Podcast Episode 6 - How I am creating a learning community with Drupal

August 26, 2006

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Discovery Educator Network leadership for the inspiration to do this…

At the DEN NLC 06 I heard a keynote presentation from Alan November, who speaks a great deal on our flattening world and how to give our kids a leg up in this changing world. The final straw was what I read during a pretty amazing little PowerPoint presentation brought to fame in the DEN world by the DEN’s own Aaron Smith.

So I decided it was time to teach my sixth graders the power of going from being consumers to contributors of content on the Internet. Their eyes grew wider and wider as time progressed and I told them that there was a chance that real people they did not know might read their blogs.

I didn’t exaggerate too much, I told them that folks might never read their blog, but the truth is at the very least, all their posts would be aggregated for each other to read.

I will keep you posted as to how the experiment goes. That’s really all teaching is anyway, right, one grand experiment where there truly are no constants save for the lack of constants, and the variable change exponentially year by year. That is why we adjust, adapt, and overcome.

Naturally, Drupal is open source, and you can try it on a live tester demo at www.opensourcecms.com, one of my favorite sites in the CMS/LMS, etc realm.

UPDATE: I started a Discussion Board forum on this topic.