Drupal is a popular open-source content management system (CMS) particularly suited to building community websites. Over 100 people gave up their Saturday to attend the first meeting of the Drupal Ireland group in the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), which was efficiently organised by Stella Power and Heather James (two keen Drupalers). The day buzzed with energy and enthusiasm with participants ranging from Drupal core developers to ‘newbies’ thinking about developing their first site. Topics ranged from implementing the semantic web in Drupal 7 to adding and displaying images in a lightbox.
The community elements of Drupal would seem to make it a powerful, social e-learning environment. Discussion forums, blogs, user-generated media, social bookmarking and resource sharing modules combined with user administration can turn Drupal into a virtual learning environment (VLE) … perhaps, a web 2.0 version of Blackboard.
Bill Fitzgerald’s book Drupal for Education and e-Learning (due out shortly) introduces these ideas to educators and learning technologists. Drupal Multimedia from the same publisher (Packt Publishing) shows how to create media-rich Drupal sites by embedding and manipulating images, video, and audio.
See the latest images, podcasts and video clips from the Mars Exploration Rover at http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/. A particular goal of the mission is to find evidence of past water activity on the planet. As well as improving our understanding of the climate and geology of Mars, this will help answer the big question “Was there ever life on Mars?”
I am looking for a tool that will enable a group (some with little technical experience) to create and maintain a website on a voluntary basis. The desired features include: open source, standards compliant, easy-to-use, secure with threaded discussion forums, news, RSS, calendars and media handling. It must be suitable for showcasing papers, presentations and video clips from an annual conference.
The Old: Our group wanted to move away from a ‘traditional’ website created in Dreamweaver as it depended on one or two people to maintain it.
The New: We looked at and rejected:
Drupal and eZ Publish - difficult, steep learning curve, probably more than required.
Moodle and WordPress - stretching them too far beyond their original purpose.
Ning - we wanted a conference site as well as networking (also it’s not open source).
Now we are looking atJoomla- which seems at about the right level of functionality and ease of use. I was going to add their logo but it is not allowed!
My habit of a lifetime is to write field notes in a notebook with a ballpoint pen… obviously a digital migrant. On a recent field trip I noticed some of our group used a mobile phone (not a Blackberry or PDA) to take notes. Seems sensible, though a bit awkward … but it had never occurred to me.
CAPTCHA is a security feature which adds a distorted image to web forms including comments and registration in this blog. Humans can read CAPTCHAs. Spambots cannot.
ReCAPTCHA uses a CAPTCHA to digitise books. The digitising process (OCR) cannot recognise some words in a book. The ReCAPTCHA presents an unknown word alongside a known word. If the known word is entered correctly, the ReCAPTCHA assumes the unknown word is correct and allows the user to continue. The ReCAPTCHA checks the unknown answer by using it again in another ReCAPTCHA. This process is repeated several times until the same answer is given sufficient times to satisfy the system as to its accuracy.
ReCAPTCHA is a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
