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.
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By Barbara Dieu · August 31, 2008
SUGGESTAN
1. geo. A little country where everyone is suggesting something.
From the same developer of Rare Words, Suggestan is another application which taps into crowdsourcing and a bit of semantics.
According to the author, it is “define a thing” project, where you can find or share knowledge about the subjects/hobbies/professions/ideas that you know in form of suggestive questions. It will also try to define some relations between these words, ideas and places.
You may consult a list of suggested random topics on the main page or create your own in the sidebar on the right by starting your sentence using “If you …”. eg. (if you) are dating online . The bold part is all you need to type to start a new topic. The second step is to click on the link created and add suggestions according to the prompts given.
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By Barbara Dieu · July 11, 2007
Among the many cool social tools that have been lately launched on the Web, there is one that has struck my fancy: Voice Thread
It is an online platform that allows you to produce a narrative using photos and audio. Other people can add their comments (voice or text) so an entire group’s story can be told from various perspectives and complemented by multiple audio voices. Fascinating!
Alan Levine gives two excellent examples on his blog and demonstrates how you can creatively mash-up and relate content from various sources.
Many creative and exciting possibilities of using this for language learning. Can you think of any? Share your little spark!
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By Barbara Dieu · March 12, 2006
Bored with the lack of pictures and conversations, I followed the Semilicio.us link featured on George Siemens’ blog . I typed the Dekita URL to find out which sites had a similar focus or interest. As I perused the list, The Word Detective caught my attention. Curiouser and curiouser, I clicked further and found Evan Morris’ online version of his newspaper column by the same name—a treasure trove for lovers of words and language!
I was attracted by another link on the right, Your Favourite Word, which is another wonderful way to play with vocabulary.
Now, as I went further and explored the possibilities, I remembered the Jabberwock and thought it would be fun to have English speakers from different countries recording L.Carrol’s poem so as to compare the different intonation and pronunciation of words? Listen to this mp3 version recorded in 2003. Would this be too non-sensical?
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By Rudolf Ammann · February 25, 2006
The news is a couple of days old, but I’ve only just discovered that WordPress.com has implemented global tags:
We’re experimenting with a new system for connecting bloggers across WordPress.com with people writing about the same topics. We just turned on our global tags system, which means that when you blog about topic X and tag your post with X, you can see everyone else who has done the same. Think of it like Technorati tags for our little community here.
And yes, since we last mentioned WordPress.com here on Dekita, they have dropped the invitation system—anyone can now set up their own WordPress.com weblog straight away.
For those of you who have been grumbling about Blogger’s relative lack of “social networking features”—well, here’s something you might find appealing.
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By Aaron Campbell · October 11, 2005
Over the summer, Bee, Rudolf, and I carried out a collaborative review of Elgg, a piece of software being developed by Ben Werdmuller and David Tosh that combines elements of weblogs, e-portfolios, and social networking.
I enjoyed collaborating on this review immensely. And even though Elgg is in its very early stages of development and has evolved slightly since we submitted the paper, I hope that the perspective from which we evaluated the software is of interest to readers, especially our take on the pedagogical approach most likely to bring about a P2P mode of learning.
The review is in the latest edition of TESL-EJ. Also check out the response from David Tosh on his weblog.
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By Rudolf Ammann · September 16, 2005
While we’re running with a theme: Delicious, the social bookmark manager created by Joshua Schachter, has just turned two. Happy birthday, little toddler!
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By Rudolf Ammann · September 09, 2005
Where have all those hand-crafted link pages gone? They went to Delicious, mostly.
Delicious is an online bookmark manager that lets people collect links and tag them like they’d tag their photos on Flickr. The links posted to each tag receive a page of their own, and each of those pages is available as a separate RSS feed. In addition, each bookmark is linked to all the other users who bookmarked it, thus adding a rich social networking layer to the site and complementing search engines with an alternative mode of searching the Web.
Here at Dekita, we’ve been posting links to Del.icio.us/dekita for a while.
We’re also working on a little initiative that will build on top of Delicious—more on that soon.
And while we’re playing with tags, we’re trying to get a handle on Technorati tags, so let’s try this: to delicious, tagging.
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By Rudolf Ammann · August 26, 2005
Most EFL/ESL weblogs I’ve seen to date run on Blogger. This may be about to change shortly.
A new hosted weblogging service, WordPress.com, is in “closed beta” now, meaning that a few end-users are testing it and that it will be opened to the general public before long.
So far, WordPress has been known as a free weblogging application that runs on server space provided by its user. The stand-alone version has gained a huge following and may have surpassed Movable Type as the most popular software in its category.
Hosted WordPress weblogs will lack some flexibility, but they won’t require any technical knowledge to set up. While no pricing model has been announced yet, there’s a good chance basic accounts will be free of charge.
Lorelle VanFossen has a write-up: What can you do with wordpress.com.
There’s no word yet on when the service is going to launch, but the servers on which WordPress.com will be running have arrived at the data center in San Diego, California.
And yes, WordPress.com is hosted by the same folks that keep Dekita.org humming along: TextDrive.
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