The Moss-Free Stone

Greg Rodriguez from San Antonio ISD made the presentation in place of Miguel Guhlin today. The audience consisted of a blend of network admins looking at the technical requirements of the Web 2.0 tools on servers, networks, administration, etc., and educators/technology specialists, who were primarily concerned with the application of these tools in the classroom. The presentation focused almost entirely on the more technical aspects, which are largely foreign to me, but it was very useful to see so many open-source tools in one presentation, as our district is looking at resources to set up a blog/wiki server and other Web 2.0 tools. The workshop allowed us to set up a mock server on a laptop and intall several applications, which will be helpful in presenting to those who will provide the know-how and support back in the district.

Some of the tools presented included:

• Joomla–content management system, similar to Mambo.
• Wordpress–very popular opensource blogging software (which this blog is created with).
• Moodle–another opensource course management tool.

All of the tools demonstrated can be used by schools/districts to create, as described by Wesley Fryar, a “walled garden” of Web 2.0 tools. In other words, they provide a means by which educators can utilize blogging, wikis, survey tools, discussion boards, and more in a closed, monitored manner, if so desired. Students can collaborate and share with one another and teachers without sharing or receiving input from outside their network. If so desired, the tools can be opened up, however, to allow viewing by anyone on the Internet or specific invited guests. Regardless, the ability to make that decision at the local level is certainly appealing.

During the session, participants actually went through the process of setting up such a network of tools. The encouraging thing about this was that the process was relatively simple (so long as users have some degree of familiarity with Apache, SQL, and PHP) and did not take long. An issue that was raised by some participants was that of support, as keeping the software up-to-date with security patches and other updates is essential. Moodle was used to create our system database. The Moodle interface is not difficult to grasp, and users and new applications are swiftly added. We added Wordpress for blogging and Joomla for course content.

Additional tools which were mentioned but not demonstrated included:

• Wiki tools: MediaWiki; TikiWiki; DokuWiki; WikkaWiki
• Content Management: Plone; Drupal Ed/Drupal CivicSpace
• Discussion Boards: phpBB; Moodle
• FAQ: phpMyFAQ
• Survey Tools: UCCASS; phpSurvey; PHPSurveyor
• Calendar Management w/RSS: WebCalendar

I wish I had a greater understanding of the technical aspects of all of these tools. Even so, I came away feeling that they are easily within the capabilities of our district network and staff, and I plan to set up a demo meeting soon. Thanks to Greg for a very useful session!

I did get an interesting response when I asked Greg about Elgg, an opensource tool for creating social networks. Greg had done a review of the software, but did not recommend it. His reasoning was simply that it was social networking. While I certainly understand this position (given the negative press of MySpace, Xanga, et al), but I think there are some big possibilities for schools setting up their own social networks as a means of communicating, collaborating, and forming networks within a district that might not so easily be developed with other means. More to come…

For more information on these and other Web 2.0 tools, visit Miguel Guhlin’s wiki at http://mguhlin.wikispaces.com/walledgarden.

Technorati Tags: web2.0 blogging wikis opensource guhlin tcea2007