Drupal Education Camp Oxford (School's out)

Well it is over and it was a great experience. So many thanks to the Drupal Oxford Group, Finn @finnlewis and the sponsors. The boxes are all ticked: the sessions, lunches, St Catherines' College surroundings and staff (excellent), and as ever the Drupal Community. Amongst many really good sessions ...

Yesterday, Johan Gant listed the pros and cons of Migrating data into Drupal using the migrate module, when you might care to use it and when not. When not to use it is a definite take home (a take care). There's a potential overlap here with semantizing content in Drupal 7 which Philipp Schaffner explored today. His presentation included not just the relevant modules, but Drupal's core RDF status out of the box and how to extend this. Philipp's English is very good; I wish I could present in another language as well as he did.

Many of the 'take homes' have not changed. They are glaringly obvious: build your site get on with it. That aside in the previous efforts to enter content from the old website into Drupal (4.7, 5.x, 6.x ...) the decisions about style, fonts, colours have been and remain an enjoyable task. In Bring that designer over to the Drupal side of the force Tom Bamford provided a description of styling and a listing of resources. Definitely something to follow and use.

Martin Bush introduced his work as a lecturer Use of Drupal at London South Bank University and the creation of QuizSlides. I have an eye on the existing Quiz module. The QuizSlides' approach utilises Powerpoint as the basis for the quiz. Prior to this Martin outlined his course on Internet Technologies across lectures, labs, MCT and individual assignments. Speaking to him afterwards I mentioned how I would love to take my stuff (re. h2cm) and formalise it in a structured way. How could you link Hodges' model into nursing, informatics, and educational curricula?

Another key session for me was How we built a Virtual Learning Environment with Drupal 7 with Lee Willis. This is way beyond my purposes in the sense of scale but not in terms of - intended - user experience. Lee made some vital points about Drupal's educational potential and the lessons he and his colleagues have gleaned from projects to date. There is still great variation in the user interface of Drupal and this is compounded with the number of contributed modules used. Drupal is powerful in providing related navigable content, but this should not mean forcing an order on the learner. In addition to the need to plan the interface, another point Lee made also draws me to Drupal and reflects a central ethos of some psychological therapies. We learn best through self-discovery. So in addition to structured and unstructured content, there is a case for leveraging Drupal to facilitate discovery. (I've just thought of another post...)

As well as education, the keynote yesterday by Prof. David Upton was informative and entertainingly delivered (a lesson in itself) stressing the complexity of corporate scale IT projects and the problems (disasters) that can and do ensue. I did wonder (and nearly asked) if Prof. Upton had any views on a particular project he didn't mention. Which reminds me: I must cast an eye on the new NHS information strategy.