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We held our first gathering of the “Blogging and Student Publishing” learning community last week. It was a small, informal gathering - only a handful of profs were able to make it due to summer schedules, and another handful of staff. I think the small group was actually a very good thing for a first gathering, though, as the conversation was extremely engaging and dynamic - something that may have been lost in a larger group. What I loved about this gathering, is that we were able to reproduce much of the vibe from the Social Software Salon event held a couple of years ago at UBC. I’m hoping to to much more of this kind of thing, to get faculty members together and properly caffeinated in order to get the conversations flowing.

We talked about many things, but I think the common thread was that this is really not about “blogging” or even technology. It’s about what happens when students are publishing their own content, and collaborating with each other. What does that mean for assessment? How do you properly engage a class of 100 (or more?) students, having them all publish content, exploring various topics, commenting, thinking critically, and still be able to make sense of that much activity?

Since we stepped back a bit from technology, we defined student publishing more broadly, to also include such things as discussion boards and wikis.

We talked a bit about blogging as an ePortfolio activity - that it may be effective for students to publish various bits of content through their blog(s) and then to let it percolate and filter until the “best” stuff is distilled into what is essentially an ePortfolio - and maybe THAT’s the artifact that gets assessed. The activity through the blogs is important, but every student will participate in a different way. Maybe it would be a valuable thing to even make blogging itself an optional thing - but those who don’t participate will have had less feedback and refinement of their ePortfolio artifacts.

I gave a quick demo of the eduglu prototype site to show some of the strategies could be used to make the workload more manageable - social filtering of content within the site, organic groups based on projects and topics, etc… There was a fair amount of interest in those ideas, and I’ll be refining the prototype over the summer.

We’re going to be having learning community gatherings on a regular basis - I’m hoping to have more faculty come out to the August event (date TBD), and have it keep growing from there.

I’m also starting work on a learning community around mobile learning (mobile devices as a platform for teaching and learning), and another on course design (to tie in with our ISW and FTC programmes here at the TLC).

My next immediate task for the learning communities project is to polish off the community hub website - which will provide a place for coordinating the various communities, as well as providing a way for faculty and staff to identify and create their own communities.

Links discussed during the gathering:

• UBC’s Murder Madness and Mayhem Project
• Eduglu
• UCalgary’s Faculty of Education eDOL journaling project
• weblogs.ucalgary.ca - community blogging for UCalgary
• CPSC 203 tech issues published collaboratively on a wiki (see Winter 2008 semester examples)
• IBM Wikipedia History Flow

We use the Events module to manage workshops here in the Teaching & Learning Centre, and use the “Upcoming Events” block to display the next few workshops on our website. Works great, but the default text leaves a bit to be desired. By default, it shows the event title, and “(2 days)” - which indicates that the event begins in 2 days.

But, it could also mean that the event lasts for 2 days.

So, I just added a trivial change to the event.module file, adding the following line of code at line 1847 (on my copy of the file, which was checked out on June 4, 2007):

$timeleft = 'starts in ' . $timeleft;

That changes the text indicator in the “Upcoming Events” block to read:

(starts in 2 days)

Which is much clearer in meaning. Easy peasy. I just have to remember to edit the module after updating, if this doesn’t make it in…

I had to debug our TLC website this morning, as it was pointed out to me that parts were misbehaving, and that some content hadn’t survived the upgrade from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5.2. The missing content was easy, for the most part. It’s just a matter of renaming the tables to use the content_TABLE format expected by the current CCK module. The exact table names that are expected are listed in the node_type table, under the “orig_type” field - just prepend “content_” to the “orig_type” value for the table name, and CCK should find everything just fine.

One of the CCK content types used the weburl field type under Drupal 4.7, but this has apparently been replaced by “link” in Drupal 5’s version of CCK. That’s fine, I’ll just swap out the data. Shouldn’t be too bad.

What got puzzling, though, was that after switching to link, I was getting segmentation faults on the webserver every time I tried to view, save, or template a CCK content type containing a link. WTF? At first, I didn’t make the connection that it was link that was causing problems. Eventually, I created a “test” CCK content type, containing the same fields as the offending content type (every time I tried to view anything in our “Simple Resource” content type, hell was unleashed). I reproduced the same set of fields, and BOOM, Simple Resource was also bringing down the server. So, I started removing fields. Didn’t take long, since the content type had a total of 2 fields. I started with the Link field. And the content saved, viewed, and templated just fine.

AHAH! It’s something wrong with Link! Maybe it’s trying to validate the URL? Maybe it’s trying to download the content at the other end of the URL to do some processing?

Nope. Turns out, Link may use the token.module to parse out bits of the URL. But token.module was getting caught in a recursive loop. I had to install token.module to support the current version of pathauto.module - I need that, so I can’t disable token.module. Turns out, there’s an easy way to avoid this recursion-killing-the-webserver segmentation fault problem. In the CCK definition for the link field, just uncheck the “Allow Tokens” option. Yeah. It’s that easy. But it took me all frigging morning to figure out what the problem was, and about 5 seconds to fix it once it was identified.

Links that were useful in diagnosing and solving this:

• Infinite Loop with Link + Token
• content_view() not recursive safe
• Token module causes segmentation fault (this was the solution - see comment #4 on that page)

Our main Teaching & Learning Centre website runs on Drupal, with extensive use of CCK, Views, Events and Signup modules. The site had been running on the Drupal 4.7, with only security patches applied. But it was starting to act up (content was suddenly not showing up), so I decided to pull everything up to the current 5.2 line, with updated modules. It’s an easy enough upgrade. When it works.

The CCK update appears to have really botched things. As in, most of our custom content types are now missing data for several of their fields. The data’s safe - I can see it in the database - but it’s not showing up when viewing or editing the nodes. Annoying.

So, my task over the next couple of days (hopefully much shorter than that) is to debug wtf went wrong, and figure out how to manually upgrade the various CCK database tables from wherever they were to where they need to be for 5.2. Fun stuff.

Also, the embedded Views have decided to go TU, so I get to debug wtf is going on there, as well.

Thankfully, I have backups of the data, so can play a bit if needed, but I need to leave the main site up and live to support workshop registrations while I fix things. It’s taken much of today to get the site to the state it’s in now. Haven’t even had a chance to check all of my feeds yet. The horrors!

I may need to dig up one of those circa-1995 “Under Construction” animated GIF images for the site in the meantime…

Update: Thanks to a tip from Webchick, I got the CCK tables manually reconstructed. All I had to do was rename the tables as per the pattern described. It looks like the 4.7 - 5.x upgrade path for CCK got really complicated, and may have been overlooked. My Drupal 4.7.7 site was fully patched, all modules were up to date, as was core. Upgrading from a fully patched 4.7.7 to 5.2 just plain didn’t work, from the perspective of CCK. Turns out it was a pretty easy fix, but still, a bit annoying. Huge thanks to Webchick for the tip. It’s amazing just how active and helpful the Drupal community is.

My last big issue is wrt embedded Views in several nodes. They appear to be ignoring arguments (but not all of the views are misbehaving, making it a bit harder to diagnose). That’s my task for today, to get the rest of the site behaving properly. Then to fix some layout issues that are unrelated to the Drupal upgrade (the UCalgary theme we had been using was a 4.7 variety, and the 5.0 variety has subtly different css, and lacks our custom stuff).

Want to work at the Teaching & Learning Centre? We’re hiring. It’s a tenure track position, working on coordinating our major teaching workshops.

photo by small ape

In a recent project meeting, we were tossing around ideas for workshops to conduct in 2007, and I've taken on a series of topics that could be loosely described as "new tools and strategies". Here's the current short list of workshops I'm planning to develop (and later conduct) through the TLC. Any glaring omissions?

• Creative Commons (copyright and IP in general, and how they affect sharing and reusing available work)
• Flickr. As a source of Creative Commons images for use, and as a potential tool for teaching and learning.
• Google Earth. Basic overview, as well as an intro to some of the cool add-ons (geology, politics, etc…)
• eXe - eLearning XML editor (for ePortfolios or personal websites)
• WordPress.com (setting up a blog for free in seconds)
• weblogs.ucalgary.ca (participating in the blog community on campus)
• Drupal for websites and communities
• Moodle (? this might be counterproductive, given Bb's role on our campus…)
• Social bookmarking (del.icio.us for distributed tagging of resources)
• Google Docs

I've left off a couple of items on purpose because I want to be doing things that aren't already running in full hype mode (podcasting and secondlife are fine on their own). I'm hoping to be showing stuff that might be flying under the radar (at least to most faculty on campus - many of the items on my list are completely taken for granted by tech types)

Since we switched to Drupal to power the department website recently, we're able to have RSS feeds to keep up to date on stuff as it gets added to the site. It hadn't been exposed previously, but I just took a few minutes to expose 3 of the "main" feeds for the site.

I also used my blog within the site to describe what I'd done. My first non-hello-world blog post on our site (although only marginally non-hello-world, but still, it counts).

Here's the goods on our main feeds:

• All content
• Workshops
• Resources
• All blog posts

It's the first time I've had RSS available from my employer's website. It's a small thing, but a huge shift.

I just finished the first pass at "fixing" the TLC website. Now, it's not nearly as slick or effective, but is chock full of compliance. mmmm…. compliance… please, sir? may I have another?

TLC Website - with UCalgary "B" template

We just launched the new website for the Teaching & Learning Centre at The University of Calgary. It’s been a long time in the making, with heavy use of themes, custom CCK content types, events, signups, views, and a bunch of other Drupal modules and tricks. King worked his usual magic in putting together the CSS for our theme, which uses the same HTML templates as the official www.ucalgary.ca site.

The new site should make it much easier for us to keep content up to date. We’re also planning some potentially cool community features for down the road a bit, once the dust starts to settle after The Big Website Launch.

Also, it’s currently running on our aging PowerMac Quicksilver dual 1GHz G4 server, so is a bit slower than it should be. We’ll be moving it to a shiny new-ish XServe ASAP.

TLC Website in Drupal

I had the pleasure of attending a presentation/workshop by Craig E. Nelson this morning. The Teaching & Learning Centre hosted the event, which brought faculty members from the various sides of campus together to discuss critical thinking and implications on pedagogy.

It was a really interesting session, with Craig telling stories and modelling effective use of the strategies and activities he was talking about (and getting us to talk about). My takeaway points from the session:

1. there are no broken students, only broken pedagogies
2. successful students are the ones who can adapt to repair broken pedagogies for themselves (spontanously forming study groups, connections, etc…)
3. “shut up and allow for processing time” - give students a chance to move stuff from short-term to long-term memory. simple 2 minute pauses and asking questions may be enough to start this.
4. “bulemic learning” - binge/purge of stuff, leading to mental starvation
5. an educator’s job is to educate students, not sort/filter them. The goal is not to enforce the bell curve, it is to maximize grade inflation through effective teaching and learning.

I was there (primarily) to take photographs. I’ve been wanting to record the activities of the TLC for awhile now, and finally just started doing something about it. This was the first “real” event I’ve photographed, so I’m sure I was doing many things awkwardly. But, the end result is something I’m at least not disappointed in. I learned some things:

• for an indoor event, get a long, fast lens. the kit lens won’t cut it. I used the zoom lens from our old D30 on my XT body, with ISO cranked up to 1600. Even at that, the aperture was too small to get decent shots. Fast, long lens is required. Something like this one would do nicely.
• get a big CF card. Or two. Or three. I was using my 1GB card, so left it in JPEG/fine mode. It would have been better to be shooting in RAW so I could adjust white balance properly later. I was afraid of filling up the card too soon, so reverted to JPEG.
• plan shots ahead of time. I was able to get some of the “best” shots by picturing in my head where Craig would have to be standing/looking, and where I’d have to be, in order to take advantage of (or reduce the effect of) background items in the room. It didn’t always work out, but thinking ahead would help reduce background distractions like the overhead projector…
• try not to distract. I found I was being extremely self conscious of the shutter noise, afraid I was distracting the other participants, or affecting the audio being recorded for the session. I refused to use the flash, because I didn’t want the paparazzi effect. Work to find the happy medium between getting the shot and not being noticed.
• I overplanned. I brought in my monopod (which broke on the way in this morning. crap.) I brought 2 batteries. I brought the extra lens from the office’s D30, as well as my XT’s kit lens. I brought lens cleaning cloth and brush. I brought battery charger. I brought vertical grip. I ended up not using the monopod, nor the vertical grip. But they were there just in case.

I wound up taking almost a hundred photos. Many were unusable due to the slow lens producing blurry or excessively grainy images. The survivors are available in a Flickr album.

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