New release of Eduglu

I'm pleased to announce the second release of Eduglu! Eduglu is a Drupal distribution designed to support social learning at institutions of higher learning. It's available for download now at http://eduglu.com/download-eduglu. Since the first release, We've squashed dozens of major and minor bugs and made the significant jump to the Spaces 3 and Context 3.

From British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott:

Conversation is not . . . a contest where a winner gets a prize, . . . it is an endless, unrehearsed, intellectual adventure in which in imagination we enter a variety of modes of understanding the world and ourselves. And, we are not disconcerted by the differences, or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of it all.

I really like that. Good conversation is good for the soul.

Two questions from moderator:

* What will the next generation of learning tools look like?
* What do Universities need to do to prepare?

Marko Turpeinen from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology demoing Sizzle.

DrChuck warning that what works for small sizes don't scale. Too much friction to using these tech tools. There should be a one-click install.

First Keynote from Howard Rheingold.

Started teaching a digital journalism class then moved on to teaching digital literacy. When first started teaching classrooms, thought about how to use online media to overcome disadvantages of teaching in classrooms namely a) not all teachers good at speaking extemporously and b) classroom learning militates against thoughtfulness, can't share thought that occurs an hour after class.

First started experimenting with using online tools for learning in 1995.

The first alpha of Eduglu is out and ready for testing. Download it at http://community.eduglu.org/release-announcement/node/8

What I hope to accomplish with this first Alpha?

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.

1. Schools exist to prepare students to thrive in the environment where they live.
2. The environment we live in has changed significantly in the past fifty years from a mechanistic to an electronic world.

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.

Pattern 1: Launch Broad then Deep

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.