social learning

From Cole Camplese, Should it all be Miscellaneous?:

The idea that we can follow a book filled with instructions on how to do information architecture, web design, usability, and so forth may be crazy.

Some great conversations going on about structuring dialogue within organizations, and the inherent tension between freely flowing conversation and institutional control over the messages contained within that conversation, and the need for quality control over content affiliated with an institution.

In addition to Cole's post (linked above), D'Arcy Norman has a couple of good posts that provide some context.

D'Arcy and Cole both talk about the relationship/tension between the institutionally controlled (and provided) CMS, and the role of user created content in that webspace. As I see it, this is more of a design issue -- what mechanisms are you creating as you build your webspace to accomodate content from a variety of sources? A good CMS allows for easy interoperability, and good design exposes that interoperability to the end user in intuitive ways. While this isn't a conversation about tools per se, the limitations of of the underlying CMS play a factor here, but that's a different discussion.

As I see it, the following factors (among others, of course) need to be addressed in the design of an inclusive webspace:

1. Low barrier to entry.

2. Multiple points of entry for end users (ie, choices. A user can post from multiple sites, and push their content to the institutional web space).
3. Tools for multiple ability levels -- some users will only want to use their own blog, while others will be perfectly happy using a tool provided by the organization. Both choices are perfectly okay.
4. Guidelines and tutorials for posting to the system using both external tools, and publishing tools provided by the organization. At its most simple, this would include tagging guidelines, and links where external users could submit their rss feeds. This assumes, of course, a system designed to handle aggregation and embedding of external content.
5. A governance model designed to vet content, and maintain quality control over critical areas of the organizational web presence. We're not talking about abandoning IA, or about turning the organizational webspace into Rome as enjoyed by the Visigoths; rather, we are talking about a system with clearly defined publishing workflows for content essential to the daily functioning of the organization (think admissions info), with rules and guidelines that permit the inclusion of quality content flowing into the system from external sources.

Within a new publishing model, the Information Architecture (IA) required/desired by the organization still has a critical role, but the IA realistically can't be extended over all content in all contexts. At a certain point, IA stops being an organizational tool, and something central to the user experience, and becomes a barrier to efficiency. This becomes especially true when IA gets extended into the learning space -- and the learning space/community building space is where "miscellaneous" needs to flourish freely.

Content management often gets dragged out as the punching bag here, but the problem has less to do with the CMS than it has to do with restrictive rules governing the use of the CMS. Some of these restrictions are, of course, designed into the specific CMS/platform, but all CMS's are not created equal, and it's important to separate the choices made by an admin/organization from what is actually required by a CMS. In many of the discussions I hear about freeing content for reuse, the definition of a CMS gets conflated with the rules governing its use.

It's also worth noting that the most secure system is one that is so complex that no one will use it. From a sysadmin perspective, that's great. No users vastly reduces the security risk, and virtually ensures that the IA will remain intact, and unsullied by user error. I'd love to see some good numbers on the amount of time used within organizations chewed up by end-user "training" (ie, here's how to work around security requirements) compared to support and outreach (here's how to immediately be productive using any of these freely available tools).

We're past the point where IA, publishing workflows, and quality control are mutually exclusive. The meaning of "managing" content has shifted. We can set up publishing workflows that direct selected content into an existing navigational structure, and the route can include steps for editing and approval. Allowing people to work with the tools of their choosing doesn't mean selling the farm and turning your organizational site into MySpace. Providing options for users, and allowing increased interoperability between these tools and the organizational webspace, requires planning. The barriers aren't technical; they are organizational. More importantly, the migration/flight away from the organizational enterprise is well in progress. While the IA of many organizations doesn't reflect this, the change is already occurring.

Over on his blog, Miguel Guhlin asks:

Anyone have suggestions on how to respond to this question? I welcome all brainstorming ideas...

We are ready to implement a student portal (with teacher and parent portals to follow) for our 1:1 campuses. We would like for this portal to be a web-based, searchable, "pretty"

While "pretty" is subjective, this is one place where spending a little time with either an ID or a graphic designer, or both, will benefit your site. "Pretty" has a frequently overlooked cousin, "Usability" -- sorting out your navigational structures (done in Drupal using the core block and menu items), and making sure your theme enhances these architectural decisions, will often get you both Pretty and Usable, which is a winning combination. Starting with a solid base theme, like Zen, helps you theme your site in a time-efficient way, particularly if you and your team are learning how to design/theme in Drupal. Drupal can be themed pretty effectively via css alone; if you have someone on staff who can work in php, there really isn't much you can't do. Also, if there is one element you decide to outsource, the theme is a pretty good choice.

container for all of the learning materials that we've purchased and/or created for students, including audio books, legal MP3 music files,

The Audio module -- it can generate iTunes compliant feeds, has an embedded flash player, and can be used to create playlists.

clip art, videos and animations,

The Embedded Media Field module (used along with Content Construction Kit, or CCK) allows you to embed and play media from within your site, and embed videos from external sites, such as the Internet Archives/etc. If you want more robust video handling (ie, something that will convert various formats into flv video) use the Media Mover or the FlashVideo modules. In very general terms, Media Mover is designed to work as a media processor with a full harvest --> process --> store workflow; FlashVideo works in a similar way, but has scaled down flexibility for storing media on external locations. Either FlashVideo or Media Mover will get you a site that, to the end user, feels like a YouTube clone.

For most cases, Embedded Media Field does all that's needed.

documents, presentations, and such.

For images, use ImageField (along with CCK), Imagecache (for on the fly scaling of images) and Lightbox2 (for a clean image gallery functionality). This combination will let you store full size originals while generating thumbnails and scaled down versions of the image, and displaying the images inside a clean gallery, all from one upload.

For documents, the easiest thing is probably a content type where you upload files. If you are uploading pdfs/word docs/ppts/etc you can create a text description to simplify finding the doc via searching. If you want to get into coding, there are ways you can extract text from various other formats and expose that to the search index, but that is an added level of complexity that, depending on your goals, may or may not be worth it.

Edit, March 29, 2008
For Drupal 6, it looks like there is now a module for this -- the Search Files module "allows searching through the text of PDF, MS Word, plain text, and other types of files in given directories of the server."
End Edit

We have all of these now on a shared server on our Windows network and the students can access them fine. However, it is not easily searchable and does not provide a way to include a description of each resource, along with other pertinent information (thumbnail sketch, Lexile reading level, etc.).

For each of the resources listed above, you can include full text descriptions, alongside controlled keywords (for things like lexile level, etc), alongside freetag folksonomies (a la delicious). Additionally, using CCK, you can create custom forms/storage mechanisms via the web browser, without writing a single line of code.

And, using the Views module (bascially a web-based query builder/display tool) you can choose how/to whom/where/when you display your data, and filter on keywords.

We have looked at several "document management" solutions, but I don't really feel like they are as broad as what we would like to use. We've also looked at Microsoft SharePoint

Ahh, Sharepoint. Recoil from the functionality; run screaming from the expense :)

, but are frightened by how expensive it is on both a one-time and a recurring basis. We have a Moodle server already, but this doesn't seem to really fit well there as we are not interested in running "classes" right now.

Within Drupal, you could also allow specific users (as defined by role) to create informal working groups using Organic Groups. These groups can be fully public (both in content and enrollment), fully private, or some mixture in between.

Drupal also gives you tools for flagging inappropriate content, setting up publishing workflows (allowing, for example, a submission --> review --> edit --> publish workflow for a newspaper/magazine), setting up private content between users, setting up social networking, online portfolios, etc, etc, etc.

Since some of these materials are purchased and so have user limits, we would also need for this system to use Active Directory to authenticate our users.

LDAP Integration module.

What are you using to run your student learning portals? How is it working? How much did you have to spend up front?

Everything I have listed here is freely available on drupal.org.

• Combined cost, Purchase and Licensing: 0
• License Renewal Fees: 0
• Pricing structure based on number of users: none -- as many users as you want.

I could go on...

Like any system, Drupal has a learning curve, and this is also an area where getting outside help to streamline building internal capacity can save you person-hours, and therefore money. When working with an outside person, always make sure there is a mechanism for archiving the content of these trainings, so that the process of training also jumpstarts the process of creating a body of documentation about your system.

How much maintenance is required?

Server maintenance is pretty standard, and I'd recommend a LAMP stack. For the Drupal codebase, I'd plan on 1-2 hours a month for module upgrades. These can generally be scheduled, and the upgrade process can be made fairly painless by setting up three sites: your production site (the one where everybody is working); your QA site (the one where you experiment); and your backup verification site (where you make sure that your backups work). The QA and the backup site can be run on the LAN, on a pretty anemic machine.

Feel free to ping back with any questions.

From my comment on Gardner Campbell's blog:

Hello, Gardner,

As a few people have already pointed out, these are incremental moves -- Open Content has been around for a while, as have blog-based classes. I think most of us are in agreement that, in general terms, these are Good Things, and that these shifts are improvements over expensive textbooks and cumbersome, expensive, proprietary LMS's.

The incremental shifts, however, become more meaningful when considered together.

Pulling content from a closed repository isn't all that big a deal -- we've had rss for a while. But, putting high quality content into a container where it can be readily remixed and reused is an incremental step in the right direction.

Using this newly liberated content as the basis for constructing a course isn't that big a deal either. You can use a blog as the skeleton for a traditional course, or you can use the blog as a tool for fostering discussion within a network of learners. And in this case, the second approach is what generates the excitement.

If you port open content into a blog-based class where students can participate using the tools of their choosing, you are allowing students to participate in a way that doesn't shut them off from their own intellectual work. This is an enormous shift from the traditional LMS.

So, when you combine these pieces together, you get:

1. Open Content in a highly portable, reusable format. This open content, unlike most open content currently out there, is easy to reuse.
2. If you collect your newly created curriculum into a planning repository, you then begin to create a new body of Open Content, thus increasing the amount of good quality open content.
3. When you import your curriculum into a social learning space (I agree w/Chris -- the term "blog" gets confusing), you create class record of student interaction around open content.
4. Students interact in the learning space by using their chosen tools; they always have control over their work. Subsequently, they can make that into a PLE/portfolio if they want to, completely outside of the course context.
5. All of this has been accomplished using tools that are easy to set up, inexpensive to use, and easy to administer.

All of these are incremental changes. However, when you put these changes together, they allow for a degree of flexibility and control not present in most systems. As to whether it's evolutionary or revolutionary, I don't know, nor do I really care. It's an improvement that has the potential to get high quality content to a broader range of people at a lower cost.

Introductory Notes

These are some thoughts in progress -- I’ve been thinking these things through for probably the last few years, but things have been getting more interesting of late.

Some of the blog posts that have helped shape my thinking here include:
http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044998.php
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/464
http://www.chrislott.org/2008/02/17/confused-about-the-blog-uproar/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044813.php
http://www.funnymonkey.com/mini-edu-rss
http://www.darcynorman.net/2008/02/16/on-eduglu-part-1-background/
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010236.html -- this is from Tony Hirst, who has an almost overwhelming amount of great information regarding remixing content on his blog.
I've also been thinking about the work Scott Wilson has been doing with FeedForward.

Toward the end of this post, I fall short of the needed conversation when I talk about the Course and Learner sections. There’s more to be said here -- a lot more -- but the poor souls who actually persevere to that point in the post will probably agree that I’ve said enough by then already.

An Open Content and Open Learning environment

External Repository -- in this context, an external repository is a place where content is stored. In many ways, the external repository is an artificial construct that doesn’t need to exist. The single most important argument in favor of the external repository is that the external repo can provide a level of credibility that less “official” sources of information lack. For example, a piece of information coming from the MIT’s OpenCourseware will have more credibility than a YouTube video.

These external repositories, however, need to expose their content via rss/atom, or web services, something that many of them do not do. With that said, it would also be nice to see the major OCW repositories use less pdf’s to allow for easier modification.

On a technical note, Tony Hirst pointed to a Mediawiki plugin that exposes full Mediawiki articles as rss feeds. This extends Mediawiki’s flexibility by allowing Mediawiki content to be imported via rss feeds.

Planning Repository -- the planning repos are the staging grounds of course preparation. Planning repositories will import selected courses from a variety of external repositories. While a limited number of people might have access to an external repository, more people can have access to a planning repository. Within the planning repository, users can edit existing courses, add links, text, images, etc. Then, users can select individual pieces of different courses, and re-organize them into a new course. By definition, planning repositories should be messy. They are workspaces, and should be viewed as a place where people go from draft versions to more polished versions of course materials.

For example: a history department creates an departmental planning repository. Initially, they import a variety of courses from different external repositories. Then, instructors add content as needed. Once they have finished adding content, they select the lessons/material they want for their course. So, an instructor teaching a course on the Rise of Modernism could incorporate material from a course on WWI. Once the instructors have selected and organized their lessons, they export them into their courses.

On the technical side, the planning repository could be a Drupal site built using the FeedAPI. I described how to do this here, and revisited the idea here. Alan Levine (in the comments here) and Jared Stein and Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn (in the comments here ) ask about how to select individual pieces of content for inclusion in a course. Once you have imported content into a Drupal site, you can use Views Bookmarks, Nodequeue, or node references (part of CCK) for doing exactly that.

Once the individual lessons have been selected and organized into a course, they can be exposed via an rss feed.

Mediawiki would also make an excellent planning repository by using XFeed to aggregate external content and the WikiArticle Feeds Extension (linked to above) to generate rss feeds for curriculum.

However, here is another wrinkle: every school is already producing curriculum. Teachers generate curriculum for all of their classes. If a school used a planning repository to coordinate curriculum planning, they could export the polished curriculum to a web site that could become an external repository. In this way, schools generate their curriculum maps and provide open content as part of their ongoing course planning and development process.These planning repositories becoming external repositories would have one enormous advantage over existing content repositories: they would be fully open, with all content within them accessible via rss feeds. For all schools currently undergoing accreditation reviews, how much time are you spending collecting up curricular materials? If you build your curriculum as described in this post, you have all your curriculum ready to hand, and categorized via tags.

It’s worth noting that the technology to do this exists now, and can be built entirely using open source tools.

It’s also worth noting that, using Drupal, you can clone an entire site -- configuration, content, and even user accounts -- and move that site with minimal effort. It’s what we’ve been doing with DrupalEd for nearly a year, and with less sophisticated class sites since September of 2005.

Courses -- In this context, courses are blog based tools, and could be delivered via a tool like Wordpressor Drupal. Curricular material could be imported; Jim has shown how to do this, D’Arcy has shown how to do this , and the aggregation examples I linked to earlier show how to do this.

The feeds of learners taking the course could be added to a blogroll, or, in the case of Drupal, could be imported directly into the site. With OpenID becoming more prevalent, students could either be site members, or be granted access via their OpenID. This flexibility would allow learners to interact with the course using their preferred tools, and, if they wanted, using their pre-established online identity.

Learners -- In this context, learners are just about anyone. You don’t need to be a student to be a learner, although, for obvious reasons, most schools probably wouldn’t allow open enrollment in their courses.

For me, the interesting piece of this has to with the potential for a true PLE. While I’m not particularly enamored of the whole notion of the PLE (I see it as more of a construct than a piece of technology, and something that is better achieved via innate curiosity than lines of code, but that’s another conversation), this system of open learning solves one of the main problems inherent in most PLE implementations: how to get course content out of the course and into the PLE. In this situation, that’s not an issue, as learners use their chosen tools to contribute in their courses. As they are doing the work from their platform, they retain control of their work in a way that just isn’t possible using proprietary LMS’s, or even open source LMS’s like Moodle.

Next Steps

The next steps could include any/all of the following:

• A school, or a group of teachers, banding together to create course materials in a planning repository. Dan Meyer has called for something along these lines a while back.
• More teachers using a blog-based approach to delivering content. The WPMU work that Jim helped spearhead shows one way of doing this; and the folks at BYU have illustrated another way of doing this.
• Existing Open Content repositories could actually expose their content via rss feeds. If this happened, one of the enornous barriers to actually using the open content that has been published to date would be removed.

These thoughts are incomplete -- what's missing? What needs closer examination? What else needs to be considered here?

I saw this earlier today over at groups.drupal.org --

Kyle Matthews and Clint Rogers built a Drupal site in suppport of a web analytics class. The site aggregates student blogs and expert blogs; this way, everyone blogs from their chosen blogging platform, and their feed gets imported into the course site. In other words, people use whatever blogging tool they are currently using, and the software running the course (in this case, Drupal) adapts to the participant. This is a nice contrast to the usual approach, where all participants must adapt to the structure required by the LMS.

The site was built using the FeedAPI and the Feed Element Mapper. We have talked about organizing classes and building Open Educational Repositories like this in the past, and our main proof of concept site has been humming along for the last few months with no issues at all.

There has been some great development behind the FeedAPI; just last week, the folks over at Development Seed put out another screencast showing how they are extending the functionality even further.

Over at the Thinking Stick, Jeff Utecht has posted a series of questions and answers related to the hiring process.

At the outset, Jeff states:

You will notice that my list says absolutely nothing about integrating technology or how the teacher uses technology in his/her classroom. No, this list focuses directly on the skill set and the tools these teachers use for their own learning.

My immediate question, of course, is: why? But we'll get to this in more detail later.

The hiring process has always fascinated me, as it is a frequently overlooked element of maintaining the strength and vitality of an organization. I thought I knew something about hiring until, a few years back, I had the good fortune to be hired by -- and work for -- Trish King. Trish has since gone on to become the head of The Island School, and if you're reading this you know what happened to me, but much of what I describe in this post is influenced by what I learned from Trish. My experience working with her helped me become aware of the potential to have the hiring process accomplish more than just hiring great people. Hiring is an opportunity for a school to refine and revisit its priorities; thus, the hiring process, if done well, can serve as a reality check for how well a school is accomplishing its mission.

Back at the Thinking Stick, Jeff's questions are rooted in a specific context, that of finding teachers capable of and excited about using technology in their teaching:

Hiring teacher that do not get excited about teaching in a new networked space will not help to move any information literacy focused school forward.

Jeff breaks his questions down into 4 categories:

• Basic User -- this section deals with 4 specific programs (all Microsoft: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Publisher), and email.
• The Average User -- the 2 questions in this section deal with information literacy and internet filtering
• The Web 2.0 Teacher -- this section consists of 4 questions about various forms of participation/interaction within online communities. Blog readership, RSS, Google groups, etc.
• Teacher 2.0 -- the questions in this section play to some of the commonly repeated memes of the blogosphere: the rapidly changing world, the coolness of new gadgets, and informal learning

There is some great stuff here, but also some things that should be jettisoned. All of the questions in the Basic User section fall into the "Jettison" category. If I interview anybody in 2008 (heck, if I interviewed anybody in 2005) who possessed and publicized superb Publisher skills I would wonder why they had spent time learning a tool that could be replaced by competent word processing software for most needs, and would need to be replaced by real publishing software for complex needs. In attempting to gauge the technical proficiency of teachers, I usually ask one question: How do you use technology to streamline preparing your course curriculum?

This question allows for a couple details to emerge: it focuses on how tools are used; it reveals what tools are used, and when; it allows the interviewee to talk about their teaching, which in turn reveals details about their philosphy of teaching. A good answer to this question also could how the candidate connects with kids.

Also, the original question focuses on software released by a specific company -- in this case, Microsoft. This narrow focus sets too low a bar.

Interviews provide an opportunity for two-way communications on multiple levels. The stated purpose of an interview -- to allow a school and a candidate to learn more about each other -- only scratches the surface. Interviews offer a chance for the school to engage in word of mouth PR -- most teachers have a network of colleagues, and we talk, and a positive or negative impression gets shared. Interviews should also be viewed as learning experiences for both sides: whenever you have a set of educational professionals in the room, you have a group of people who have something to learn from one another. Additionally, interview questions can be guided -- in some ways a form of teaching with the test (with a hat tip to Eric Hoefler). This is why I like to ask questions that require an answer based in a practical application. As an example, having a candidate self-assess Word proficiency doesn't tell me much, but hearing about a lesson that a candidate prepared using OpenOffice in order to not further Digital Divide issues gives me insight into their pedagogy. And, if a candidate hasn't been using technology in this way, a guided question can serve as a wake up call that, perhaps, they should.

The Average User questions include a great question on Internet filtering. The final two sections -- The Web 2.0 Teacher and Teacher 2.0 -- are designed to gauge a teacher's familiarity with social networks/informal learning. However, questions asking about RSS readers, specific tools that create online communities, and a teachers most recent gadget sidestep the point: we want to find people that are creative. We want to find people who, in the pursuit of knowledge, aren't afraid to fail. We want to find people who can articulate their learning process. And, because we are talking about hiring teachers, we need to find people with the above qualities who want to teach and model these traits for kids.

Technological skills can be taught. Intellectual curiosity, to an extent; but caring about kids -- not so much. I don't care if someone gets excited about an iPhone -- because, I mean, have you seen some of the folks excited about the iPhone, or [fill in the name of gadget/service du jour here]? -- All the gadgets/technological interventions in the world won't elevate mediocre teaching.

And this is where we veer away -- at least temporarily -- from the discussion on hiring.

So, let's take as a given that one goal of the hiring process is to identify candidates with a propensity toward lifelong learning. Lifelong learning implies a network of fellow learners, or what many people now refer to as the social network. Tools don't create our social networks. Tools give us different ways to keep track of them, and different ways to contact them, and different ways to share information with them, but the ability to leverage the power of the social network should not be confused with the social network itself.

I find a comparable and related lack of clarity in much of the discussion around Personal Learning Environments (or, as Chris Lott accurately coins, Personal Living Environments). We all have our Personal Learning/Living Environment -- it's what we see when we open our eyes in the morning. A technological tool helps us organize it, and a great technological tool will allow us to create additional connections that further our learning. The technological tool many of us are working towards would allow easy export/import of swaths of our learning that we have stored online -- and its worth noting that open source tools allow for more portability than any of the proprietary Nings/Facebooks/etc curently out there. The promise of the technologically-mediated PLE is the promise of a tool that tracks, supports, and expands our personal learning -- and, I would argue, by extension, our quality of life.

And this is where we return to hiring: technology use has little to do with just using technology, and everything to do with connecting people with people, and people with ideas. This is doubly true when examining effective use of technology within education. I have heard the memes/arguments outlining the case that change is occurring rapidly, and at unprecedented rates. These also miss the point. Technology succeeds when it is invisible, and when it is taken for granted. If, in our hiring process, we separate technology use from teaching, the current paradigm will remain unchanged, and this will always be funny. Technology integration will have succeeded to a degree when someone can make one of these about a PLE.

Until that point, though, questions and statements about "the world of tomorrow" ring a bit hollow, and the role of technology in that equation feels overblown. The more relevant question is how we can model behavior that allows students to use tomorrow's technology to address the issues of our very distant, recent, and ongoing cultural evolution. While the technology around us changes quickly, human nature remains remarkably consistent -- across time, across cultures, and across levels of technological complexity.

In looking back on this, we've come a fair distance from your average job interview, but that's okay, because most job interviews are just dog and pony shows when they could be so much more. If these things matter -- and if you're still reading at this point, I'm betting you're either a bored insomniac, or that this does matter to you -- then we need to clarify our terms. In trying to wrap this post up -- which is what I've been trying to do for the last several paragraphs, with no luck -- I've been trying to figure out why Jeff's post struck a chord with me. I guess it comes down to this: in the teachers I have worked with, I have had a large amount of success teaching them how to use technology. However, I have also met teachers who were incredibly intelligent, competent in their subject areas, intellectually curious, but who didn't like kids. Some of these teachers were very competent with technology, but it didn't matter. You can teach technology, but you can't teach people to care. As this relates to the hiring process, I'd much rather filter on finding people who care about kids more than they care about gadgets. A caring educator and an informed technologist aren't mutually exclusive, but we need to start talking about them as things that go hand in hand.

In an article from the Sydney Morning Herald (which I found via, of all places, Techcrunch), "half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed ... on the tiny handset of a mobile phone."

Yes, you read that correctly. Novels written on cell phones.

As noted in the article, the cell phone tales often lack complex scene and character development.

Toru Ishikawa, a professor of Japanese literature at Tokyo's Keio University, points out that Japanese mobile phones allow their owners only a limited selection of kanji, the Chinese characters regarded by Japanese as more intellectually demanding than their native syllabary. "The size of the screen also necessitates that [authors] use short, simple sentences with basic words. If that's how you measure the quality of literature, then yes, the prevalence of writing like this will water down Japanese literature.

"But it could also encourage writers to be inventive with language in new ways. Language must always evolve."

However, with that said, I could teach a great unit on character and scene -- and their role in creating tension and theme -- by comparing texts that rely on character and theme with texts that eschew character and theme and rely on other elements of story.

But more importantly, this is yet another reason why folks who advocate that cell phones should be banned in schools just don't get it. People are using cell phones to create and share information. That is not going to stop because of an administrator who thinks that the kids these days are being distracted by all the newfangled gadgets. Cell phones are a part of the landscape, and we can either educate ourselves about them, and subsequently use them effectively, or miss an opportunity and slip incrementally further into irrelevance.

Coming soon to a tube near you:

I'm looking forward to seeing what develops on this blog. From their site:

Administered, designed, edited, and written by a global mix of students of varying ages, interests, voices, and points of view, Students 2.0 will feature content written by both staff writers and guest contributors. From Hawaii and Washington, from St. Louis and Chicago, from Vermont, New York, Scotland, Korea, and other points on the globe, these writings will be united in one central aspect: quality student writing, full-voiced and engaging, about education.

The moment for a student-centered edublogosphere has come. The staff at Students 2.0 invite their adult partners in education to treat their posts as they treat all others: as serious writing, as invitations to their readers to listen, reflect, agree, disagree, extend ideas - and above all, to create new possibilities, understandings, and insights in education.

Welcome aboard.

This release features both security and maintenance upgrades.

For new users, this is the best version to download and install. The download tarball contains a directory named "Instructions" that contains some instructions on getting started. For additional help, and/or to get involved with the DrupalEd community, submit issues to the issue queue or join the DrupalEd group.

Download DrupalEd here

For existing users, you do not need to download and install this tarball. Rather, you should be managing your upgrades by using the update status module. This module will help you keep your DrupalEd install current and secure. If you have an existing DrupalEd site, you should upgrade immediately to keep your site secure.

The code upgrades included in this release include updates to the Calendar, Organic Groups, Pathauto, Date Range Filter, and Tagadelic modules, in addition to an upgrade to Drupal core.

For more information on the security upgrade, see the announcement.

I'll admit it at the outset: I'm in a bad mood today.

But when I see things like this, and this, and this, all talking about running courses in Facebook, I can't help myself

(Okay, really I can. But in this case, I don't want to).

Read Facebook's terms of service.

The "User Content Posted on the Site" section is particularly relevant here:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

While IANAL, these seems to render the site completely useless for aspiring writers looking for feedback, as even a private draft shared among friends is licensed to Facebook.

So, if you want to give away the rights to your intellectual property, post it on Facebook. I'm not even going to get into the other significant issues, although they should not be overlooked.

Granted, the traditional LMS is a monolith designed to serve the needs of institutions first, teachers second, and students a very distant third. And yes, a social learning space is a vast improvement. But, a space needs to offer more than just the potential for social learning for it to be a wise choice. Facebook offers some generic functionality that is an improvement over traditional LMS's, but this says more about the sorry state of existing LMS solutions than about the suitability of Facebook as a replacement.

If you want a social learning space, you have a bevy of open source solutions that get the job done more effectively and allow users to retain control of their content and their user data. Moodle, Drupal, or even WPMU are a better place to start.