordinated by Sue Waters, Silvia Tolisano, Michele Martin and Kim Cofino.
The organizers challenge the 123 participants to be better blog citizens by engaging them in a 31-day round of activities with the aim of later tracking who is the commenter with:
Monetary prizes from coComment and other sponsors have been secured.
What do you think? Comments welcome :-)
Comment [6]
• • •
By Rudolf Ammann · May 29, 2006
This has been coming together for a while—at least since we first mentioned aggregating student feeds a few months ago. After a bit of tinkering it has come together, and here’s the Dekita Orchard.
The Orchard aggregates feeds from EFL/ESL students worldwide and picks up where the Dekita Exchange leaves off. While the Exchange compiles an up-to-date list of courses in which EFL/ESL students participate in the live Web, the Orchard takes a selection of courses from that list and aggregates their feeds, thus providing easy access to the students’ work both here on Dekita and through a number of merged feeds that you can subscribe to in your feedreader of choice.
You may need to click around the Orchard a bit before you get comfortable with how it works. The left sidebar lists all the student feeds picked up by the aggregator, sorted by course. You can click on the folders to collapse the list if you choose.
The Orchard’s front page displays the most recent entries from all feeds. Click on a course link in the sidebar for the latest entries from that class, or click on any individual feed link for the latest entries from any individual student.
Dekita’s aggregator aims to provide a view of what EFL/ESL students are writing now, therefore we do not permanently archive entries and will remove old posts after a few weeks. You will need to make any comments at the original sites themselves, and point any links to any of the aggregated entries to the respective permanent archives back at the original site.
The Orchard is likely to remain a work in progress for quite a while. Your criticism, questions and suggestions will help us make it better.
And as an afterthought: if you’re not sure you understand what any of the above is about, you might find Dave Shea’s What is RSS/XML/Atom/Syndication? an enlightening read.
Also, in anticipation of a rich harvest our own Bee has gone all fruity. There will be fruitcake.
Comment [3]
• • •
By Barbara Dieu · April 18, 2006
Isabel Teixeira and her class of intermediate students at CILT in Taguatinga, a satellite town 40 km from BrasÃlia, have just created a class blog, on which they posted their introductions and very creative minisagas . They would love your comment on them.
Isabel, an active iEarn leader, will be talking about her blogging project during the next meeting at the Blogstreams Salon, Tappedin on May 7th (first Sunday of May) at 21 GMT. See you there!
• • •
By Barbara Dieu · March 13, 2006
Geoff Taylor, English language teacher at St Clare’s, Oxford explains what a podcast is and how to put one together.
The Bardwell Road Podcast Centre, under Geoff’s supervision, features some excellent student productions like Juliane Felicio’s from Brazil, during which she hosts a show on food and eating out in Oxford. Angela Vilarino interviews her classmates on love and romance while Bo Yang Zhu, from China tries to find out what people do in order to better learn English.
Listen to what this talented group of students has created!
Comment [1]
• • •
By Rudolf Ammann · February 08, 2006
If we’re serious about facilitating our students’ participation in authentic exchanges, then it might be a good idea to make their work more accessible to the Net at large. One way of doing this would be to aggregate their individual weblogs into a separate site: pull along their feeds, merge them into a single stream of posts, repost. Rip, mix, burn.
To illustrate, I have just plugged a bunch of student feeds (aka “sources”) into tawawa.suprglu: the result looks like a pretty convenient gateway through which a group of student bloggers could be approached from the outside.
Obviously, though, Suprglu is not the answer. The service is intended for individual people who want to pull their works from several places around the Web into one single site, and the creators of the site don’t show much enthusiasm for alternative uses: they might limit the number of permissible feeds per user. They’re also slow to update.
Self-hosted aggregation would be preferable.
I’m looking into viable alternatives.
Update #1: some clarification” from a Suprglu developer: “Right now we’re not supporting OPML import or export. SuprGlu is meant for personal usage, and only allowing 10 feeds currently. And 10 seems to be a reasonable number for users to add manually…”
Update #2: Drupal would have been overkill. I used Planet Planet for a home-glued aggegation page: Tawawa/network.
Comment [3]
• • •
By Barbara Dieu · December 28, 2005
Katy Pearce signals a project she is working on and for which she needs the help of English language adult or senior high school mentor bloggers for one week sometime in February, March, April or May 2006.
Young Caucasus Women, is a group blog for young women from the Caucasus region (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia). The students participating in this project are foreign exchange students of high school age currently in the US.
The young women will be given a topic to blog on each week, but they are welcome to blog on any topic throughout the week. The adult mentor bloggers will blog on a specific topic on Sunday, hence inspiring the young women’s blog entries. Then throughout the week, the mentors will comment on the young women’s blog postings. The topic and week will need to be determined at least one month in advance. Some topics already taken are:
As there are almost no blogs written by national individuals living in the Caucasus, the hope in the long run is that they will continue blogging once they return home in the summer of 2006.
If you are interested or know someone who is, please contact katy (at) katypearce (dot) org for more information.
Comment [1]
• • •
By Barbara Dieu · September 25, 2005
“A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary” is the quote Corinne Lautenberg (Izzy) has chosen to illustrate a new collective blog for the EFL students and teachers at the Lycée Labourdonnais on the Mauritius Island.
Corinne has just started by posting a welcome message along with links to some useful tools and resources in EFL. In a mail in which she thanks me for the comment on her blog, she adds, “Any suggestions for improvement and/or professional tips are most welcome” (I hope you do not mind my quoting you here, Corinne).
Corinne, make this an energizing social space where conversation can flow and where people can share their thoughts and learn how to express themselves better. Draw attention to select learner posts and model the act of blogging yourself.
Use this opportunity to transcend your classroom by communicating with people from all over the world in authentic, meaningful, and self-directed ways.
Erect no walls or constraints that hamper free flowing peer-to-peer communication. Do not use this interactive medium to replicate the traditional classroom practice of posting homework and assignments and to correcting your students publicly.
Let them speak out loud!
A warm welcome to the blogosphere, Corinne.
• • •
By Barbara Dieu · September 20, 2005
Blogging the World is Barbara Ganley’s collaborative pilot project aiming at recording the “study abroad” experience of 20 students and 3 faculty members during the 2005-2006 year.
While Amaury registers his first impressions on the informal and easy going atmosphere in Rio de Janeiro, Lizi shares her expectations and worries about the Russian educational system. Zoey has just landed in Berlin and reflects on how to engage more participants in this international blogging experience. What are you waiting for?
Comments on their insights and impressions on the Mother Blog are most welcome.
• • •
By Rudolf Ammann · September 13, 2005
A short while ago we raised the question of how to provide an up-to-date list of P2P in EFL/ESL projects.
We may have hit on a solution: let the teachers create information pages about those projects. Then let’s link those pages together via del.icio.us using a distinctive tag. Think of it as a kind of webring.
We’ve created an initiative around this idea: It’s the P2P-EFL-ESL-X Project.
• • •
