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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Oct
25
(2005)
Drupal to support online communities of practice
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: communitiesofpractice, drupal, eportfolio, projects.
One of my tasks for the next few weeks is to investigate Drupal, and specifically its ability to support the online interactions of a community of practice. We have a few projects that will involve some form of online interaction by students and professionals who are spread throughout southern Alberta, and it looks like Drupal may provide most, if not all, of the functionality to support these communities. I’ll be specifically looking at Drupal in the context of:
- personal and professional reflection (blogging – either privately or to selected audiences)
- information gathering
- asynchronous communication – forums, threaded discussions, etc…
- communication with peers and/or instructors
- combinations of the above to form an “ePortfolio” type of view on the whole shebang, suitable for sharing with potential employers, or others
- likely other stuff
I’m actually pretty excited to be working on this stuff – it feels like I’ve been working so long on media-production-supporting-utilities that I’ve been out of the loop on the whole community side of things. We’ll be looking at integrating Drupal with Pachyderm (likely via a download/upload process, rather than a direct tie-in), and the institutional WebDAV storage/sharing system. Should be fun.
Drupal is a good choice if you don’t want to get stuck with something propriertary (and have to start all over because the system doesn’t provide the desired behavior/plug-in). It’s open to many other systems and therefore extremly flexible.
I’m really interested in how Drupal is used to support communities of practice.
Sam, thanks for the feedback. I’ll be checking out flexinode, and Bryght’s “tagging” extension as well. I’ve been running a Drupal server for a campus weblog trial project, but haven’t had any time to devote to promotion of it, so it’s kind of idled along… I’m hoping to use these other projects to feed into that one, too. Should be fun, for sure.
This is the first public post I have seen that understands the possibilities of Drupal for communities of practice and ePortfolios. Taxonomies, node access (only allow employer view access to this one piece of content), flexible content types (flexinode and CCK in drupal-speak), flexible file management (relatively easy to tie to an external repository), external user authentication, groups, and aggregated views seem to combine to create a pretty powerful platform for a portfolio / community site. I’m interested in hearing more of what comes from your explorations.