Dave’s Educational Blog » Blog Archive » Opensim/Drupal integration for education - proposal and call for help

Opensim/Drupal integration for education - proposal and call for help
June 24, 2008 – 11:05 pm

Well… i’m finally getting my teeth back into opensim and finding that there are a couple of things i’d like to get built over the next couple of months. We’ve already gotten a good start on the automated installer for opensim, but what i’d really like to do now is attempt an integration with drupal. I’ll be keeping my running requirements list for that integration on the openhabitat project page and will hopefully pop a few updates into here from time to time.

What I need
I need two things.

1. I need a good drupal/opensim programmer. Someone familiar with both platforms who can spearhead the drupal integration (or, if you like opensim integration).
2. I need some sense that there are other folks in the British Higher Education community who would find this integration compelling for an application to the emerge community for extra funding.

So I am calling it Generic American with a splash of Modern Vintage...I guess. I'm having one of those moments as a designer when the 'correct' images are present in my mind's eye, but for various reasons they haven't formulated on the canvas. Yet...but what the heck - I'm in no real hurry. I want to savor the taste of this one.

I absolutely love working on peacefield.info. It is a designer's dream, absolute creative freedom. An opportunity to shine, explore, create and innovate.

So what do I have to work with? Not much yet, and that is ok in some respects, because I don't want to ever steer away from my built in 'open source' aesthetic: championing the best of free fonts and hacked, and neo-Dadaist imagery. This new concoction hopes to blend cinematic urban cityscapes, with an adaptation of the ever trendy rustic earth tone color palette.(see my post on the the Neo-Green Aesthetic)

Actually, keyboardist R. Bruce Phillips says it best:

Peacefield isn't so "Pleasantville." It's grittier, even darker maybe -- or at least it has that side. Kind of like in the face of the ubiquitous B&W photo of the old man who lives on the street. He is generic, he is vintage. His face tells who knows what variety of stories? Some lovely, and some horrific, to be sure.

But there is peace still. His old weather face still attracts us.

Some may not see readily the quality of peace about this town. They might think it a contradiction, or irony, that the gritty, mysterious town has such a "nice" name as "Peacefield." Of course, America is full of contradiction and ironies, and people who don't get it when others do.

Technorati Profile

I've received a number of requests for help with 'Drupal Basics' in the last couple of weeks. Here's something to get you started, hope it helps.

I've been watching the growing number of universities adopting drupal for their content management, podcasting, blogging and wiki integration needs. Here's my current list.

• UT at Austin - Department of Rhetoric and Writing - http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/
• Rice University - http://sa.rice.edu/
• Arizona State University - http://www.asu.edu/
• UNC Charlotte University Center Information Technology - http://ucit01.uncc.edu
• Brigham Young University (BYU) – Computer Science Department http://cs.byu.edu/
• Bradley University - http://slane.bradley.edu/
• Washington University in St. Louis - http://artsci.wustl.edu/
• University of Calgary - http://www.ucalgary.ca/
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) http://fab.cba.mit.edu/central/
• Purdue University - http://www.digitalparlor.org/pwenglish/
• Michigan State University - Nondestructive Evaluation Laboratory - http://www.egr.msu.edu/ndel/home

Other Drupal Sites related to Innovation in Education include:

• connect.educause.edu - http://connect.educause.edu/
• The International Center for Integrative Studies (ICIS) - http://www.icisonline.org/
• IDEAL (Integrated Data Enhancing Arizona's Learning) - https://www.ideal.azed.gov
• Texas Digital Library - http://www.tdl.org/

If you know of any others - give us a shout.

News Update

The university’s Faculty Committee on Educational Technology (FCET) said the decision followed on an earlier pledge to support its view that UCLA students, “now require a consistent, powerful, and transparent application of our educational technology applications across disciplines and across the campus.”

The decision to choose Moodle over Sakai as its convergence platform FCET said, “was based on many factors that, over time, led us to believe it to be a better match for UCLA’s current needs.” But the school intends to continue as a Sakai Foundation member, and “as capacity is available, to work with others in the Sakai, Moodle, and IMS communities who are interested in working on data, tool, and language interoperability solutions.”

...this chart from technocrati is tracking the blogosphere's conversation of drupal: Posts that contain Drupal per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

I am beginning to make educators aware of my launch of campustechnology.org .

What is the goal of campustechnology.org?

Campustechnology.org focuses on everything related to 'open education, open content, open systems thinking, open virtual learning environments, and open source instructional tools, and the hardware that promotes an 'open schools' philosophy.

green.campustechnology.org

I also have plans for green.campustechnology.org - which will promote sustainable schools, environmental education initiatives, and all eco-friendly services, products, and programs related to learning environments.

I just completed a migration from wordpress to Drupal using the wordpress2drupal module. It was fairly simple. I plan on discussing this further. - more later