 Hi. I was glad to see yesterday morning and Vince keynote that I'm not the oldest person here at the conference. I'd only been involved with Linux for about five years, but I bought my first Unix mini computer in 1981. So I've been around the traps for a long time. I'm currently working at a new research center at UQ called Center for Educational Innovation and Technology. This is a small research center that's recently been set up. That's a not very good website because I did the design for it, which you can go to and it'll show you a bit about some of our projects and who is participating and what our students are up to and so forth. But we're a very small team. This is the core team of people that see it. But the university has tasked our group with inducing change. So even though we're small, we have to do things that are right out on the edges to try and get people to re-evaluate what they're doing and hopefully make some change for the better. My boss, Phil Long, is the director, often talks about the innovation cycle and that the sorts of things we do are all based upon ideas that academics have for different ways of leveraging technology in teaching and getting students to participate in their own education. And this usually leads to us building some sort of experiment usually in conjunction with an academic and trying it out in class, getting some metrics and eventually if it proves good, then we go into an incubation phase where we try and get other academics involved, try and put the concept out to a wider audience, maybe present some papers on it and so forth. And eventually we're trying to transition through other units at UQ that are more involved with the day to day. And eventually with some of the projects might end up as actual services that are implemented by the ITS or the library and made available across the university and just become part of the university's teaching. And some of those might even spawn new experiments. So that's the sort of thing we're involved in. To do this we have to build lots of new things. If you want to do something that's not been done before, you can't just go and download a piece of software off the internet that does it. You usually have to build it yourself. So as I said, we're a new center. I've only been there a couple of years. It basically started about then. So we had no infrastructure, no nothing when we started. So we basically built everything we've got. And people, none of the core team had any experience of Drupal as a content management system, but a number of our contacts from different areas had all said to us, Drupal is worth considering if you need something to manage content. And our first task was building our own website which we call our web presence because it not only just exposes what we do, but it actually provides a way for us to interact with the different teams working on the different projects and so forth. So it's much more than just a static sort of website. So we decided to give Drupal a go initially for our own website. And it fitted in with what we do fairly well. We'd already made the decision to build a virtualization infrastructure that allowed us to run Linux VMs as our main platform for hosting stuff. And even though in previous jobs I'd had a fair bit to do with software based on J2EE and running with Tomcat and so forth, I personally felt for the sort of small ad hoc interdisciplinary teams that we were going to have on our projects that trying to build software in Java was going to be too high up in the hardbasket for what we were looking for. And even though I'm not a PHP programmer, I thought that using a PHP MySQL style applications would probably give us an easier entree. I should mention that a lot of the work we do, we get students to write some of the code, participate in the projects. And if you've only got a student for one semester or across the summer, you've got them for 10 weeks, you can't afford to spend a huge amount of time training them up. So if you're using platforms that are very quick and easy to get into, it means you can actually get productive work out of them in a short period of time. Another thing that reason why Drupal kind of fitted in really well with our plans is that we're very much at sea, focused on open source, open knowledge, sharing stuff. Phil Long, our director, came from MIT, who was heavily involved in the open courseware program there. We're at MIT making all of their courses available via the web. All the content is available and he's pushing an open scholarship sort of model at UQ as well. So having an open source platform that we use for our development also fitted in with us as well. Now I get asked this question all the time, why did we pick a CMS rather than a learning management system? And there's a couple of reasons for this. The first one is that the university has a learning management system. They've standardized on Blackboard, which isn't really an open platform. It's a Java based platform as well. So it's a little bit more difficult to develop in. So the stuff that you can just do in Blackboard, we're not really interested in because you can already just do that. We're interested in stuff that you can't do easily. Also learning management systems make a lot of assumptions, some of which are good for the sort of stuff we do. Like they assume that you have roles for teachers and roles for students. Whereas if we build a Drupal system, we have to put those roles in. But that's not very difficult. Learning management systems also typically assume you have some sort of authentication infrastructure already available like LDAP and so forth and integrate nicely with that. But again, that's pretty easy to do in a CMS as well. But a lot of the assumptions, the learning management system makes fairly narrowly targeted. And so when you're trying to build something a little bit out of the normal square, these prior assumptions that are built into the product put up a lot of barriers. So it's much better starting from a platform that hasn't really assumed that you're going to be building a piece of learning software as a tool for building learning software. So Drupal actually versus something like Moodle is actually a better choice for us in that way. Also Drupal being a product that is not narrowly targeted at a specific market like education has a much larger community and a much wider range of available modules than say something like Moodle or Sakai, which is a learning management system. They're targeted at a much smaller audience. They will have smaller communities and so forth. Talking about the large community and lots of modules, Drupal I've found has just an amazing number of modules, something like 7000 I think at the moment. It's on the next slide. We'll get to that number. It has an enormous number of contributed modules and in the areas that we find we need to use quite often like authentication, directory integration. We pretty much do that on everything we build. Design of relations between different content types and the ability to have very flexible content types really suits the sort of stuff we do as well. The ability to integrate WYSIWYG editors and extensions to that platform is also very important. The ability to automate things and build rules for workflows and actions, lots of modules in that area as well. Reports and display generation. Because the stuff we build is research focused, we need to be able to collect data and get data out of our systems. Being able to generate reports easily out of the database without having to write your own queries is really nice because typically we're the people wanting to get the data out of the principal investigator or the academic and they're not MySQL experts. Rich media integration. One of my research areas is the use of video on the web. I'm very interested in using video with HTML5 and so forth. That sort of integration is pretty good in Drupal. Other things that you would normally find in a learning management system are also there as contributed modules. Things like forms, quizzes, agreements, sign ups and so forth. It's relatively easy to build those sorts of things. Social network integration. A lot of academics are exploring the use of social network integration in their classes and how they can leverage that into the learning experience. So being able to build that easily into our products is also really good. Group management of course. Many of our projects rely on forming students into small groups so that they work collaboratively. And data integration, things like RDF, DIYs so students can build up lists of reference materials that they've created for an assignment. Stuff like that is really good. And there's just literally thousands of these modules. This is the Drupal.org homepage. If I put my glasses on. 7,546 modules as of a couple of days ago when I did the screenshot. So it's a pretty big community. We just had a Drupal down under conference on the weekend. Partially organized by the Linux guys which went really well. We had Dry's, I can't pronounce his surname, who's the lead developer of Drupal. And he was telling us about the new version, version 7 that just came out the other day on my birthday. So great birthday present. And a new release of a piece of software you're using. And he says that version 7 is a product of patches and inputs from over a thousand developers in the Drupal community which is comparable to a major release of Linux kernel. So it's a very big, very active community. One of the things I really like about using the Drupal system for development is that the community is all focused around the website. So all of the contributed modules, or nearly all I think out of the couple of hundred modules I've either used or done research into, I've only used one module that wasn't actually hosted on this site. So all of the contributed modules come through onto this site. They all have their issue queues on this site. They all have their discussion forums on this site. They all have their CVS available through this site so you can get a release version, a dev version, a head version. And I can go to one page and see all of my issues that I've lodged with core Drupal or with any of these contributed modules on the one page. And it's all done for me and it tells me where things are updated and whether a patch of contributed has been tested by anyone else and whether it's being rolled into a new release. And it really does work. I recently finished development of a fairly large system and I'd come across, not really a bug, it just didn't do something I needed to do in a particular module. It was an interaction between two completely different modules maintained by different people. And to fix the issue required changes to both modules. So I wrote a hack to get my site to work, posted that and said this is really important for me. It's probably going to be important for other people. Maybe you should consider testing it in the two modules and it's taken about two months but now both modules have been updated and sometime the next week or two I'll be testing that. And so it's worked really, really well for us. Also on the Drupal site they host a lot of groups and being in the educational software field, there's lots of groups for that within the Drupal community as well. So the groups I'm in at the moment are focused around Australia or education, higher ed or HTML5 or learning management systems. And so on the one site I get to interact with all the community members that also have those interests as well nicely focused. So it's a very well organized community around this piece of software. I want to talk briefly about our projects and give you a couple of screenshots to show you the kind of diversity of things that we've been able to do using this platform. It's just the names of some of the projects that we've done using Drupal. So we don't use Drupal for every one of our projects but we've obviously used it quite considerably in a number of them. The first project we did was our own web presence, our own website. And as well as it just being a way for us to present information out to the public, we wanted to effectively create a project management capability so that each of our projects could effectively have a sub-site that we could manage the project in and the community of people around that project. And also we have a lot of what we call communities of practice where groups of people that have a similar interest may not be related to a single project. It might be something that crosses across multiple projects or something that's unrelated to any of our projects but just an important aspect of pedagogy or something like that. And so we wanted to support these communities of practice as well. So within our Drupal website we've built, effectively reproduced the functionality that's in products like Basecamp. So for each project you can have to-dos and milestones, map them out on a timeline. Everyone in the group can post blogs, news stories, you can keep a shared bibliography of references. All of that sort of stuff is possible. And you can make groups such that anyone can join the group. You can make groups that are moderated, you can make groups that are private, all just by ticking a box when you create the group. And then when you log into the site you get to see all the groups that you're in. And you can participate in any of the groups, see what's new in the groups and so forth. And all of this was pretty well stock-standard out of the box, plug a few modules together. Basically no bespoke code required and serves our uses very, very well. The next site was probably the first one I started after the main site. And this is for a particular project we had that began in sports medicine at UQ. We wanted to investigate how, when students are learning physical techniques, like diagnostic techniques where they're maybe doing a knee examination for a football that's landed, you know, placed his foot incorrectly and twisted his knee and snapped ligament or something like that. These sorts of examinations are physical techniques that a student has to learn. And they're really difficult to teach. In the past students learning these sorts of things, the lecturer will get up at the front of the lecture theatre and maybe have a model of a joint and hold it up and say, you know, you hold here and you twist there and so forth. And then the students go away and they become practitioners and they maybe get it right, maybe don't, and ten years later after a lot of practice they might eventually be good at doing these sorts of examinations. So we wanted to find a better way of doing it. So what we did is we got the students to form up into groups of three. And one student would play the role of the practitioner doing the examination. One student would play the part of the patient, being a mock patient. And one student would be the videographer and video it. And the student doing the examination would vocalize what they're doing. And then after they videoed this they'd swap places and so they'd each get a turn at each role. And then upload the videos to this website that I'd built where the staff could examine the videos, review them and comment on them. And in the initial trials using sports medicine went really well. The students by kind of putting themselves in different points of view as to what they were trying to learn. Because the point of view of being the patient is very different. You can actually feel where someone's placing their fingers and pressing and which way they're twisting your leg. It gives you a much better idea of how you do it yourself when you put yourself into the perspective of the practitioner. And if you're someone who's trying to create a video record of an examination, then again you're having to put yourself into a totally different perspective to work out what are the important things. From what angle can you actually view what's going on and actually see what needs to be seen to make a diagnostic decision. And we found the students that did this sort of training were much much better at the actual physical skill than students that had just learned in the traditional way. So my battery's running low. So we built a new site and rolled it out to a much larger audience of students doing medicine. Unfortunately I can't show you a screenshot of the inside of the site where they're sharing the videos. A, because the material, because it's videos of students we shouldn't really show it. And B, because the student I've got converting this site so that we can have a download version of it available, accidentally deleted all the video files and haven't restored the database yet. But in this newer version what I've been doing is using the new HTML5 capabilities with the video tag and some new features that were introduced in HTML5 that allow you to script what the video tag is doing to build an annotation capability on the video display. So now instead of the academics just being able to play the video through and then just make some comments which are just stored separately, they can actually stop the video at any point, make an annotation. The annotation is stored with the time code. They can get a scrolling list of the annotations as they play the video and the list scrolls through and the highlighted annotation is the current one. They can scroll through the annotations, click on one, it jumps to the video. All of this sort of manipulation is just happening using these JavaScript and HTML5 techniques that are now available in the web browser. And we found that's worked quite well so the students can now get much more targeted feedback. The lecturers can pull out a couple of exemplar videos, go through them and provide quite detailed annotations even with links out to other videos and so forth. Yeah, we had a look at a couple of those sorts of things and at the moment because the annotations are being stored separately so they're actually everything's in the database except for the video which is just a file. But one of the things I like about Drupal is effectively everything you build, all of your data is in the database and so effectively you can do anything you want. Another interesting project we've built in Drupal is for a history course. We call it the World History Companion. Traditionally students studying history, the major form of assessment is that they write an essay. So if you're a student and you're given a topic and you have to write an essay, you go away and you write something and on the due date you submit it. The only feedback you get is after you've finished. You get some grade and maybe the lecturer will write on your thing with a red pen and give you some tips but you've done it. You've finished, you're not going to take those tips and make your essay better. It's all done and dusted. So we thought it'd be much better to have students go through a review process where they actually get feedback before they submit and this kind of sounded a little bit like what they do if they actually become a successful historian and they have to write articles and publish them and so forth. So we said well let's build it like an online journal. Let's have the students write articles, submit them for review, get anonymous reviews, update their articles based upon the reviews, maybe even grade the review feedback as to how good the feedback was and then they eventually get a final article. We also did a few other things like have them in teams so a team of five would write articles on a larger topic so that each pick a single topic, each write their own article and then at the end they collaboratively write an introduction that frames the collection of articles. So this is very much a workflow driven sort of site. The students, the system picks what articles they get to review. They never get to see who it was that wrote the article or who it was that wrote the reviews of the articles of their articles but all of the grading is kept and the feedback and so forth and provides them with a much richer environment to improve their writing skills. Even though they're not even having to write anywhere near as larger article as they would if they were just given an essay, we found that it does really improve their writing because they're having to reflect not only on what they've written but on what other students have written and so forth and out of the two reviews I have to write, hopefully one of them has got a better article than theirs so they get to see a better one or they might get to see a worse one and give themselves a bit more confidence and so forth. Another site, this is one that Anisha, one of my co-workers has built. This is a little bit more like a traditional learning management system where the students just presented with a large bit of information but it's for a specific topic and this is teamwork. We find that at university students are required to do teamwork a lot more than they were in the past. Lots of subjects now included as a core attribute that the courses are trying to encourage in students but a lot of students don't have much experience in what working in a team is all about. So this site is a set of well formed content material to tell students about teams and how teams work and what the roles are in teams and so forth. And interspersed in the material are a number of surveys and reflective questionnaires where the students think about how they've used teamwork themselves and their understanding. So it's a little bit more complex than a standard sort of presentation of material that you would do and say something like Blackboard. Potentially this sort of thing could have been done in something like Blackboard but the reports and some of the quizzes are maybe a little bit more, you know, they're not quite fitting into the standard sort of learning management system framework. That's the sort of questionnaire they get and there's a lot of video material interspersed in it as well. Another more recent project that's an ongoing one is Collections in this project where it's really just the beginning of probably a whole series of projects exploring the idea of student centric portfolios where a student collects the outputs that they generate during their studies and control those outputs and able to mix them into different conglomerates and share those conglomerates for different purposes. Yeah, we've looked at a number of the portfolio style products that are out there but again because we're looking, we're wanting to experiment and get data out, it fits us much better to have something that we build ourselves and so this has got a long way to go. It's just like the video site that's evolving, this site will do similar sorts of things. Yeah, actually we're looking at maybe turning a couple of our things into distributions or features in the future. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, EDU glue. One of, I haven't actually used the EDU glue one, I have had a look at it but it may for our purposes be a little bit like the reason we didn't choose Moodle because it's more targeted at being a learning management system. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah and what we're hoping to do with a lot of our functionality is put it into these features so we'd be able to add them into a larger framework like EDU glue as things that other people can turn on and off as well. It's one of the nice things about Drupal is it's evolving into a much more flexible product as each release and each expansion of the community seems to create more opportunities. It really is a very flexible thing. Yes. We will. I think we're getting towards the end. This particular site is a site where we're targeting first year engineering students. They come to university and they see a list of different engineering courses that they can do, you know, chemical engineering, physical engineering and they might look at science courses and so forth. And how is a student to know whether their skill set, their knowledge, their interests suit them better as a chemical engineer than a civil engineer or a mechanical engineer. So what this site does is it uses a large set of focused concept questions to effectively find out from the student what they know, what they're interested in and so forth and eventually it gives them a big report like this which tells them what subjects and what courses they're most suited or most likely to succeed in. So it gives them some feedback when they're confronted with the vast array of courses that are available as to what actually might be the best thing for them to go into based upon what they actually know at the time. So that's it from me. Happy to answer any questions. Wait for the mic. It goes on the video. Are you looking potentially to share that with academia nationally and internationally if such a forum was available or as a collaboration? Yes. What we're actually in the process of doing at the moment is going through all of the systems we've built so far and creating downloadable versions of them. There's a fair bit of work in that. You know, we have to strip out all of the data that students have put in and package them up in a way that people can download and install and get a working system and that's where one of my students accidentally deleted all my videos doing that process but for future products we're hoping to take core sets of functionality that we develop and implement them as a Drupal feature which is something that effectively bundles up configuration and modules that you've created into something that appears as a single downloadable item that people can download, install into a Drupal site, effectively tick a box and it installs it, makes it a little bit more accessible than having to download the entire thing that we've built which may not be exactly what someone's after. But by putting it out there it means it's all there so if we've written a module and it's got database schemer and some MySQL queries and reports and so forth and someone wanting to achieve the same thing then it might get them 90% of the way towards what they want. It's always easy to build off something that someone else has done that nearly does what you want to do. I've found. With just a kind of two questions. I have both other universities that are using it so the Australian Learning and Teaching Council and the ALTC exchange project for example. I haven't personally, I've sent a couple of emails to people. I know recently someone from the ALTC has created an account on our site for them to log in and participate in our projects but I haven't actually personally spoken to anyone yet. Once again if you want I can connect you to the development team there because they've put a lot of time into doing the ALTC project and stuff and if taking it out to other universities might be good to talk because there is quite a lot of use within the university section. But just another interesting question on a policy. So one thing I've done, I've actually did the ALTC implementations and those projects and I've worked within Drupal within the academic sector. Big problem within universities and a big problem that we had for all our fellows at the ALTC is getting Drupal into the academic system. As you would know yourself it's very, very, very hard. There's a lot of red tape. There's a lot of policy. There's a lot of not wanting to go that way. So how did you get it in there? Was it trying to introduce it in smaller projects? Well luckily our centre has been tasked with inducing change. So to some extent we had a free licence to do whatever we wanted and break any rule we wanted to break which most university centres don't have that sort of freedom of licence. I suppose they think that because we're so small if we break a rule and something goes terribly wrong it's only gone terribly wrong in a very small way. But if we break a rule and show that the rule was bad or something else really does need to change then that's a small thing has created something bigger. But we found that Drupal, what we've been doing with Drupal has encouraged other people at UQ so it's now being used in the library and the business school. They've waited for us but we were kind of at the forefront of it and I've tried to participate a little bit with the Brisbane commercial Drupal environment as well because we will have to hire people. Our students are actually getting exposure to it and then graduating so we are part of the Drupal environment. I got the information about the ALTC using Drupal from the Drupal Higher Education Group on the Drupal site so the community works really well and now we've had a couple of quite successful Drupal conferences in Queensland and hopefully we'll have more as well. At UQ I think we're fairly lucky and that if you saw my talk at the Drupal conference was on a corporate application that we got roped into developing so corporate services in ITS at UQ will have to run Drupal to run that application so having a corporate style application built on an open source platform is not really common. Could be. We don't have any budget for it. Any more questions? Thank you for listening. I think John on behalf of Len it's come to talk to us today. Thank you John. A small gift for you. Thank you.