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.

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 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.

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: