Cole just posted a note about PSU’s podcasting training session, including a screenshot and link to the Podcasts @ PSU website. Looks very well done – I’m sure we’ll be borrowing liberally from it when we get our butts moving here.
What’s interesting to me is that the site is done in Drupal. Taxonomies to organize content. Drupal’s RSS feeds spitting out the podcasts. Very nice. It looks like a pretty stock implementation without much hackery to get things going – but knowing Cole, he’s probably added some cool stuff to streamline the publihsing process.
Cole – I hope you have time to put together a colophon to share with the rest of the class 
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Jesse … I guess that is the point, take it out of the realm of a single institution and into a larger collection of schools looking to solve this problem. It could work …
Agreed… would be a good OSS project. Now to find the time to set it up
We are also working on similar issues, from both the technical and the pedagogical side — While FunnyMonkey does a fair amount of Drupal work, we also are part of a partnership with the folks from Elgg — the OpenAcademic project is designed to address many of these exact needs. We are currently working on our roadmap, and the accompanying infrastructure to support a development community.
And, the project is open source — all code gets released back to the community.
OK. So Cole and I (and a few others, in parallel) have been tossing the idea around of a Higher Ed. Social Software Group (or the like, for folks bashing away on Drupal and/or podcasting and/or other cool and possibly open source stuff). Maybe this is a good bootstrap project?
Just be sure you aren’t duplicating work unnecessarily…
http://www.funnymonkey.com/ and http://www.drupaled.org/
right – but what we were talking about wasn’t just Drupal-specific, and was more of a developer’s/implementors community. a place to share ideas about projects, discuss implementation, pedagogy, etc… Drupaled might be relevant for the Drupal-specific stuff, but I think this is broader…
Cole – It’s a good idea and likely the only trick is the authetication with class list group management. We sorta have a system designed, but nothing coded as yet, that could do just that built on Ruby. We just built an events system that has management of streams, authetication with our ADS/LDAP, etc. I could see that idea scaling out into something more… but the brainy student I have working for me this term goes back to his nanotech eng courses this fall.
Hmmm? This is the “real” JMaddrell. Not sure why, but looks my information is pre-populating in the comments section for others. No biggie, but just wondering why?
I think I maybe figured out the source of the comment problem. I had checked “Save my Comment Information for next time” when I made my first post this morning and I believe that pulled back my information for everyone? I unchecked that box, so we’ll see if that gets rid of my information going forward. Weird, huh?
JMaddrell
Heh – that last post (that appears to be from Jennifer Maddrell at 8:20) was by me. Check the host in the accesslog to be sure if you’d like :/
greggles@drupal here – sorry for the triple post. In the 8:21 post I made sure to change the name/email/homepage but it seems they didn’t work. Let’s see if it works this time. Sorry that I’m using your blog to test this, I just want to help you (and the comment information saver module) understand the problem…
I cleared all of the cookies from darcynorman.net and the problem seems to be gone.
dnorman – something’s goofy on the comment “remember my information” section.
I’m seeing the information (including email) for Jennifer Maddrell – :/
Not sure what the cause is…this is my home machine that I don’t even share with my wife, so I’m pretty certain nobody borrowed it to post with Jennifer Maddrell’s information.
Ya PSU's stuff looks pretty good. I am getting less and less interested in iTunes U as I start to look at different ways to manage podcasts. The Drupal solution appears to be good.
btw – this comment form doesn't work in the latest safari.
Jesse – looks like Drupal can handle quite a bit. I’d like to do some serious scalability testing. What happens when a campus of 30,000 students (or more) start hammering on it to get the latest media for class?
I’ve also disabled the TinyMCE rich text editor for commenting. That should work better no matter what browser is being used.
D … our concern is for podcasting to take off this fall and we end up with 50,000 unsers — not likely, but with a campus of about 100,000 people (faculty, staff, and studnets) who knows. We have started a serious look into our scale and backup challenges with Drupal. In the long run we may or may not stick with this solution. We didn’t have to do too much to make it work the way we wanted, but a the moment it is a little too much of a manual process. We will get there.
I am preparing a larger post about how we pulled this together … I’ll post that in a week or so. Thanks for the look in … love to give you a behind the scenes tour. Maybe this is the chance we’ve been looking for to collaborate. Perhaps a true EDU podcasting engine that just works — open source with the ability to hook into university authentication systems and class lists. Sounds like a good challenge … any thoughts?
dbnorman – I wonder how much of a load 30 000 people would really have besides bandwidth given a podcast is just a file downloaded and organized by XML. Drupal should have nothing to do with the load. Your network infastructure will though.
If 30K people were trying to upload podcasts and Drupal was generating the XML and moving the files then you have a load issue. But I can’t see that happening.