EduGlu Sandbox

I saw this earlier today over at groups.drupal.org --

Kyle Matthews and Clint Rogers built a Drupal site in suppport of a web analytics class. The site aggregates student blogs and expert blogs; this way, everyone blogs from their chosen blogging platform, and their feed gets imported into the course site. In other words, people use whatever blogging tool they are currently using, and the software running the course (in this case, Drupal) adapts to the participant. This is a nice contrast to the usual approach, where all participants must adapt to the structure required by the LMS.

The site was built using the FeedAPI and the Feed Element Mapper. We have talked about organizing classes and building Open Educational Repositories like this in the past, and our main proof of concept site has been humming along for the last few months with no issues at all.

There has been some great development behind the FeedAPI; just last week, the folks over at Development Seed put out another screencast showing how they are extending the functionality even further.

Well, it sounds as if everything went well last night with the arrival of our 15 participants in this year’s Pakistani Educational Leadership Institute, or PELI for short. Although their departure wasn’t all that smooth as it appears that they were caught up in the chaos surrounding a siege on a mosque. Apparently the shooting started while they were leaving for the airport and they just made the airport before the curfew went into effect! Our ITA colleague in Pakistan, Beena Raza, is still sorting through some things back there.

Their transit took them through Heathrow and even with all the recent trouble over there, it appears that it didn’t slow them down as they made it into Logan Airport around 8:30 p.m. EST last evening. As I type, they are probably still making up for lost sleep and aren’t due to make an appearance until our brunch around 11 a.m. local.

The focus of this year’s Institute is on assessment. As this is the fourth year that the Institute has run, it was felt that it was time to bring over some of the senior educational leadership and close the loop on our prior work. I’ll keep folks apprised of our progress as the next three weeks unfold.

[tags]peli, peli2007, pakistan, education, leadership[/tags]

Powered by ScribeFire.