ZipTies

Google the terms “placefulness” and “Drupal” together, and the top results all point to … Plone! As we move more deeply into our web site design, we are gaining a better understand of our site needs.

Placefulness: the Plone community makes frequent use of this term to describe how the system automatically retains the “location” of each new document one creates in the site. In end-user terms, the user clearly knows where he/she is within the site at all times. This makes Plone well-suited for sites with a clean content hierarchy. Contrast this with Drupal, in which new nodes have no location by default. The system only automatically assigns them a node ID number. Drupal developers use content types, menus, tags, views, and modules to create the illusion of place and hierarchical structure.

Many of our users, responsible for a particular school program, need to manage the hierarchy of article in their content area. If this process is difficult to use, it will challenge a lot of people and become an obstacle to content creation. We must also consider permissions and menus. Plone cascades editing privileges in a way that Drupal does not — if you can edit the parent, then you can also edit its children by default. Users may expect menu items to appear automatically in a hierarchical content structure.

Recognizing the need, the Drupal community has generated a number of modules that help automatically link new nodes to their location within a hierarchical content structure. Most obvious is the book module, distributed with core. Users may create child pages, and the Book Navigation feature automatically generates a book menu on the fly.

I learned that it is best to automatically display Book Navigation on whenever one is in a book. If one restricts the block’s visibility based on the URL path, then one has to specify custom URLs for all of the pages in the book or use PathAuto to automatically generate them. This quickly becomes a hassle again.

At first glance, it does not appear straightforward to mix book and non-book menu items in these menus, which could be a problem. We could create separate menus for structured content navigation and links to interactive pages (a.k.a., transactions). While that would work better within Drupal, would it make the site more or less usable to our visitors?

To further complicate matters, we want the landing page of each top-level section to show the news items for that category instead of a book page. Now we need to make the book navigation appear before we are actually in the book. This code snippet makes book navigation appear on all pages — we would have to modify it to display a navigation block to match the book one is about to enter. Another possible direction is to insert PHP code into the book landing page to manually query the database for news items related to that book. That may be more straightforward.

Good news: I just tried two new tricks (for me). I inserted PHP code into a book page to mix dynamic with static content. Drupal provided me the SQL query in the Drupal 6 View interface.

$sql = "SELECT node.nid AS nid FROM node node LEFT JOIN term_node term_node ON node.vid = term_node.vid INNER JOIN term_data term_data ON term_node.tid = term_data.tid WHERE (node.type in ('news')) AND (term_data.name = 'admission')";

}

And also used a redirect to send the user from a static page to a separate, dynamic one.

header('Location:http://ww2.catlin.edu/scripts/admission.pl');

(I know, I’m showing my novice Drupal learning curve. It’s my blog.)

We could throw in the towel and manually manage the menus. We really want the ability to post a single article to multiple places in the hierarchy, which seems to run counter to any automatic menu generation feature. However, if a user responsible for a small portion of the site needs to scroll through the entire site menu hierarchy to place their item, they will be stopped in their tracks.

Node Hierarchy appears to address our concern directly, allowing a user to specify the child relationship of a new node to an existing one. It’s unclear whether development on this module is sufficiently active to use on our primary, public web site. The Drupal 6 version is currently in alpha. I also question whether it uses a popup menu to select the parent node, which would be very awkward on a large site. Node Hierarchy is incompatible with book, which would mean that we were placing our trust in a module with less community support than Book.

I have yet to investigate breadcrumb navigation, which would also help strengthen the sense of placefulness of each node. I hope it will play well with the other hoops I am jumping through to make this work.

For classroom pages, it may make more sense to use Organic Groups. That should allow teachers to post articles, manually maintain a simple menu, and create items for other content types as we support them (image galleries, calendar, blog posts, etc.). This will also allow individuals to maintain both public and private content, which should help us both maintain visibility of classroom programs and protect the privacy of our students, teachers, and parents.

Amherst College developed their own solution, Monster Menus, to provide this functionality to their site. However, development was so extensive that they were not able to publish a module for this, despite recognizing the high levels of interest and expressing their willingness to share.

If we need to choose between Drupal and Plone, we may need to determine the core nature of our site. Is this a traditional content repository with some interactive features, or is it an interactive site with some hierarchical content? Will the interactivity be mostly one-way (collecting information from school community members), or will we really reply and produce lots of original, dynamic content ourselves? In other words, will we really have the kind of community site that Drupal was invented to provide? We don’t want to constantly swim upstream against Drupal’s core tendencies.

The ace up our sleeve is that we can set up a test site to experiment with different potential solutions before we commit to a development platform.

tags: drupal, plone, placefulness, menus, structured_content

The world has gone digital in just about everything we do. Almost every iota of information we access these days is stored in some kind of digital form and accessed electronically — text, charts, images, video, music, you name it. The key questions are: Will your data be there when you need it? And who’s going to preserve it?

In the December 2008 edition of Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, Dr. Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, provides a guide for surviving what has become known as the “data deluge.”

Managing this deluge and preserving what’s important is what Berman refers to as one of the “grand challenges” of the Information Age. The amount of digital data is immense: A 2008 report by the International Data Corporation (IDC), a global provider of information technology intelligence based in Framingham, Mass., predicts that by 2011, our “digital universe” will be 10 times the size it was in 2006 - and almost half of this universe will not have a permanent home as the amount of digital information outstrips storage space.

“As a society, we have only begun to address this challenge at a scale concomitant with the deluge of data available to us and its importance in the modern world,” writes Berman, a longtime pioneer in cyberinfrastructure – an open but organized aggregate of information technologies including computers, data archives, networks, software, digital instruments, and other scientific endeavors that support 21st century life and work.

Berman is a strong advocate of cyberinfrastructure that supports the management and preservation of digital data in the Information Age – data cyberinfrastructure: “Just like the physical infrastructures all around us — roads, bridges, water and electricity – we need a data cyberinfrastructure that is stable, predictable, and cost-effective.”

In her article, Berman explores key trends and issues associated with preserving digital data, and what’s required to keep it manageable, accessible, available, and secure. However, she warns that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution for data stewardship and preservation.

“The ‘free rider’ solution of ‘Let someone else do it’– whether that someone else is the government, a library, a museum, an archive, Google, Microsoft, the data creator, or the data user — is unrealistic and pushes responsibility to a single company, institution, or sector. What is needed are cross-sector economic partnerships,” says Berman. She adds that the solution is to “take a comprehensive and coordinated approach to data cyberinfrastructure and treat the problem holistically, creating strategies that make sense from a technical, policy, regulatory, economic, security, and community perspective.”
Berman’s ACM article closes with a set of “Top 10” guidelines for data stewardship:

1. Make a plan. Create an explicit strategy for stewardship and preservation for your data, from its inception to the end of its lifetime; explicitly consider what that lifetime may be.

2. Be aware of data costs and include them in your overall IT budget. Ensure that all costs are factored in, including hardware, software, expert support, and time. Determine whether it is more cost-effective to regenerate some of your information rather than preserve it over a long period.

3. Associate metadata with your data. Metadata is needed to be able to find and use your data immediately and for years to come. Identify relevant standards for data/metadata content and format, following them to ensure the data can be used by others.

4. Make multiple copies of valuable data. Store some of them off-site and in different systems.

5. Plan for the transition of digital data to new storage media ahead of time. Include budgetary planning for new storage and software technologies, file format migrations, and time. Migration must be an ongoing process. Migrate data to new technologies before your storage media becomes obsolete.

6. Plan for transitions in data stewardship. If the data will eventually be turned over to a formal repository, institution, or other custodial environment, ensure it meets the requirements of the new environment and that the new steward indeed agrees to take it on.

7. Determine the level of “trust” required when choosing how to archive data. Are the resources of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration necessary or will Google do?

8. Tailor plans for preservation and access to the expected use. Gene-sequence data used daily by hundreds of thousands of researchers worldwide may need a different preservation and access infrastructure from, for example, digital photos viewed occasionally by family members.

9. Pay attention to security. Be aware of what you must do to maintain the integrity of your data.

10. Know the regulations. Know whether copyright, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the U.S. National Institutes of Health publishing expectations, or other policies and/or regulations are relevant to your data, ensuring your approach to stewardship and publication is compliant.

Berman is a national leader in this area and also co-chairs of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access with OCLC economist Brian Lavoie. The task force was formed late last year to explore and ultimately present a range of economic models, components, and actionable recommendations for sustainable preservation and access of digital data in the public interest. Commissioned for two years, the task force will publish an interim report outlining economic issues and systemic challenges associated with digital preservation later this month on its website.

For Berman’s full Communications of the ACM article, please see: http://www.sdsc.edu/about/director/pubs/communications200812-DataDeluge.pdf

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My personal learning network is really coming through this week. I found out about the Berkman draft literature review on internet safety and Berkeley report on informal learning of digital youth. We are preparing two evening technology events for parents. Together, these reports will help us contextualize parent concerns about their children’s safety within a broader understanding of why kids value the time they spend online, especially on social network and gaming sites. Our administrators particularly appreciate the detailed, research-based studies.

One of our middle school spanish teachers proposed a session on Voicethread, in order to share teaching techniques with his language teacher colleagues. I invited Barbara Cohen, noted Voicethread enthusiast, to join us via Skype. What a great meeting that was! Barbara contributed her experiences working with a set of teachers in a different school, quickly solved some longstanding technical issues we had experienced, and picked up a few new teaching tips from us. We should include colleagues from other schools more often.

From blogs and Twitter, I sent a number of links to teacher colleagues: tech ideas for the social studies classroom, Life’s archives online at Google Images, and Google Earth’s ancient Rome layer.

The BAISNet community came through repeatedly. When I was looking for a way to ensure that Macs prompt for network logins using the username instead of the real name, the network sent me a command-line statement to set this as a preference. As I consider how to apply Drupal to build our next web site, BAISNet scheduled a meeting on open-source software for January. This will be great place to try out some ideas and seek development partners.

As I suddenly found myself in possession of three long videos to post online, I recalled colleagues’ Twitter posts regarding Blip.tv and gave it a try. I have been so pleased with the results. Why should I necessarily evaluate a wide range of streaming video providers when others have communicated the results of their experiences (and I have a dozen other things to do this week)?

The network learns, and it knows far more than I do.

tags: twitter, bliptv, blip, networks, connectivism

A former student recently asked whether I could point him in the direction of resources on the effects of computing on schools in Africa. As the academic computing activities of an entire continent are far too diverse to capture in a single response, I collected a few links to identify some activities that might help provide some insight.

AfriGadget While not specifically about academic computing, AfriGadget uses grassroots reporting to collect stories of technical ingenuity under conditions of extreme resource limitation. AfriGadget best captures everyday Africa.

Konrad Glogowski: South Africa, A Reflection Konrad visits Cape Town to help teachers learn to integrate Web 2.0 tools into their instruction. He grapples with the relative modernity of South Africa and the huge differences in access to resources within the country.

dvGarage in Zimbabwe: Alex Lindsay teaches Zimbabweans professional 3D animation and compositing techniques. He seeks to create a PixelCorps of media developers worldwide for the new economy.

One Laptop Per Child Africa: the heavily scrutinized ubiquitous computing project has several test sites listed on this page. (Go to the parent page to find the link to South Africa.)

In the mid 90’s, I was involved in academic computing initiatives in Botswana secondary schools. This Google search result suggests that some academic papers exist on this topic, though most require membership to access.

Lynne Kiesling

One of the consequences of the current financial market upheaval is MidAmerican’s buyout of Constellation Energy. See also the discussion at WSJ’s Environmental Capital of this and other possible consequences for energy industries.

Keith Johnson at WSJ also thinks that this move shows an interest on Warren Buffet’s part in nuclear assets.

Electricité de France has bid, and rebid in the face of rejection, for Constellation, arguing that the MidAmerican bid is too low. However, Constellation is not going for it, in part because of the increased national security scrutiny that would accompany foreign ownership of nuclear power plants.

We live in interesting times …