sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

I'm sitting in on a birds of a feather session for education. First observation: wow, there are a lot of people in here. I actually feel bad taking up a seat, because its crowded and there are definitely people at the back who can't hear. (I'm delighted to see Evergreen represented here! Woot!)

Takeaways

• In comparison to other organizations, educators are very concerned with interoperability with other systems, including login systems. This isn't particularly surprising, given the huge user bases at universities, their lethargic pace of change, and their dependence on somewhat obscure, archaic systems. Examples: Kerberos, Shibboleth (not archaic, but not a winner either), etc.
• Similarly, they are very concerned with scalability of theming, including the ability to, effectively, run different "sites" for different departments using a single them. I wonder whether they should be thinking about multi-site configurations, or multiple standalone solutions instead (although that creates upgrade issues). Obviously, big questions include how different departments needs are, how much content types and views need to be shared, etc. The model that Georgetown uses, at least with CNDLS, seems effective - a strike team of designers who make a lot of similar, but standalone sites for individual courses, departments, etc.
• It occurs to me that the size of this group seems related to its problems -- the needs and limitations are quite varied.
• Libraries - Looks like there is stuff in the works that's about to take off... I want to keep an eye on this and chip in. Maybe this is an alternative to my (future) Koha solution, or something complimentary. Buzzwords: SCORM, LMS, Moodle, etc. (these are course-related, but with potential library implications).
• Penn State's ELMS modules (to be shared on drupal.org soon) looks pretty killer. I'll definitely give it a test drive soon.
• Young Writers Project looks successful and cool. Nothing technologically flashy, but it's impacting kids.

At the end, we got a rushed demo of the Multisite Manager module (?), which seemed very impressive, although it was hard to hear anything. But it looked sweet.