I must have blinked when this was announced, but OpenAcademic.org sounds like a perfect scenario. Development efforts to integrate some of the biggest open source tools used in online education. It sounds like the goal is to come up with a way for Drupal, Elgg, Mediawiki and Moodle to all play nicely together, in such a way as to be easily deployable and maintainable by even the smallest school. Rather than attempting to build The One True LMS, they’re taking the approach of playing to the strengths of the available tools, and putting the effort into integration.
The really cool thing is a documented commitment by the OpenAcademic.org team to not fork projects, and to contribute any code to the relevant communities. So, they’ll be hacking on each of these applications directly, with all improvements freely available to everyone.
Personally, I think this is one of the biggest and coolest developments in online education for the year. I’m ashamed that I missed the announcement almost a month ago.
I’ve been spending almost all of my time lately in Drupal, with some time in Moodle. It’s pretty obvious that each has its own strengths (and weaknesses), and that spending effort to duplicate each package’s feature set would be wasteful and counterproductive. Having an effective way to integrate these various tools would be amazingly powerful, especially as more applications, platforms and tools are brought into the mix.
Imagine an elearning ecosystem that ties in Drupal, Mediawiki, Elgg, Moodle, Blackboard, WebCT, Flickr, del.icio.us, Facebook, YouTube, etc… in a flexible system that can adapt to any pedagogical needs. Sweet.
I must have blinked when this was announced, but OpenAcademic.org sounds like a perfect scenario. Development efforts to integrate some of the biggest open source tools used in online education. It sounds like the goal is to come up with a way for Drupal, Elgg, Mediawiki and Moodle to all play nicely together, in such a way as to be easily deployable and maintainable by even the smallest school. Rather than attempting to build The One True LMS, they’re taking the approach of playing to the strengths of the available tools, and putting the effort into integration.
The really cool thing is a documented commitment by the OpenAcademic.org team to not fork projects, and to contribute any code to the relevant communities. So, they’ll be hacking on each of these applications directly, with all improvements freely available to everyone.
Personally, I think this is one of the biggest and coolest developments in online education for the year. I’m ashamed that I missed the announcement almost a month ago.
I’ve been spending almost all of my time lately in Drupal, with some time in Moodle. It’s pretty obvious that each has its own strengths (and weaknesses), and that spending effort to duplicate each package’s feature set would be wasteful and counterproductive. Having an effective way to integrate these various tools would be amazingly powerful, especially as more applications, platforms and tools are brought into the mix.
Imagine an elearning ecosystem that ties in Drupal, Mediawiki, Elgg, Moodle, Blackboard, WebCT, Flickr, del.icio.us, Facebook, YouTube, etc… in a flexible system that can adapt to any pedagogical needs. Sweet.
Just saw a tip about creating “feed books” in Elgg – subscribing to a bunch of RSS feeds that will be used to populate a blog. It allows filtering by keywords, so you don’t have to have your offsite cat blog post aggregated along with your Chem 350 research notes.
Combined with the cool community stuff in Elgg, I’m wondering how close this might get to EduGlu?
ps. I’m reading Cryptonomicon too much lately. The title of this post almost looks Outer Qwghlmian. Code talkers beware…
Just saw a tip about creating “feed books” in Elgg – subscribing to a bunch of RSS feeds that will be used to populate a blog. It allows filtering by keywords, so you don’t have to have your offsite cat blog post aggregated along with your Chem 350 research notes.
Combined with the cool community stuff in Elgg, I’m wondering how close this might get to EduGlu?
ps. I’m reading Cryptonomicon too much lately. The title of this post almost looks Outer Qwghlmian. Code talkers beware…
Another thinking-out-loud topic here… I’m re-evaluating weblogs.ucalgary.ca – what’s worked, what hasn’t, what could be done differently. It’s best to take a long, hard look at it before it really takes off. There are a bunch of users in it now, but a critical evaluation of it is pretty important before we get into the hundreds of users level… I’m also colouring evaluation in light of the PLE/EduGlu concepts being rolled around. Perhaps the need to have a communal blog hosting service on campus is less important, or unnecessary, if that function is pushed into an aggregator service where it should be, rather than in the hosting side of things.
Elgg has improved a heck of a lot in the year since I quietly rolled out weblogs.ucalgary.ca (powered by Drupal at the moment). I really like the simplicity of the Elgg interface – helped by the fact that it’s not trying to be a Swiss Army Knife, as Drupal is.
In the back of my mind, I had been hoping to keep WordPress MultiUser as the backup plan in case Drupal didn’t work out. Elgg might be a more appropriate alternative.
Also, it’s not that Drupal isn’t working out, it’s just that weblogs.ucalgary.ca doesn’t have the right feel – it’s not a personal environment, it’s a commune. That makes it harder for an individual to find their own voice in the mishmash of common spaces within it. Elgg and WPMU are better as individual spaces, with varying degrees of built-in aggregativeness (Elgg has some cool Friends features, WPMU would rely on external aggregation).
So, in assessing plans B and C, has anyone successfully migrated from Drupal to Elgg or WPMU?
Another thinking-out-loud topic here… I’m re-evaluating weblogs.ucalgary.ca – what’s worked, what hasn’t, what could be done differently. It’s best to take a long, hard look at it before it really takes off. There are a bunch of users in it now, but a critical evaluation of it is pretty important before we get into the hundreds of users level… I’m also colouring evaluation in light of the PLE/EduGlu concepts being rolled around. Perhaps the need to have a communal blog hosting service on campus is less important, or unnecessary, if that function is pushed into an aggregator service where it should be, rather than in the hosting side of things.
Elgg has improved a heck of a lot in the year since I quietly rolled out weblogs.ucalgary.ca (powered by Drupal at the moment). I really like the simplicity of the Elgg interface – helped by the fact that it’s not trying to be a Swiss Army Knife, as Drupal is.
In the back of my mind, I had been hoping to keep WordPress MultiUser as the backup plan in case Drupal didn’t work out. Elgg might be a more appropriate alternative.
Also, it’s not that Drupal isn’t working out, it’s just that weblogs.ucalgary.ca doesn’t have the right feel – it’s not a personal environment, it’s a commune. That makes it harder for an individual to find their own voice in the mishmash of common spaces within it. Elgg and WPMU are better as individual spaces, with varying degrees of built-in aggregativeness (Elgg has some cool Friends features, WPMU would rely on external aggregation).
So, in assessing plans B and C, has anyone successfully migrated from Drupal to Elgg or WPMU?