Thanks for the DrupalEd, Charlie, and or this setting. I really appreciate your help and will probably keep lurking at the dialog. I'm getting a vision of how this might be useful to my students, though I seem to be slow at picking up on the implications of taxonomies, and haven't had time to explore a huge variety of the modules. But I go crazy keeping websites fresh with the evolution of events in the classes that I'm teaching, and I'm guessing that the community features of the program will be a great assist.
I'm a psychologist teaching management skills in a college of business. I've long leaned toward experiential methods, and for years this included group dynamics process skills. I've hosted simulations and found role playing inevitably contrived. I started having more fun delegating anything and everything I could to classes, and leveraging the vacuum thus created for learning purposes. So my style is to set out discussion groups on themes which will produce learning events on key topics for the class, and then involve every person in cross-matrixed teams for administrative functions for the class.. Human Resources, Scheduling/class moderation, Quality Control (evaluating every presentation and providing feedback), Spirit (mission statement development, community-building activities, recognition awards), team effectiveness facilitators, contribution assessment (monitor attendance, enforce policies, design and implement peer evaluation processes). I provide a base grading plan and the rest of the decisions are made by a council consisting of representatives of the functional teams. Of course it all falls apart with slackers and collusion, authority problems and the sorts of eruptions that management has to deal with all of the time.
Anyway, it's in this context that I want to develop a drupal to make Orange Blossom Incorporated (http://www.OBInc.US, and soon.. http://www.OBInc.US/drupal ) a transparent system with virtual extensions. Staff members set weekly behavioral goals, produce weekly jounals, functions post policies, council agendas, class time schedules, class decisions need recording in minutes.In addition, each student reads 3-5 articles a week and posts essays on topics. Essays are responded to with solid feedback from the reviewing team of the week.. and reviewers do the grading (rankings to be scaled). I'll take this class to 50, and I think I might just be able to hold it together with atavars in all posts, team hacking at their own team books and pages, forums, comments, news, and the rest. I need to get the survey tools working in drupal for weekly meeting reactions sheets, presentations evaluations, performance appraisals, etc.
Thanks for the comments and cautions here on HTMLArea. I'd been thinking that would be a great tool, and now I'm wondering if I shouldn't keep things simpler. Now I got to figure out how you got those 'replies' posted with your entries;-) -- nice feature!
So... thanks for your help in getting me started in this direction, and please wish me luck! Care and appreciation, Steve Iman -- sciman@csupomona.edu
interesting class structure
structuring the class around the principles of organizational behavior and management seems a very interesting approach, one that is inline with writing teachers' ideas about building online learning environments which enable the community interaction/group learning we value in the traditonal classroom. i also hope to do something similar with a techical writing class that will be working on drupal documenation: setup an open source community. so i would love to see how the drupal site works once the class is well underway :)
note: one thing that might help with your project is the drupal project module, the same module that is used for tracking bugs and issues on drupal.org. i have not worked with it myself, but i suspect that it could be useful, especially if it was coupled with the mail capabilities that drupal.org has (all of those issues are mailed to the mailing lists once posted on site).
thanks
Thanks Charles. As I get this thing going, I'll be in touch, and will share what it seems you might be interested in.
I did look at project, and was hoping it might have something of interest, but some of the terms seemed ouside the parameters of the context. I've just learned about "locale.module", however, and perhaps that would allow me to explore features with an eye to alternative heuristics which would be useful. Thanks for the idea, and I'll let you know. I'm so weak at some of the technical stuff though, I may have a hard time grasping how some of the features work. That last thing our good friends at drupal would probably need would be my students reporting on their learning projects;-)
Care..
Help!
Thanks for the comments, Charlie. I hope I can get this thing going and try it out. It's so hard when you're swamped with day-to-day teaching to get about planning the next quarter. I'm finding this is a pretty steep curve for me to -- just thinking about Drupal and how it might work. I've got my fingers crossed, but may have to conclude that I can't get my head around it.
Maybe you can help with one small thing. Perhaps I've made things too complex trying out features that I don't need. I've been playing with my drupal and registered as about 5 users and an administrator. I try stuff like the webform, which I want, and can't figure out how to get it to work. I spread comments around and have been trying to figure out what happens with messages and where they go. And then all of a sudden I see what a wad of files.. new nods, pages, comments I've got. I wonder what I need to do in managing content while I've got 50 students doing all kinds of essays.
And so today I was trying to figure out.. ok.. at the end of a quarter, how do I delete everything and start over? Well, if I go through the administrative interface to the comments page, I can see what a pain I'm in for. I'd have to click through to each comment, click delete, confirm delete, etc. Then the other content management page seems to appear in administration, where each node requires work. Am I missing something that should be obvious?
Care and appreciation.. Steve
for a new semester
well, there's not yet an easy way to delete out old comments and posts. that's sort of a classroom specific function in that most websites don't delete out old content :)
then again, if you want a brand new site each time, what i do is dump the database when i have the class setup before students begin using it. then i have a clean base for using later on (and this is where drupaled came from). just reload the database :)
good suggestion.. hmmm...
Charlie:
Thanks for your help and suggestions. I'm still working to set things up for myself and have a million questions. By the way, do you ever do some consulting on numb-nuts sorts of issues? (How did you set up filters and simplify the "formatting options" below, how can I use the taxonomy menu module when I have "articles" such that when one clicks "article" for pull-down options of library areas, one doesn't have a screen full of random postings, but an index page instead?... etc. etc. etc.)
I bet that in half an hour you'd have great answers for me on a number of issues, and a with a site visit you'd probably have many suggestions for alternative settings and link possibilities for me. Please follow up if you have a little time to help -- sciman@csupomona.edu.
Care and appreciation.. Steve Iman -- sciman@csupomona.edu
http://www.OBInc.US