Drupal

This December 10th through the 12th, I'll be at the Do It With Drupal seminar in New Orleans. The name of the seminar notwithstanding, a quick run through the speakers list and the sessions shows that this seminar offers a solid blend of social web, web communities, and developing web trends, in addition to sessions on Drupal use and development.

Drupal use within education is on the rise; if you are already using Drupal, thinking about using Drupal, or contemplating ways of making your site more effective, this conference will have something for you. To receive a 10% discount off the registration, use the EDUCATION discount code as you checkout.

If you're going to the conference and want to meet up, feel free to drop a line in the comments. I look forward to seeing you there!

Last week, I had the chance to talk with Jeff Robbins at Lullabot about using Drupal in Education. This conversation has been unleashed upon an unsuspecting world in the form of Drupal Podcast 66: Bill Fitzgerald & Drupal For Education. It's a pretty free ranging, mildly technical discussion of some of the different ways that Drupal can be used within different educational contexts.

I spend a fair amount of time talking about using Drupal in Education, and every time, I am struck by the different niches Drupal can fill within educational organizations, ranging from courseware to portfolios to constituent management to online magazines and newspapers to public facing web sites, and other uses in between. And as I have these conversations I realize, again and again, that using Drupal in Education is difficult to approach as a unified topic, as each of the sites listed in the previous sentence has a unique set of needs, and therefore a unique set of design requirements.

Anyways.

It was great to be able to talk with Jeff, and thanks to him and the folks at Lullabot for making some space in their podcast lineup to talk Education.

Over the last few months, we have had the pleasure of working with Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, and the rest of the team behind YouthVoices. The site supports youth working in a variety of creative endeavors, from blogging to video production and discussions of video to digital photography.

In the process of building the site, Paul and Susan expressed an interest in embedding video from VoiceThread in the site. They have been using VoiceThread extensively, and wanted their students to be able to share their work in the site. We were already using the Most Excellent Embedded Media Field module to embed video. However, Voicethread was not among the supported providers. While the process of coding support is not particularly complex, it does require some time, and given the other priorities of the site we decided to postpone that development.

Fortunately, Paul and Susan know everyone, including Steve Muth and Ben Papell at Voicethread. Paul and Susan introduced Steve and me via email; I pointed Steve toward the documentation that explained how to code support for new providers (for the geeky among you, the best documentation is found in the code; take a look in the youtube.inc file in the contrib/video_cck/providers/ directory) and went on my way.

Fast forward a few weeks. I'm hard at work on something, when, lo and behold, like magic, an email from Steve appears in my inbox. Attached to this email: fresh, shiny new code with support for embedding Voicethreads! We installed it on a test site, ran it through the paces, and all worked perfectly. Then, we installed it on the YouthVoices site, where it seems to be working pretty darn well.

And this is one of the many things I love about Open Source. Paul and Susan had a need: embed VoiceThreads in their web site. Like many of us, they did not have the programming skills to code it themselves, but they know people who did. Through the power of an email introduction (and to this day, I have never met Steve in person, or even talked with him on the phone), the folks at VoiceThread and the folks at FunnyMonkey began helping each other out. Our collaboration met Paul's and Susan's need. And, now that the folks from VoiceThread have produced the code, anybody using Drupal and VoiceThread can benefit. For now, the extension can be downloaded here; pending a broader code review by the maintainers of the Embedded Media Field module, it will likely be bundled with the Embedded Media Field module.

I take my virtual hat off to Steve and the folks at Voicethread. They provide a great service, and a great model for working with people who use and love their service. It was a pleasure to be able to collaborate with them on bringing this functionality live. And now comes the fun part: seeing the work that the students produce.

For a good portion of 2008, I have been writing a book on using Drupal in Education. It has been a pretty incredible process, filled with rewards and challenges I didn’t envision at the outset.

Among the challenges: I began writing the book when Drupal 6 core was still in active development, and the contributed modules featured in the book did not yet exist in their D6 versions. As a consequence, I ended up writing two books to create one; the first version using Drupal 5 to help frame the scope of the book, and the second, final, version updated to reflect the improvements and changed processes in Drupal 6.

Among the rewards: a chance to see Drupal through fresh eyes. I’ve been working with Drupal for nearly four years now; writing a book targeted for people new to Drupal, and/or with a limited technical background, provided me the opportunity to slow down and examine procedures we had come to take for granted – things like adding a new content type, or adding a view. CCK and Views are critical to building a site within Drupal; we haven’t rolled a site out in the last couple years without these modules. The process of documenting their use helped me see the barriers that new users face when trying to learn these modules for the first time.

And while we are on the subject of Views, one of the other rewards of writing the book was being able to focus on the improvements between Views 1 and Views 2. The conversations and the development of Views 2 have been ongoing for over a year, and the work and effort has resulted in a tool that is more powerful while being easier to use. The ease of use of Views 2 in Drupal 6 shifts how we can develop, as Views 2 eliminates even more problems that used to require custom development.

The other realization I had throughout the course of writing the book centers around how we approach training in general, and Drupal-based training in particular. In discussions of training and usability, one main challenge revolves around identifying your audience: who are you training? What are their skillsets? What do they need to know to work effectively?

Most Drupal sites have at least three primary types of users: people who read content in the site; people who create content in the site; and people who maintain the structure of the site. There can (and usually are) overlaps between these roles, and some larger sites also have additional roles: for example, people who only add video content, or administrators who only edit/moderate content. And this is where things start to get interesting from both a training perspective and a book-writing perspective. Administrative tasks -- things like creating a new content type, building a navigational structure, configuring user profiles, configuring groups, etc -- are mostly strategies designed to meet needs. These strategies, once built into a site, provide a structure that people can use to do their work. The better these strategies have been executed, the easier it is to work within a site, and the more usable the site is for all stakeholders.

Which is all a long way of saying: site admins need to learn how to solve problems with Drupal. Other types of users shouldn't have to care. They are coming to the site to do work, and they shouldn't need to be bothered with *how* the site runs. From a training perspective, this results in multiple trainings around a single site

And with that said, the more we can simplify managing Drupal for site admins, the better. On more complex sites, we are already creating custom interfaces to make site administration easier, or less "drupal-ly."

Really, I'm still digesting the lessons (I think/hope) I have learned regarding Drupal, training, and usability. I'm going to be optimistic and assume that these thoughts will become more coherent, and if/when they do I'll share them here.

In the meantime, now that the heavy lifting involved in getting the book out is behind me, I'm looking forward to devoting more attention to other projects. In the upcoming weeks, we'll be doing some (much needed/long overdue) work with DrupalEd, and doing some more work with RSS Import (along these lines, but with an eye toward making this happen). We have some code that we have developed on some ongoing projects we need to release out, including some Drupal 6 code that can be used to create an amazingly flexible and simple online portfolio application. We're also still in the pipeline for the Knight-Drupal Initiative; as progress occurs I'll update this space.

We're getting very close to completing the application for the Knight Foundation on our Knight Drupal Initiative proposal.

Out of curiosity, I figured I'd run it through Wordle and see what turned up.