Learning the World

The Social Media Classroom is an experiment in using Drupal to drive a Web 2.0 classroom. From the web site:

The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools.  The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. 

Interesting.  It’s based on Drupal 5.x and makes use of a huge number of modules — 61 to be precise. Among those included are activitystream, advanced_profile, chatroom, lightbox2, nodefamily, node review, panels, organic groups, seesmic, tagadelic and many, many more.

I think Drupal is a good fit for this kind of thing, though I’m curious to see how they polished up the Drupal interface to hide the rough edges from students and faculty (which has probably been our biggest stumbling block in using Drupal with our “Soapbox” web app at the college).

I think I’ll throw this on my Mac when I have a chance, but my biggest concern about this is keeping it current. They appear to be doing regular builds based on updates to Drupal’s CVS repository, but I’ve run into problems over the years with one module update mucking up a bunch of other modules. I imagine staying on top of those interactions is going to be a heck of a challenge for the SMC’s developers.

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