EduCon 2.2: "Learning 2.0"
I just returned from EduCon 2.2 in Philadelphia - http://educon22.wikispaces.com/ - it was a profound wonderful experience. Here are three of my takeaways (which were the unique product of my eyes/ears/brain and conversations I had - you won't find them in the conference notes):
- The unit of analysis of teacher professional development, if a school is moving towards what might be called "Learning 2.0", is the "Professional Learning Community (PLC)", not the individual teacher.
- Schools that adopt "Learning 2.0" should choose an Intranet platform for the blogs/wikis/forums/etc to support school/home Web 2.0 projects rather than relying on external "free" sites. The latter cedes control over content and access inapppropriately and leaves the schools open to crises.
- One popular platform other than Drupal is Mahara and it is very well worth everyone's look. It interoperates with Moodle and is packaged to require less tech support than Drupal would.
Many schools tried Drupal but didn't have the right tech support behind them, or didn't pick the right modules, and had experiences that led to mistrust of the platform. However, the user base for Mahara is very small in comparison to Drupal, as will be the code base - it's a tradeoff.
If anyone is using (or has used) Mahara well as Drupal, a comparative analysis would be VERY wonderful! Please comment.
-Bram
- Learning 2.0
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Cross-posted: Drupal vs. Mahara
admin — Mon, 02/08/2010 - 17:52Jim Heynderickx, a leader in Instructional Technology, writes on K12Converge:
We were interested enough in Mahara to build it on a test Linux server, but we have two types of reservations about it.
First, the server and database setup was quite a bit harder than Moodle and/or Drupal, and the interface seemed too simplistic and with fewer options for modules, outside developer support, and integration with existing systems. We really like it’s concepts (private work space, shared workspaces, portfolios, public sharing), but not other aspects.
We think we can achieve the same with Drupal, but with more integration, modules, support and easier server management. [snip]
Scan http://www.kassblog.com/ for examples of how Drupal can be built out relatively extensively, for a more social platform than Moodle (which is more of a class platform).