Thursday, May 20, 2004

Education, 21st Century-Style - Laura Fording, Newsweek. Ask Virtual High School CEO Liz Pape what she thinks her organization has to offer high school students and she'll tell you in no uncertain terms: great content, curriculum not available in kids' regular schools, a chance to interact with people around [Online Learning Update]
9:35:19 AM    

DrupalEd and DrupalBlog: Preconfigured Drupal Distributions.

One of the biggest complaints about Drupal is that it's difficult to configure. I'll agree. As I've said in this discussion thread on drupal.org, most Drupal users know "that the reason that Drupal is difficult to customize is that it's like a block of clay--has to be molded for the particular site configuration." And I firmly believe, despite some of the comments in the same thread, that this is the number one obstacle stopping many people from adopting it.

Well, I'll admit. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to take the Linux kernel, assemble the necessary packages, and configure everything. That's what Linux distributions are for.

So in the interest of making Drupal easier for newbies, I've assembled two Drupal distributions:

  • DrupalEd is intended for the writing classroom. I say that not because it can't be used for other classes, but writing teachers are generally more interested, I believe, in discourse and community interaction more so than content delivery. And in this area Drupal excels. Looking for testing and grading modules? They won't be here. It's simply the configuration that Terra and I have been using for a few semesters now.
  • DrupalBlog is setup as in individual blogsite, much like what Terra, Clancy and I use. By modifying a couple of permission settings, it can easily be configured to allow for multiple authors like Kairosnews.
[cyberdash - cyberteacher cyberculture cyberlearner]
9:12:22 AM