DrupalJam in 7 tweets (Awesöme?!)

Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about DrupalJam 6 by commenting on 7 tweets that have a #drupaljam hashtag. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.

DrupalJam 6 was held in Amsterdam on March 19th 2010. I have never really used Drupal, but as a project it has many similarities to Moodle and that makes it interesting to me. Just like Moodle it was started by a single very sociable person with a vision, just like Moodle it is a PHP application and just like Moodle it is the de facto mindshare (if not market) leader in its field. All the similarities make looking at the differences even more interesting. Moodle has commercialised through a decentralised network of Moodle partners, whereas Drupal has chosen a venture capital backed route with Acquia.Martin Dougiamas has decided to commercialise the Moodle trademark through a decentralised network of Moodle partners, whereas Dries Buytaert has chosen a venture capital backed route by creating a company specialising in Drupal services: Acquia, allowing other companies to (often freely) license the Drupal trademark too. (Text deleted and added after a comment by Bert Boerland, thanks!) The DrupalJam was more product focused (in the sense of software focused) than your standard Moodlemoot. This makes sense: DrupalJam visitors only share the fact that they use Drupal (the contents of their site can be about anything) whereas Moodlemoot visitors usually also share a passion for education.

Let’s cut to the chase: During the DrupalJam I kept monitoring the #drupaljam hashtag using Tweetie 2. I then favourited every tweet that I thought was interesting and could be used for this post. Out of the twenty or so favourites I selected these 7 to share with you.

1. tkeppens: Het zou fantastisch zijn de #drupaljam sessies na de conf als screencast te kunnen zien. Drukke agenda laat niet toe er te zijn. : – ( #drupal
A quick translation: “It would be fantastic if #drupaljam sessions would be viewable as a screencast after the conf. Busy agenda doesn’t permit me to attend”. Technology is now at a stage where even for a non-commercial event, this should be feasible. Presentation capturing is something that I have been exploring in my role as Innovation Manager for Learning Technologies recently and it is a market with fast maturing products. I have looked at Presentations 2Go and am also very interested in Echo 360‘s offering (see here for a more complete list of options I explored). I believe it is good practice to separate the video of the speaker from the video of the speaker’s laptop. Does anybody know what is the easiest way of organising this on the cheap for conferences like the DrupalJam or a Moodlemoot?

2. ellishettinga: 2 werelden komen samen, #drupaljam in de Microsoft-/Sogetizaal, Microsoft als hoofdsponsor? Gezellig.
Translation: “2 worlds come together, #drupaljam in de Microsoft-/Sogetihall, Microsoft as the main sponsor? Convivial.” I have a distaste for giving rooms names of sponsors and have tweeted about that before:

However the fact that it is Microsoft sponsoring an open source event is pretty new to me and apparently something we should be getting used to.

3. ijansch: #drupaljam dangerous question in opening. ‘how many women are here’ is so eighties… Make them feel normal, not special.
Women in technology is a pretty contentious topic. Ada Lovelace day has just passed and could be seen as a symptom of more ground needing to be covered. DrupalJam did not have a lot of women attending. As nooble wrote: Op #drupaljam met 2^8 mannen en 2^2 vrouwen (“At #drupaljam with 2^8 men and 2^2 women”). I agree with ijansch that the organiser did a terrible job in the way that they brought this to the attention of the complete audience. Instead they should have asked themselves why this is the case and how it can be changed for the next event. I’ve recently listened to two podcasts that discuss women in technology as a (sub)topic: FreeBDSgirl and Fernanda Weiden both on Floss Weekly. Another interesting project to stay in touch with is Women & Mozilla. Open source projects should never forget that there are also many other diversity and inclusiveness lenses to take into account outside of gender.

4. ijansch: Would be nice if #drupaljam was on http://joind.in for talk ratings
It is always nice to learn about a new web service through a tweet. I checked out Joind.in and have decided to register for an account and try and use it at the next conference I am organising (Moodlemoot on May 26th). Joind.in allows you to add tracks and talks to your event and then provide an easy link to a summary, slides on Slideshare and a way to score and comment on the talk. They have an iPhone app and an open API (so other apps should be on their way). The only thing that might be a problem is that it doesn’t seem to allow for localisation: the whole site is in English, making Dutch summaries stand out a bit.

5. ekes: apache solr stats #drupal understand what people look for on your site. Genius. @robertDouglass #drupaljam
The first tweet that has any relation to Drupal. Apache Solr is an interesting Apache project that sits on top of the Lucene search engine library. It is a very fully featured and fast search platform with things like faceted search out of the box. There is a Drupal project that integrates Solr with Drupal, bringing very rich search functionality to any Drupal website. Good stuff!

6. askibinski: Just learned about the ‘Levensthein distance’. A way to compare similarities between strings. #drupaljam
This tweet had me whipping out my phone to do a Wikipedia search (I use the excellent and free Wikipanion app for that) on Levensthein distance. It is a way to see how similar two strings of text are measured by their edit distance: how many steps do you need to transform one string into another. I have no idea why this concept came up during DrupalJam (I wasn’t at the talk), but I do now have another trivia under my belt.

7. bramveen: Maybe the speaker should remove his chewing gum #drupaljam
Every open source project seems to have a least one “rock star” and Morten Heide self-named “King of Denmark” was the rock star of the day. Morten loves umlauts, the name of his company is “geek Röyale“, and his two favourite words are “awesöme” and “shit”.

Morten is a web designer and was giving the final talk of the day, speaking about the new way of doing themes in the as yet unreleased Drupal 7. The only problem with the talk was that Morten was chewing gum while talking. That and the rest of his behaviour turned the talk into more of a show about Morten then a talk about Drupal theming. Afterwards Mortendk showed some remorse on Twitter: #drupaljam next time im gonna drop The gum it was an #epicfail hope ppl got The awesome shit in drupal 7 anyways. I would say: Keep the gum, the world needs more completely self-involved rock stars…

My Top 10 Tools for Learning

Number 10 by Flickr user Downing Street, CC licensed

Jane Hart does the educational technology community a big favour by compiling top 10 lists of learning tools which are send to her by educational professionals from around the world. She creates a top 100 list that is an interesting reflection of current (and past) popular technology in education and learning.

Each year you get a chance to update your own list. I haven’t done that this year, so here goes:

Moodle – This open source course management system is my bread and butter and has led me into the free software world. Its community of teachers and its enlightened leadership is second to none.

Google Reader – The only way that I am able to keep up with the things that I want to read. Outsourcing my subscriptions and read/unread statusses to Google makes it possible for me to use my laptop, my cellphone or any random computer and see the same information. I just wish there was an open source project that would do the same and could run on my own server.

Moodle – This open source course management system is still very much my bread and butter and has led me into the free software world. Its community of teachers and its enlightened leadership is second to none.
Google Reader – The only way that I am able to keep up with the things that I want to read. Outsourcing my subscriptions and read/unread statusses to Google makes it possible for me to use my laptop, my cellphone or any random computer and see the same information.
Ubuntu – My operating system of choice. Not only does it give me the freedom to use it how I want, it is also the source of much learning about how computers work. I see it as a critical enabler.
Google Search – Still the best search technology around. I have a couple of stock queries that I do all the time like “better than x” if I want to find an alternative to x and I can usually find what I need in one or two queries.
Wikipedia – More and more the easiest way to find a piece of factual information. I use a lot of materials from the Wikimedia Commons in most things that I create. Wikipedia has been decisive in many kitchen table arguments.
WordPress – I have been blogging for over a year now and the process of writing for an audience has forced me to think deeper about my profession. Writing blogs could a central part of many courses. It really is a heavily underutilised pedagogical tool. I have to admit I don’t run my own installation, but trust the excellent WordPress.com service.
Chromium – Most of the work that on do on my computer is done in a browser window. Google’s open source effort is now my default browser. This is mainly because of it’s amazing speed and the Omnibox. Read this blog post for more of my reasons.
LAMP = Apache, MySQL, PHP – This technology makes it trivial for a non-programmer like me to create my own tools that do what I need them do. Using the APIs of the different web services I can create my own mashups.
Youtube – This has become an indispensable resource. Stuck in a level on a Nintendo DS game? Type the games name and a level to see a walk through. There are endless tutorials on anything that you might want to learn.
Delicious – The social bookmarking site not only remembers all I have seen that is interesting on the net, but it is also an excellent way of finding many good sites on a topic. My slowly expanding network of del.icio.us friend tag interesting pages for me to look at.

It wasn’t intentional, but I now notice that the only things that are not web applications are an operating and a browser (the bare essentials). That must be of some significance!

Corporate Social Networking Part 1: Elgg

Over the next couple of weeks I will write a series of blog posts about corporate social networking. I will be looking at some open source tools that can facilitate the creation of these kind of networks in a corporate setting and I will try and make a business case for why you want to start experimenting with these kind of tools in your company.

In this first post I will take a look at Elgg, a tool that will allow you to build your own social network. You should see it as an open source version of Facebook, Ning or Hyves. Unlike these services, Elgg will allow you to retain full control of your implementation and of your data.

Elgg has been around for a couple of years now. Recently the core developers have completely rewritten the application and version 1.0 came out on August 18th 2008. They have used the pretty standard PHP/MySQL combination to implement their own MVC framework. This will allow you to easily change the user interface without changing the functionality and makes extending the existing functionality a pain-free experience.

In 2008 Elgg won the best open source social networking award in Infoworld’s Best of Open Source Awards. Examples of Elgg sites are:

Community@Brighton: a social networking system for students and staff at the University of Brighton. This university has been using Elgg for quite a while now (they seem to use the old platform still), using it for blogging, sharing of different media files and for the creation of internal communities.
Rucku: a virtual clubhouse for rugby. Rugby enthusiasts share forums, videos and pictures. Note how even the language of the site is rugby themed (e.g. “sledge” instead of “message”).
Harvard University: recently some courses were taught in an Elgg environment instead of in the standard (home brew) Harvard LMS. Weekly blogging instead of threaded discussions was the central activity. This way the content of the posts stayed with the students even after the course had finished.

If I were to summarise Elgg in a couple of words I would say that the core functionality revolves around a dashboard, user profiles and groups and that these are linked through tags and a flexible access infrastructure allowing users to build their own networks.

Each user has their own dashboard. This is their launch page and contains widgets showing recent activity in the network:

The dashboard, each user has one (click to enlarge)

Users can add their own widgets to this page by clicking on the “Edit page” link and using the drag and drop interface (Elgg makes extensive use of jQuery) to fashion the page to their own liking:

Adding your own widgets to the page (click to enlarge)

Developing your own widgets is trivial for any web-programmer. This will allow Elgg to play nicely with other systems (e.g. a Twitter widget already exists). The Elgg developers write on their homepage: “We are committed to open source, data portability and transparency”. Their support for OpenID, OpenSocial, openData and Elgg’s RESTful API clearly demonstrate this. Because of this it is very possible to use Elgg data inside another application.

There is a user profile for every member of the site. Users can upload their own picture and fill in a couple of profile fields. These fields can be created by the site administrator and will allow connecting different users on the basis of their interests, location or field of work for example. The user profile has the same widget based approach, so that the user can decide what people see when they view their profile:

User profile, note the Twitter widget (click to enlarge)

One of Elgg’s most celebrated features is the way that groups can be created inside the system. Users can start their own groups around projects or communities of practice. A group has their own files, forums, activity stream and pages and can have open or closed membership:

Every thing that is added by users to the system will allow multiple tags to be attached. These tags make finding relevant materials in the network very easy:

A search for the term "Elgg" (click to enlarge)

Finally the access controls make it a snap for users to share any of their materials with the world, their friends, a particular group of friends, a group in Elgg or to keep them private. You can set these permissions for anything, be it user profile information, uploaded files or blog posts:

All the other functionality inside Elgg is completely modular and can be turned on or off with a couple of clicks. The main modules that are relevant for businesses are:

Each user can have their own blog. The blog is quite rich in functionality: it has comments, pingbacks can be installed and access to each post can be set.
The files repository will allow the uploading of any file type. Files can have a description and tags and their level of access can be set. Image files get special treatment, automatically allowing them to be viewed in a gallery.
Messaging comes in two forms. There is an internal messaging system allowing one to one private messaging and there is a facebook-like “wall” connected to the user profile page.
Elgg calls their wiki functionality “Pages”. It is a mix between a true wiki and a collaborative hierarchical web-page writing tool. Each page has separate access permissions for reading and for writing. A very simple revision history is kept.
The social bookmarking tool (including a bookmarklet) allows users to store their favourite websites and share these with selected friends. Websites can be tagged of course.
A user can easily update their status. Each status update is stored so that this can also function as a microblogging platform, especially in combination with the activity river which shows the most recent updates of your friends. There is a plugin that will push status updates to Twitter.
Many information streams inside the Elgg installation have their own RSS feeds pushing the content to your feedreader of choice.

In the next social networking post I will try to build a business case for a tool like Elgg inside corporations. Why would it be useful to have this inside your business? I can imagine that you as a reader might have ideas of what could be the added value or maybe you have some examples of businesses that are already doing this. It would be great to get your input and feedback in the comments.