The Latest in Open Source Online Portfolios
Although I missed Bill Fitzgerald’s Educon 2.2 presentation about online portfolios in Drupal, I’ve been studying his demo site for that presentation:
http://educon20.com/posts/4/user
I need to overlay his recent work with his book about the educational development of Drupal (http://www.funnymonkey.com/), but he’s stating some very intriguing ideas about a more simplified portfolio structure that servers several purposes at once.
We normally think of portfolios as a way to students to select and share work for assessment, but his approach is to build the portfolio concept right into the development of units by teachers. Thus, they are building and sharing multi-year teaching portfolios with each other, while also using the units with students, who develop their own portfolios in response.
He speaks of this as possibly creating more openness and searchable examples between faculty, much in the way that curriculum mapping has attempted in the past. We are spending next week building and revising a pilot Drupal system for middle school students to use for blogging (using ideas from his book), but at the same time we’ll try to think about larger issues like this as we map out the information and access design of the site.
Should be fun.
Tags: Bill Fitzgerald, Drupal, Educon 2.2, Portfolios
EdTech | Jim Heynderickx February 7, 2010
By demetri, February 7, 2010 @ 2:17 pm
have you looked at mahara or other plug-ins for Moodle for portfolios? (I haven’t explored these yet… i’m just curious about setting up another system (drupal) if there is portfolio functionality that might work in Moodle?)
By Jim Heynderickx, February 7, 2010 @ 3:23 pm
Hi, Demetri
We were interested enough in Mahari to build it on a test Linux server, but we have two types of reservations about it. First, the server and database setup was quite a bit harder than Moodle and/or Drupal, and the interface seemed too simplistic and with fewer options for modules, outside developer support, and integration with existing systems. We really like it’s concepts (private work space, shared workspaces, portfolios, public sharing), but not other aspects.
We think we can achieve the same with Drupal, but with more integration, modules, support and easier server management.
As for developing Moodle, we building the blogging system now because the one in moodle is too restrictive. It may be that there are modules for Moodle that would improve the blogs, multimedia and perhaps offer portfolios, but we have a different problem then. In our case, Moodle become too important, too fast to experiment with. Within a few months, it became the main homework management system for hundreds of students, and at that point we became very hesitant to experiment with new modules and add-ons, for fear we would destabilize the system. It’s like an email server now– too important to tweak much.
Thus, we like Drupal in part because it can be an optional development and pilot space for awhile. Scan http://www.kassblog.com/ for examples of how Drupal can be built out relatively extensively, for a more social platform than Modole (which is more of a class platform).
By Bill Fitzgerald, February 9, 2010 @ 6:58 am
Hello, Jim,
If you’re working along with the book, file handling has come a LONG way since my book came out.
The sections in the book about Views, CCK, and Organic Groups have help up pretty well over time (athough we have actually written some OG code that’s useful since the book was published).
But for file handling, we’re now using a combination of the Filefield module, with SWF Tools for more flexible formatting. I’m actually about halfway into a blogpost/screencast that will lay out how we did the media handling for the portfolio site.
Cheers,
Bill
By Jim Heynderickx, February 10, 2010 @ 11:12 am
Thanks for the comments, Bill. We’re installing modules today and following the recommendations in your book. I may email you for more info about your OG code, since that is the part I’m most interested in.
As for file handling, we’ll try out Filefield and SWF Tools. Are you still using FKeditor instead of CFKeditor? We noticed that there is a CKFinder module as well for file management, but Filefield looks more integrated with the CCK toolkit.
Jim