OK, so it’s turning out to be more like a monthly report, but I’m “on holidays” at the moment :-)
Slowing down a little…
We’ve settled (slowed?) down quite a bit over the last few weeks - with three main contributors (Leigh Blackall, Sean Fitzgerald and myself) posting to the blended learning email group. After a few Skype sessions with Sean, we’ve identified a few different ideas and I’m currently looking at whether Drupal might be able to accomodate our varied ideas.
Sean’s keen to include a database of links related to blended learning with a rating system of sorts, which will be a great resource if we can get it up and running (and populated). I’m keen to get up some basic workshop/web-quest resources to help educators transition to the new tools of the web, preferably splashed throughout with rich-content. Leigh’s creating some screen-casting tutorials which will be unreal demonstrations of the tools being used in action. Hopefully we can combine all of this into a useful and focused resource.
Two great discoveries
We recently discovered a great webquest by Trevor Ettenborough, and after contacting Trevor, he was more than happy to let us use his web-quest under a Share-Alike Creative Commons License.
James from Incorporated Subversion (another Aussie venture based in Melbourne) generously set us up with our own Blended Learning Drupal site so we could test its suitability to a collaborative resource development. I’ve started transfering Trevor’s Webquest so that we can try out Drupal and actually work on a simple resource… but that’s where I’m currently up to.
The short-term future
Another priority at the moment is to find out if Drupal can support Sean’s database of rated resources ‘out-of-the-box’ or whether we’ll need to do some development ourselves (which could be fun too! but time consuming).
I can’t hide the fact that I’m blown away by the flexibility and ease-of-use of Drupal. It has an incredible number of modules that allow you to configure the system with all the collaborative features that you want (wikis, forums, blogs, rss-aggregation)… it really is amazing. I’m feeling like I want to register a simple domain and just start going ahead with a Drupal site… we can only evaluate so long… but even then there are issues to discuss.
I really would like to get something ready to use in some professional development workshops, such as the Getting Started with Blogging in Education web-quest, but it’s hard to find enough time to get it ready (and there are always other issues popping up needing time to resolve). Why is there never enough time allocated to complete tasks satisfactorily?