I've been working on a social learning site based on Drupal for the past two years as a student at Brigham Young University and am now working towards readying it for its maiden release into the world as a full-fledged Drupal install profile.
My goal with Eduglu is to:
a) Provide a superb out-of-the-box social learning engine to help departments, clubs, classrooms, and other campus groups communicate, collaborate, and learn with one another.
Reading through "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" by Marshall McLuhan, I came across this gem of a quote:
The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold.
And I think we all know how that's turned out.
I've been reading and thinking a lot lately about how to drive more adoption of the social learning platform I'm building here at BYU, https://island.byu.edu, and wanted to summarize some of the highlights of what I've learned. All of the patterns come directly from Ross Mayfield and Michael Idinopulos's writings so a big shout out to the great work they're doing at Socialtext.
I've started reading "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" by Marshall McLuhan and am greatly enjoying it. It's an incredibly dense read but so far, my efforts have been richly rewarded.
This is the second part of a (most likely) three-part series of posts I'm harvesting from a journal article Tim Olsen and I wrote earlier this year. You might want to read the first post for context, Organizing University Learning: Moving Beyond the Course to Micro-labs, before continuing here.
University learning is centered on the course. A pattern for learning familiar to any current or past student. Students and teacher meet 1-3 times per week for 8-12 weeks. There's lectures, readings, papers, projects, quizzes, and tests.
This, by and large, is an adequate pattern for many learning purposes. But no rational person would suggest this is the only workable solution or even what's best, or adequate, for all purposes.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the power of transparent learning or learning in the open. With blogs, twitter, wikis, and other social media tools, our ability to share what we're learning with others has increased dramatically. The shift from learning in private to learning in public is dramatic and chaotic, much like swimming from the edge of a river into the fast flowing current. All of a sudden you're being pushed and tumbled along much faster than before.
Lately I've been helping out a web development team at BYU develop a new calendaring system in Drupal to replace our existing all-in-one calendar. It's an ambitious project that's leveraging quite a few different modules from the Drupalsphere.
Some of the features include:
I recently (re)read a great post on Coding Horror which pointed me towards an article by Jason Kottke who noted that many successful web2.0 projects are a result of taking "something that everyone does with their friends and make it public and permanent. (Permanent as in permalinked.)"
Some examples:
