Book Image

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

As social networks become more popular, their role in the classroom has come under scrutiny. Drupal offers a wide variety of useful tools for educators. Within a single Drupal site, you can set up social bookmarking, podcasting, video hosting, formal and informal groups, rich user profiles, and other features commonly associated with social web communities. "Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition" teaches you how to create your own social networking site to advance teaching and learning goals in the classroom, while giving you complete control over features and access. Communicate with students, share learning resources, and track assignments through simple tasks with this hands-on guide.In this book you will learn to install and configure the default Drupal distribution and then extend it to include blogs, bookmarks, a media sharing platform, and discussion forums. The book also covers how to organize your site to easily track student work on the site, and how to control who has access to that information. Additionally, it teaches you how to make the site easy to use, how to maintain the site, and how to ask for and receive help in the Drupal community.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The relationship between forums and blogs


Forums and blogs both support interactive, threaded discussions between users. However, many users report that conversations within blogs feel different than conversations within forums. In general terms, forums feel more group centric, and blogs feel more individual centric.

Within Drupal, however, these paradigms can be shifted. For example, the taxonomy module and use of keywords allows blog posts to be organized in the same way as forum posts; within groups (discussed in Chapter 12, Supporting Multiple Classes), blog topics can feel more like a forum. In the rest of this chapter, we will look at some of the ways in which these modes of discussion differ, with an eye towards helping clarify how and when to use each tool for the greatest effect.

Forums

Forums are among the oldest of the online communication tools, as they have their roots in tools that have been around since the 1970s. Traditionally, forums provide a place for group members to come...