This semester, David Blakesley and I are teaching our two sections of ENGL 420S: Business Writing at Purdue University using Drupal via distance ed with both of our sections on the same site. I've posted a little more information about this at DrupalED

In blogging Sam's, Dave's and my presentation on Drupal in education, Harold Jarche cites two of the slides offering a particular bit of commentary to one of our points:

Reallocation of funds from site licensing fees into learning opportunities for students. [I like this one!]

This afternoon, Samantha Blackmon, David Blakesley, and I will be giving a presentation at Purdue University's 2005 Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) Conference. View the Shockwave version or download the original OpenOffice presentation format. This presentation is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Also, below are some of the many Drupal sites being used for teaching this semester in the English department at Purdue. For most instructors, this is the first time teaching with Drupal. With others, this is the first time working with any online course management platform. Their responses so far about using Drupal have been very positive; I look forward to seeing how everyone's Drupal teaching practices evolve and develop over this semester and in the future.

A Panel Presentation for the 2004 Computers and Writing Conference.

The DrupalEd and DrupalBlog distributions previously mentioned on cyberdash are now ready for download. Each is tar gzipped and contains a copy of the Configuration Guide as a pdf and text file.

Get the DrupalEd distribution. Visit the demo site (feel free to use the admin username and password listed in the installation section of the guide). Get the DrupalEd Configuration Guide pdf.

Get the DrupalBlog distribution. Visit the demo site (feel free to use the admin username and password listed in the installation section of the guide). Get the DrupalBlog Configuration Guide pdf.

One of the biggest complaints about Drupal is that it's difficult to configure. I'll agree. As I've said in this discussion thread on drupal.org, most Drupal users know "that the reason that Drupal is difficult to customize is that it's like a block of clay--has to be molded for the particular site configuration." And I firmly believe, despite some of the comments in the same thread, that this is the number one obstacle stopping many people from adopting it.

Well, I'll admit. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to take the Linux kernel, assemble the necessary packages, and configure everything. That's what Linux distributions are for.

So in the interest of making Drupal easier for newbies, I've assembled two Drupal distributions:

• DrupalEd is intended for the writing classroom. I say that not because it can't be used for other classes, but writing teachers are generally more interested, I believe, in discourse and community interaction more so than content delivery. And in this area Drupal excels. Looking for testing and grading modules? They won't be here. It's simply the configuration that Terra and I have been using for a few semesters now.
• DrupalBlog is setup as in individual blogsite, much like what Terra, Clancy and I use. By modifying a couple of permission settings, it can easily be configured to allow for multiple authors like Kairosnews.