Information Culture

Information Culture

From Online Education to Social Media to Curriculum Mapping

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Topics Presented

The History of Online Learning

Drupal Open Source Application Framework

Technology Impacts on Media

Gamification within Education and Advanced Simulations

Motion Graphics and Conveying a Message

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5Web Development Future Career – Approaching the Semantic Web

Usability – A Case Study of a User Research Project

Web 2.0, Social Networking and Social Media in General

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The Digital Divide

Addressing the Challenges

In this current day and age we are witnessing the advancement of technology at a rate never seen before.

As a result, people are relying on technology to a greater extent each and every day. According to DiMaggio et al, “The digital revolution is the first major technological change that has occurred after the emergence of federal social science funding and the expansion of research universities in the 1960s (2004).

* http://forrestdoud.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/digital-divide-versus-digital-inequality/

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One in five American Adults do not use the Internet Senior citizens, those who prefer to take our interviews in Spanish

rather than English, adults with less than a high school education, and those living in households earning less than $30,000 per year are the least likely adults to have internet access.

Among adults who do not use the internet, almost half don’t go online because they don’t think the internet is relevant to them.

Most have never used the internet before, and don’t have anyone in their household who does.

The 27% of adults living with disability in the U.S are significantly less likely than adults without a disability to go online (54% vs. 81%).

Though overall internet adoption rates have leveled off, significant differences in use remain, generally related to age, household income, and educational attainment.

Pew Internet Research: FindingsWhile increased internet adoption and the rise of mobile connectivity have reduced many gaps in technology access over the past decade, for some groups digital disparities still remain

* http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Digital-differences/Overview.aspx

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Moving on to Curriculum Mapping

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Curriculum Mapping

What is Curriculum Mapping?

Process of documenting lessons, activities and assessment methods used within different grade levels and classes within an educational institution.

In recent years web-based technology solutions have been implemented to provide real-time access to vital curriculum data and reports, enabling school administration to ensure there are no gaps between grade levels.

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School Administrators A dashboard system can

provide administrators a means to be able to manage curriculum across grade levels.

Management of learning outcomes and learning opportunities across different elements of the curriculum.

Teachers Curriculum Mapping systems

can provide teachers a tool to update, document and share lesson plans with others.

Common core standards are more easily tracked to ensure lessons are fulfilling the required objectives.

Parents and Relatives By providing an accessible

system, it is easier to can keep track of where their child should be academically.

Parents and guardians will have an opportunity to reinforce at home the focus of learning that takes place at school.

Curriculum Mapping – Targeting all User Groups

* Proposed Curriculum Mapping Application

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Monarch Academy

Research Study

Monarch Academy has informally implemented a form of Curriculum Mapping using desktop applications.

The current system has not been centralized, nor easily accessible by staff and administrators.

Commercial tools were researched; however none met the unique requirements of Expeditionary Learning.

Atlas Rubicon came closest to meeting the school’s requirements.

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Atlas is a Web-based curriculum management tool that electronically: Incorporates curriculum mapping, tracks gaps and repetition in instruction, addresses the Why in performance testing, aligns curriculum to benchmarks and standards, produces updated reports to encourage partnerships, facilitates sharing of ideas and communicating them rapidly across buildings, schools and grades and shares requirements with students.

Oakland Public School system has implemented Atlas Rubicon for all grade levels.

They provide a public website for parents and guardians to review courses, units and other curriculum information.

In a separate study I am testing the current system that Oakland uses as an exploratory study in determining what works well and what doesn’t in the current system.

Atlas Rubicon and Oakland School System

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Building, testing and deploying a workable solution for Monarch Academy by quarter 1 of 2014.

Planning the Ideal Curriculum Mapping System

Building

Choosing Architecture

Choosing an architecture based on either an existing framework or technology stack.

Exploratory Research, Requirements Gathering and Proposal Acceptance.

Gathering Initial Exploratory Research

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A custom built application could be developed using ColdFusion, ASP.NET or PHP.

Provides greatest flexibility in design and development choices along with a greater sense of ownership.

Potentially take a much longer time to develop than building from a ready-made solution.

Content Management Systems are a good alternative to building a custom solution as much of the heavy lifting has been taken care of.

Many CMS’es are not intuitive in terms of customization and may impose limitations on development.

While a CMS can typically be deployed in a shorter amount of time than a custom solution, the down-side of being placed in a ‘box’ is deal-breaker for many.

Choosing the Right Architecture

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Drupal – Bridging the Development Gap

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a CMS for Building Dynamic Websites

Similar to other CMS solutions, Drupal allows you to easily setup and deploy a dynamic website solution out of the box.

Drupal is an Application Framework

Extensive API and Hook system allows for rapid development of custom modules, themes and add-on APIs for developers. Drupal is a PHP based CMS/Framework.

Drupal is a Social and Semantic Web Platform

Tools have been built into Drupal including support for Resource Description Framework (RDF) to enable sharing of data with different web sources.

Drupal is a Community

The Drupal Community is extremely active, especially in the Washington DC Metro area with conferences, frequent meetups and local user groups.

Content type choices and descriptions are presented when the editor selects to add new content to the site.

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WordPress was primarily built as a blogging engine and later developed into a CMS. It is great for developing small to medium sized websites, however it was never built to scale as an enterprise level CMS.

Drupal assumes at its core there will be many kinds of users with many requirements. At its core, WordPress on the other hand was developed only for one type of user in mind and later adapted accordingly.

Drupal provides more extensive development framework for many different types of websites: blogs, forums, e-commerce, CRM, intranets, social networks, news aggregators, wikis, photo galleries, restaurant review sites.

Joomla is arguably a better product ‘out-of-the-box’ as it provides much of the expected advanced features of a CMS already built-in.

Drupal on the other hand is limited out-of-the-box, however it provides a more extensive framework for developing a more advanced site. “On the same grounds, if you can master it, Drupal 7.0 is the best CMS”

How Drupal Compares to other CMS’s

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Write Custom Code

Next you will want to develop your own custom modules to

fill in spaces of missing functionality or improve upon

existing contrib modules.

Theme it

Theming can occur in parallel to other development activities. Drupal’s theming engine also

provides extensions to the modules.

Use Existing Modules

Drupal has an extensive library of ‘contrib’ modules which are readily available for download and customization into any Drupal installation via drupal.org. Select modules for ‘some’ functionality.

Configure the Site

Site configuration can be an ongoing process which will increase with complexity dependent on the amount of modules, size of site, user role, permissions, content types, etc.

Drupal Provides for Extensive Customizability

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Usability Should be usable by the target audiences on the target devices. Consideration should be made for different user groups.

The Social Web Where possible, integration of technologies like Facebook Connect

should be examined.

Rich Media Experience

Gamification, motion graphics and rich media are all topics that should be considered when presenting a framework for lesson plans, outcomes and information to potential parents, guardians and interested stakeholders.

Communication of Information

The system should convey the appropriate messages it needs to assert through the various user groups. Collaboration, sharing or resources and dashboard reporting all should be considered.

Goals / Considerations for a Drupal-Based Curriculum Mapping Application

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Complete proposal, begin working with stakeholders and create a development plan.

Next Steps

Carry out contextual inquiry, focus groups, and user interviews.

Complete version 1 of the system and begin

planning for version 2.

Build and test an initial prototype of the proposed system.

Refine prototype and begin development version 1 of the application based on feedack.

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Information Culture provided insight into several areas of digital media that I will be considered during the development of Monarch’s Curriculum Mapping System.

Areas of research go outside the scope of this presentation, next semester Proseminar will flesh out theorical framework for the project and study.

If the application becomes a success with Monarch, plans to release the code under open source via a distribution method such as GitHub will be explored.

Concluding Thoughts

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Questions?