Charlie Lowe announced that he assembled a group of writing teachers interested in using Drupal in education. The group is mostly comprised of PhD students and faculty in Computers and Writing, a subfield of Rhetoric and Composition studies. They plan to commit themselves to improve and extend the existing Drupal documentation. Read on for the full announcement.

Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 13:51:17 -0400
From: Charlie
Subject: A group to improve documentation and promote Drupal for education

I have assembled a group of over a half a dozen writing teachers
interested in using Drupal in education. The group is mostly comprised
of PhD students and faculty in Computers and Writing, a subfield of
Rhetoric and Composition studies (so don't think of us as your typical
literature teachers). As researchers, we are interested in both
electronic communication and using computers to facilitate writing and
learning. From what we have seen, Drupal seems one of the best open
source platforms for online classroom communities for the following reasons:

*ease with which each site member can have and post to their own weblog
*sophisticated control of content through taxonomy and node system (most
content management systems depend on creating separate modules for each
content type)
*wiki-like web authoring features of the collaborative book

At the same time, Drupal is also effective as a weblog/website for one
individual (in this regard, seems superior to MT). As our profession
becomes more engaged in using weblogs in the classroom, Drupal will be
particularly attractive to teachers since it can be used as a
teacher's main site and a classroom site.

Now, none of us are coders on the caliber of the Drupal developers. In
fact, some of the group has no coding training or experience at all. But
we are all writers who study how writing works in online communities and
what software is effective for classroom use. So what we can do is
better prepare Drupal for a wider range of users by decreasing the
learning curve necessary to install, administrate, and use Drupal by

*extending existing administration documentation
*developing site user documentation
*producing alternative formats for the above documentation, such as pdf,
to make it easier to work with Drupal help and instructions offline
*preparing Drupal distributions for classroom use and an individual
blogsite, pre-configured Drupal installs with distribution tailored help
*helping with Drupal developers with ideas for improving usability for
end users.
*developing additional texts offering suggestions for teachers on how to
use Drupal in the classroom
*promoting Drupal within our discipline

Dries has suggested that, instead of forming a separate Drupal community
to handle the project, that drupal.org could make a place for us within
the community.  If the developers are willing, we'd like to join in.

Over the next few months, we'd like to begin contributing to the Drupal
handbook. Some of the group are new Drupal users and have already been
taking notes about the questions they have for configuring and using
individual blog sites, looking for places to expand the exisiting
documentation. Myself and another teacher will be using Drupal in the
classroom in just a couple of weeks. We will be considering a basic
Drupal install configuration for the classroom and also hope to be able
to offer some usability suggestions at the end of the term (students can
be useful usability testers because about a quarter of the class is
always looking for a way not to complete an assignment and then tell the
teacher what that problem is :) This fall, one of the faculty members in
the group is teaching a technical/professional writing class. He wants
to make evaluating and assisting with Drupal documentation an integral
part of the class (more details to come later).

Thus, I'm hoping that through our participation, we can help to make
Drupal a better platform for all users.

Any questions, concerns, suggestions or objections?

Charlie Lowe
<a href="http://cyberdash.com/">http://cyberdash.com</a>

Comments

joe lombardo’s picture

What a testament to the hard work and collaborative effort of the Drupal team. While I think the documentation is off to a good start, there is certainly room for improvement.

Should there be a process for documentation changes and additions? Maybe a simple review and comment period, using the submission queue would be beneficial.

Welcome to the team! I look forward to the coming releases of Drupal with your contributions.


Joe Lombardo | joe@familytimes.com | My Blog
cel4145’s picture

"Should there be a process for documentation changes and additions? Maybe a simple review and comment period, using the submission queue would be beneficial."

Sure. We'd should definitely share any significant changes to documention before implementing them.

randybrown’s picture

Charlie: I've subscribed to the drupal-user list and will be checking in here. Interested in helping small way to develop the ed-specific installation of Drupal.

cel4145’s picture

Great! Don't hesitate to jump in with any suggestions :)

olav’s picture

I am about to deploy Drupal as platform for both the homepage and lab environment of my elder son's primary school.

Especially the lab environment caused me some initial head ache because it is based on TWiki, a very capable WikiWiki software in Perl. As, however, our children only use a very small percentage of the features of TWiki, I decided to implement a wiki.module for Drupal.

All the content ported from the original homepage is now based on this module, and some first labs with a class suggest that the wiki.module combined with Drupal's image.module greatly simplify hyper-linking and uploading pictures, which is important in primary school.

Regarding Charlie's post, we plan to publish our experience with primary school children doing writing excercises online and plan to bundle this with an easy-to-install Drupal distribution so we might join efforts in this.

--
Olav Schettler