Drupal

For a K-12 language educator, teaching vocabulary presents some singular challenges. While we all agree that vocabulary is a critical skill, the agreement tends to disappear when it comes to how to present vocabulary in a classroom setting. Talking about words has the potential to expose students to the power and paradox of language; however, vocabulary instruction frequently descends to a balance between exposing students to as many words as possible, defining the words clearly, and keeping the class awake in the process.

The challenge: minimize the rote repetition, maximize the time spent using the words.

Over on the OpenAcademic blog, Sean Lancaster has asked the following question:

i appreciate the effort that is being undertaken to create a terrific online learning environment that brings various resources together seamlessly; however, i am curious to better understand how Drupal and Moodle are different in what they provide. i mean, why would a person use both tools at the same time?

The short answer to your is that the best option is a subjective determination -- kind of like Mac vs PC, etc, etc.

This has been in the works for a while, but now it's official: http://openacademic.org

This is an open source project designed to integrate Elgg, Drupal, Moodle, and Mediawiki. All code that fuels the integration will be released back to the community.

The project is a collaborative venture between the Elgg team and FunnyMonkey.

In the next few weeks, we'll be building out the infrastructure to support the project, including a development site to centralize the integration discussions and coding, as well as a svn repository for the codebase.

OpenID provides a method of Single Sign On (SSO) between multiple web sites. OpenID allows users to "claim" a specific url; this url identifies the user as they browse and join different web sites.

Other SSO options exist, including Shibboleth, SXIP, Pubcookie, and JA-SIG's Central Authentication Service. OpenID differs from other methods in a few ways, but the purpose of this post is not to compare or contrast the pros and cons of the different SSO options. This post is also intended as an overview to demonstrate some possibilities, not as the final word on what OpenID can or can't do.

We are happy to release a new bookmarks module for Drupal. Using this module, users can create and share bookmarks with other site members. We'll be checking this in to drupal.org shortly. This module works in 4.7.x, and is released under the GPL -- enjoy!

From the module's README.txt:

The userlink module allows users to save and share links. To access the full potential of the userlink module, we recommend using the functionality offered by freetagging, and the contributed module tagadelic.