We had a good group watching the Effective Use of Social Media for Student Recruitment webcast last week.  The session was nicely moderated by Jacques Steinberg of the New York Times, with speakers Robert Moore a consultant and Greg Carroll from Furman University.  A couple of take-aways: Read the rest of this entry »

I want to like Drupal, but despite a fair amount of effort I haven’t been able to get over its shortcomings.  Four years ago we had a need to create a web-driven resource library serving dialect training mp3s to students.  I did some research and found a really great model powered by Drupal.  I’d heard a bit about the system, and after researching it sounded like a good fit for our needs.  But as I started digging into a test implementation I found myself feeling a little overwhelmed, so I hired a consultant to serve as a technical resource.  We continued that relationship over the course of 2 months, with weekly phone conferences which were really training/technical consultation calls.  I got the application up and running, and even expanded its functionality over the last year with the help of a really dedicated student worker.  Now I’ve done a fair amount of PHP work, and extensive work with other open source systems like WordPress — and this student worker also had a really strong PHP background.  Neither of us ever got to the point of really liking Drupal, or feeling like we wanted apply it to any other projects.  Why?

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From the Chronicle of Higher Education to Popular Science writers are exploring the future and place for OpenCourseWare.  The Chronicle reviews the ongoing costs, and that with budget cuts continued funding for open courses is tough.  Popular Science is writing from the perspective of an interested adult learner, wondering how interesting the courses are.  The conclusions from both perspectives indicate that the opencourseware movement is still trying to find its way.  And I think that until opencourseware initiatives are integrated into the core activities of universities and colleges, their future and purpose will remain uncertain.

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Twitter and other companies are smart enough to let their users innovate — see what catches on — and then integrate the successful features.  At the university can we empower students to do the same with classroom technology systems and course management/learning systems?  Why not?  Our users are certainly a cut above the average Twitter user — at least more selectively chosen!

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Educause just released their 2009 study of undergrad technology use.  Here are some highlights that caught my attention: Read the rest of this entry »

A great post by Jim Groom at UMW on the use of WordPress multi-user to aggregate content via technologies like RSS.  Places like universities are complex places with many affiliates who all have needs for their own web identifies, and control over these identities.  These can range from grant-funded projects to various centers to faculty research sites.  But there is also a need to be able to pull this content and re-mix it in various ways for various audiences.  For instance faculty research sites that feed content to a department site that highlights the latest doings by their faculty.  Jim describes this all better than I’m doing here so go read his post.  We have something similar running with MU here, although we haven’t really started to employ it in a production way yet (too much beginning of the year stuff to work through!)  But the bottom line is what sounds really complex is actually pretty easy to set up from a technical standpoint, and pretty cheap from a hardware/software cost perspective, when you use a tool like WordPress MU.

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