Hofmockel.org

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!

Vicki Davis, over on her blog, bemoans the closure of Lively. The Google blog contains this very helpful advice: "We'd encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms." Now that's data portability for you.

As I've said before, using someone else's "free" service is a risk, analogous to crashing on someone's couch rent-free. While it can be useful, and even fun, as a short term getaway, it's not particularly viable as a long term strategy. And if you have student work hosted on such a service, and you haven't asked how to move that work in the case of a loss of service, you should examine your process of technology integration.

Earlier this week, Chris Sessums had some insights on this issue as well, as he described some of the problems users have faced with the Edublogs service. When you are using someone else's service, you are using it on their terms.

Of course, an easy fix is to host your own tools using open source components that run on open standards. My question: how many closures/abuses of trust will it take for schools to get serious about controlling their own data, and their own infrastructure?

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 formally submitted our Knight Drupal Initiative application last week. We're now officially in the pipeline; when we hear anything from the Knight Foundation we'll post details here.

Until then, this paragraph from our application sums up what we're trying to do:

We would like our project to help catalyze profound disruptions across several pre-existing markets. We would like to shift the definition of journalism; and we would like for this shift to diminish the reach and influence of corporate media outlets. We want citizen and community media to become more accessible, and barriers impeding prolonged collaboration between local, regional, national, and international groups to disappear. We would like to see schools and training organizations reduce their reliance on textbooks, as a secondary use of the tools created by our proposal is developing and distributing open courseware. On a more fundamental level, we want to see web publishing tools relegated to the level of the desktop text editor: something that we use daily without thinking or worrying about the details.

Since this site went live, we have released our blog posts under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Recently, however, we have seen several spam sites using our content to support click-through ad sales. As part of our efforts to combat this misuse of our content, we are changing to the Non-Commercial license.

We are open to people using our content in any way they see fit; part of the reason we are open source developers is that we believe in the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. However, ad-driven spam platforms are a parasitic form of web site; we don't want any association with that type of business practice.

See our About Our Documentation page for more details.

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.

From an article in the New York Times, it appears that the Princeton Review "published the personal data and standardized test scores of tens of thousands of Florida students on its Web site, where they were available for seven weeks."

According to the article, the breach -- likely caused by human error -- exposed some very sensitive data:

"One file on the site contained information on about 34,000 students in the public schools in Sarasota, Fla., where the Princeton Review was hired to build an online tool to help the county measure students’ academic progress. The file included the students’ birthdays and ethnicities, whether they had learning disabilities, whether English was their second language, and their level of performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which is given to students in grades 3 to 11."

In another folder on the same server, several files containing the names and birthdays of 74,000 students from Fairfax County, VA, were exposed.

On a related note, a prominent test preparation company will soon be looking for an experienced web security expert. The qualified applicant should be able to meet or exceed the skillset laid out in this document.

This post is adapted from my post over at Sylvia Martinez's Generation YES blog. Her post is titled Why open curriculum wikis won’t work. As my title suggests, I have a different viewpoint.

From my comment:

There is an enormous gap that is not addressed between wiki curriculum and delivery in the classroom — you allude to it in your closing when you say: “But hoping random lesson plans can knit themselves into a coherent curriculum is just magical thinking. At best, teachers may find a few nuggets they can adapt for their own classrooms.”

So, the problem here isn’t in wiki-style curriculum repositories. The problem is twofold: first, most existing repositories are content silos; second, the workflow of teachers isn’t considered in how open content is published. Neither of these issues are inherent in open content or wiki-style curriculum tools.

The Knight Drupal Initiative proceeds apace. Last week, two additional projects were approved to be forwarded along to the Knight Foundation, and there is a third strong proposal under consideration. If you are a Drupal developer, and/or have an idea about how to combine your love of open source software with your desire to change how we communicate, get a proposal in.

We are in the midst of refining our proposal prior to submission to the Knight Foundation. It's been a useful process, as it has forced us to take a step back from our thoughts and ideas and find a method of communicating them to a general audience. This post gives a summary of what we are thinking; if you are so inclined, please leave any feedback in the comments.

Need: What journalistic or public need will the proposed project address? How was the need identified?

Schools, non-profits, community organizations, and traditional media have all struggled with how to update their approach to their mission through effective use of social media. Over the last few years, while mainstream media outlets have made forays into these areas (albeit with limited success) smaller organizations have been constrained due to financial and technical barriers. Our Local Publishing Platform seeks to eliminate the technical barriers and minimize the financial barriers.

The Aggregation Hub seeks to eliminate another issue affecting smaller organizations ranging from local papers to community-run advocacy groups around varying issues: frequently, these organizations have limited knowledge about similar work being done by other groups. The aggregation hub, at its most basic, would provide a centralized resource for groups with a common mission. Over time, the aggregation hub could serve as a springboard for greater collaboration. With services like Twitter, we have seen the power of loose connections, and how in specific circumstances these types of lightweight connections can lead to more meaningful exchanges.

These needs were identified in a variety of ways: primarily, we observed common patterns of community involvement and development as part of our own work, as we are actively involved in several different online communities. Second, countless people – from clients to other social media professionals to heads of community organizations – identified a subset of these needs as issues they were struggling within their own organizations. As we talked with different organizations doing a wide range of work – from organizing resources around School-Based Health Care, to running online magazines for K-12 students, from supporting Action Research as part of Teacher Professional Development, to developing Community Published Journalism platforms, to building out a news and services directory to support agriculture among rural communities in Southeast Asia, a set of common needs emerged: people wanted to publish easily from a variety of sources, and collect these posts in a central place. Taken individually, these are all interesting projects; taken collectively, they have the potential to shift how we view “news,” and who has a right to “make” it. While these ideas have been around for a while (depending on how you want to look at it, they can be sourced to the advent of the Social Web or, arguably, to the advent of the web browser as Tim Berners-Lee first envisioned it, the promise has yet to materialize. Sophisticated, easy to use tools remain beyond the reach of many grassroots communities. This project aims to meet that need.

Proposed Project: Briefly summarize the project for which Knight Foundation funding is requested. Relate the project to the needs identified above.

As described above, the needs can be condensed down into two discrete categories

1. Local Publishing Platform: A more efficient means of communicating.
• Accepts input from web and mobile devices;
• Seamlessly handles images, audio, text, and video;
• Easy to install, maintain, and use;
• Can support simple group blogs to more structured channels or magazines;
• Can support publish-on-demand alongside community rating and editorial review.
2. Regional Aggregation Hub: A more efficient way of creating community knowledge.
• Low barrier to entry – participating groups do not need to make significant changes to their current procedures;
• Over time, accumulated content forms a searchable archive of information contributed by different community members and organizations;
• Provides a means of both highlighting the work of individual organizations, and amplifying the voice of loosely connected groups;
• The strength of loose ties -- shared content in the same “space” creates an initial connection that can be used as a starting point for more comprehensive collaboration.

Within both sites, various methods of “visualizing” a community can be employed. This visualization can be rendered based on geography, content, tags, users, frequency of posts, or any combination thereof.
In our proposal, we request funding to build these two resources. The Local Publishing Platform will address the needs of individuals and organizations as they communicate their message to a broader audience. This site will be available as a downloadable platform from Drupal.org, and will have a full suite of documentation describing how to install, modify and use the site. Our goal is to build a base profile that can be installed within the space of about 15 minutes (an average time of a standard Drupal install). This initial install will contain some sensible defaults to support several common publishing scenarios.

The second site, the Aggregation Hub, will be made available in the form of a site recipe. Like the Local Publishing Platform, all the code needed to build this site will be freely available for download from Drupal.org. The documentation will describe how to install and configure the site. As the expressed needs of the Aggregation Hub cover a broader range of functionality than the Local Publishing Platform, documenting the base install and additional use cases will allow us to build a tool that will be useful to a larger audience.

Both of these projects can be replicated and installed by any organization that wants to use it. To emphasize: this is not software as a service, and it is not a tool that an organization needs to rely on a third party to provide or support.

Two articles with an interesting contrast going on right now -- one on John McCain and a recent speech he gave on Georgia, and the other about a student expelled from Semester at Sea.

First, it appears that a speech given by John McCain on the Russian invasion of Georgia borrows, without attribution, from a Wikipedia article on Georgia (note-- for the Wikipedia article, I am linking to the revision current on the date of this blog post, as wikipedia articles change over time).

I first read about this at the Political Insider.

It appears that a Wikipedia editor pointed out the similarities. The Political Insider provides three example; the first two contain clear overlaps, where common phrases appear verbatim in both texts.

The third example provided on the Political Insider blog, however, is more interesting -- in the quotation, given below, I have highlighted all of the "to be" verbs in the Wikipedia version, and I have italicized two key structural elements:

Begin quoted excerpt

In 2003, Shevardnadze (who won reelection in 2000) was deposed by the Rose Revolution, after Georgian opposition and international monitors asserted that the 2 November parliamentary elections were marred by fraud (1). The revolution was led by Mikheil Saakashvili, Zurab Zhvania and Nino Burjanadze, former members and leaders of Shavarnadze's ruling party. Mikheil Saakashvili was elected as President of Georgia in 2004. Following the Rose Revolution, a series of reforms was launched to strengthen the country's military and economic capabilities (2). (Wikipedia)

vs.

Following fraudulent parliamentary elections (1) in 2003, a peaceful, democratic revolution took place, led by the U.S.-educated lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili. The Rose Revolution changed things dramatically and, following his election, President Saakashvili embarked on a series of wide-ranging and successful reforms (2). (McCain)

End quoted excerpt

A comparison of the two passages shows a reliance, in the Wikipedia quotation, on "to be" verbs. The McCain speech, however, uses none, and the resulting text of the speech is less verbose -- this is a common side effect, and benefit, of using fewer "to be" verbs: quicker, more active phrasing. However, the italicized phrases mark the organizational structure of the excerpt: Fraudulent parliamentary elections sparked the Rose Revolution --> which led to a series of reforms. This structure, along with a few key words, survives intact from the Wikipedia article to the McCain speech, and this is one of the more common forms of unintentional plagiarism that I saw back when I taught writing to high school students. Clearly, this concept is difficult for writers at all levels to master. On its own, this would certainly be a borderline case, and one that would merit a conversation on what constitutes original work, and what deserves citation. Within the context of the first two examples, however, this appears to be an extension of the plagiarism cited earlier.

And, on a related note, a student was recently expelled from the Semester at Sea program for plagiarizing from Wikipedia. Maybe we need to put all the speechwriters on a boat...

Over on his blog, Will Richardson has an interesting post on using the power of cloud computing. The comment thread also gets interesting; some responders conflate the idea of cloud computing with the more general notion of web-based tools and Software as a Service, but one of the other issues that gets either overlooked or undervalued is the issue of student and faculty privacy. It's also clear that in some cases, the terms and conditions of these services remain unread or ignored.

I left a version of this post as a comment on the blog, in addition to an earlier comment. As this comment has been caught in the gaping maw of spam prevention for the last 24-36 hours, I figured I'd post it here as well.

One commenter asks whether Google is liable for any data loss.

RE: "Do they (Google) have any liability for lost documents?"

No. See the Terms of Service

Two relevant sections:

"13. Warranty Disclaimer. CUSTOMER UNDERSTANDS AND AGREES THAT EACH SERVICE MAY CONTAIN BUGS, DEFECTS, ERRORS AND OTHER PROBLEMS THAT COULD CAUSE SYSTEM FAILURES. CONSEQUENTLY, THE SERVICE INCLUDING ALL CONTENT, SOFTWARE (INCLUDING ANY UPDATES OR MODIFICATIONS TO THE SOFTWARE), FUNCTIONS, MATERIALS AND INFORMATION MADE AVAILABLE ON OR ACCESSED THROUGH THE SERVICE, AND ANY ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND ANY USE THEREOF SHALL BE AT CUSTOMER'S OWN RISK."

and

"15. Limitation of Liability. IN NO EVENT WILL GOOGLE OR ITS LICENSORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, AND INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DAMAGES FOR INTERRUPTION OF USE OR FOR LOSS OR INACCURACY OR CORRUPTION OF DATA, LOST PROFITS, OR COSTS OF PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES, HOWEVER CAUSED (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO USE, MISUSE, INABILITY TO USE, OR INTERRUPTED USE) AND UNDER ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO CONTRACT OR TORT AND WHETHER OR NOT GOOGLE WAS OR SHOULD HAVE BEEN AWARE OR ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE REGARDLESS OF WHETHER ANY REMEDY SET FORTH IN THIS AGREEMENT FAILS OF ITS ESSENTIAL PURPOSE; OR FOR ANY CLAIM ALLEGING INJURY RESULTING FROM ERRORS, OMISSIONS, OR OTHER INACCURACIES IN THE SERVICE OR DESTRUCTIVE PROPERTIES OF THE SERVICE."

The convenience of the service is also mentioned.

RE: "As soon as we go to Google Apps, all our students will have a similar conventional email address so all students will be able to use Docs, Calendar, GTalk, Reader, Sites, etc. in a collaborative way."

This type of comprehensive user experience makes an ideal terrain for data mining. One user ID can be tied to chat content, email content, various documents (both created and read) and links followed from all these documents. Additional mining can include looking at groups of students, and student surfing behavior based on time of day. This is advertising gold, and it gives some amazingly useful information about a coveted advertising demographic.

For a cautionary tale on privacy, see this post that goes over the recent Viacom suit against Google, and lays out some of the privacy implications. Imagine that a media company has detected copyright violations coming from within a district. Then, read the article linked above. Substitute "Google Apps for Education" for "youtube." Then, imagine your district's cost savings vaporizing faster than you can say, "I wish we had invested in our own infrastructure" as gaggles of lawyers flood your district. For extra fun, imagine the lawsuit involves students under the age of 13. Considering that you can sign into YouTube with your Google ID, it's conceivable that many students would use their school account for their personal video use.

Seriously, folks. Think long term, just for a second. We don't encourage our students to cut corners. We should have the same expectations for our critical infrastructure. Open source virtualization options exist; these options would deliver some of the same advantages of cloud computing, but without selling out student and faculty privacy as the price of convenience.

Update: My comment has been freed from the moderation queue, and the conversation continues.