---
title: "Drupal for Educators and Academics"
subtitle: "From Modules to Institutional Cultures"
author: "Dominik Lukeš"
affiliation: "University of East Anglia, School of Education and Lifelong Learning, Centre for Action Research in Education"
web: "http://www.dominiklukes.net"
outline_version: 2
auto_title_slide: false
auto_thanks_slide: false
---

## Drupal for Educators and Academics: From Modules to Institutional Cultures
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Dominik Lukeš

University of East Anglia

School of Education and Lifelong Learning

Centre for Action Research in Education

[http://research.edu.uea.ac.uk](http://research.edu.uea.ac.uk)

[http://www.dominiklukes.net](http://www.dominiklukes.net)

## My Drupal Acad/EDU websites
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- [http://Bohemica.com](http://bohemica.com/) (subject info, community…)
- http://GlottalStart.com (social networking in language education dream - see [http://TuiT.glottalstart.com](http://tuit.glottalstart.com/))
- [http://Research.EDU.uea.ac.uk](http://research.edu.uea.ac.uk/) (“VRE”, departmental web)
- [http://eut.uea.ac.uk](http://eut.uea.ac.uk/) (information sharing)
- [http://childrenasdecisionmakers.org](http://childrenasdecisionmakers.org/) (research project)
- [http://careers.uea.ac.uk/showcase](http://careers.uea.ac.uk/showcase) (event support)
- [http://CADAAD.org](http://cadaad.org/) (community, eJournal)
- [http://PragueLinguistics.org](http://praguelinguistics.org/) (multilingual, association)
- [http://CogLing.info](http://cogling.info/) (in Czech, supporting book)
- [http://ConceptualMetaphor.net](http://conceptualmetaphor.net/) (subject info)
- [http://philblog.uea.ac.uk](http://philblog.uea.ac.uk/), HermeneuticHeretic.net (Wordpress blogs)

## Other Acad/Edu Webs with Drupal
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- Huitalk http://www.huitalk.com
- University of Calgary (http://www.ucalgary.ca)
- http://www.camot.net (research)
- http://research.yale.edu/swahili/learn
- http://nasacolab.org
- http://anthropology.net (Now Wordpress?)

## Drupal’s big GAP!
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- Drupal is great for massive projects (MTV, Sony, Mothersclick, Greenpeace…)
- Drupal is great for small(ish) personal or single project sites (http://info.ulrich-schrader.de)
- Drupal falls short for small organizations such as schools, departments or small associations with no budget for continuous website support
- This is not a technical problem but rather an institutional problem; institutions need to change perspective and processes but Drupal community should be aware of the gap

## The ‘truth’ about education
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- **Sectors:** Public/Private, Primary/Secondary/Higher/Further, Formal/Non-formal, Small/Large, Face-to-face/Distance
- **Stakeholders:** Students, Teachers, School administrators, Parents, Employers, Alumni
- **Materials:** Textbooks, Audio/Visual, Interactive, Realia, Tests
- **Processes:** Learning, Teaching, Studying, (Memorization, Projects, Case studies, etc.), Testing, Examination, Portfolio building, Mentoring, Socialization, Transitions, Logistics (scheduling, fees, HR, Privacy, …)

## Problems to solve
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- Present school
- Provide a “Virtual Learning Environment”
  - Set assignments
  - Create materials and tests
  - Communicate with others
- Administer courses, students, classrooms, timtabling
- Maintain privacy of students
- Involve others (e.g. parents)

## Drupal’s response
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- Direct
  - DrupalEd Distro (http://drupaled.org)
  - PhpEdu (http://www.phpedu.org.uk)
  - Quiz, Gradebook module
  - Moodle integration (???)
  - Old modules: Vocab, Question-and-Answer Sets, FlashCard
- Indirect
  - Buddy list, User points, Facebook integration?
  - Organic groups, Bio/Nodeprofile
  - Views/CCK (databases), Access control (privacy), Taxonomy, Book module

## Drupal’s competition
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- VLEs:
  - Blackboard/WebCT
  - Moodle, ATutor, LearnNI
  - **Digication**
  - “TuiT.glottalstart.com” (available for porting)
- Testing systems (questionmark, …)
- Others CMSs
- Social networking

## Where Drupal falls short
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- No (comprehensive/mature) modules for…
  - Creation of interactive materials (Quiz)
  - Assignment workflow (PHPEdu)
  - Classroom management (OG, distros)
  - Testing (standards compliance) (Quiz)
  - Privacy assurances (Access control)
- Mature Drupal shops dedicated to education (growing: e.g. Funnymonkey, Palantir)
- Small/Big dilemma

## The truth about academia
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- **Research** (surveys, interviews, experiments, thinking, literature review, )
  - **Research communication** (Establishing networks of trust (see philosophy of science))
  - Publication (books, journals, ejournals, websites)
  - Peer review (journals, conferences)
  - Conferences
  - Projects
- **Institutional logistics** (departments, teaching, supervision, communication)

## Academia’s Paradox
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- HTML (the web) was invented by academics for sharing and collaboration and it was OK but not all that good at it (a bit better than Gopher)
- Now that the internet is the web and it’s getting better all the time at sharing (social networking is academia’s bread and butter); academics are still living in the world of static HTML and email

## Problems to solve
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- Organize conferences
- Share bibliographies
- Anonymously peer review submissions
- Share writing
- Annotate
- Build communities
- Focus fragmentation
- User resistance
- Multi-institutional collaboration

## Key modules for Academics
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[http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-research-and-academia](http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-research-and-academia)

- Biblio, OAI-PMH, Z39.50 Search
- eJournal (CCK/Views)
- Footnotes, Table of Contents
- Conference / Conference distro
- Event/Calendar/Signup/Schedule
- Similar entries
- *Other modules:* CCK/Views, Organic Groups, Wiki, Book, Fileshare/Filebrowser, MySite

## What more could Drupal do
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- **Modules:**
  - collaborative writing projects, automatic pagination, better WYSIWIG integration
  - OG2List, email integration (not all web)
  - blogging projects
  - annotation/mark up(cf. GPL3 project)
  - Blackboard integration
  - Publish/Subscribe module
- **Other:** dedicated companies targeting universities and research centers

## Drupal’s competition/inspiration
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- Connotea (Social bookmarking for academics)
- CiteULike.org (social bibliographies)
- Sakai (http://sakaiproject.org - Java based Virtual Research Environment – VRE)
- Brochuware CMSs
- Moodle, Blackboard, etc.

## My conclusions…
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- Drupal’s has a lot of potential in the academic / educational space
- An individual or a small dedicated group can implement a ‘good enough’ website fast
- The edu/academic world lacks infrastructure for maintaining CMSs in general (funding, mindset) and needs ‘education’ and support from dedicated companies

## Discussion
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- Sites
- Projects
- Modules
- Other problems to solve
- Suggestions, ideas, disagreements
- …