We formally submitted our Knight Drupal Initiative application last week. We're now officially in the pipeline; when we hear anything from the Knight Foundation we'll post details here.

Until then, this paragraph from our application sums up what we're trying to do:

We would like our project to help catalyze profound disruptions across several pre-existing markets. We would like to shift the definition of journalism; and we would like for this shift to diminish the reach and influence of corporate media outlets. We want citizen and community media to become more accessible, and barriers impeding prolonged collaboration between local, regional, national, and international groups to disappear. We would like to see schools and training organizations reduce their reliance on textbooks, as a secondary use of the tools created by our proposal is developing and distributing open courseware. On a more fundamental level, we want to see web publishing tools relegated to the level of the desktop text editor: something that we use daily without thinking or worrying about the details.

Since this site went live, we have released our blog posts under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Recently, however, we have seen several spam sites using our content to support click-through ad sales. As part of our efforts to combat this misuse of our content, we are changing to the Non-Commercial license.

We are open to people using our content in any way they see fit; part of the reason we are open source developers is that we believe in the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. However, ad-driven spam platforms are a parasitic form of web site; we don't want any association with that type of business practice.

See our About Our Documentation page for more details.

We're getting very close to completing the application for the Knight Foundation on our Knight Drupal Initiative proposal.

Out of curiosity, I figured I'd run it through Wordle and see what turned up.

From an article in the New York Times, it appears that the Princeton Review "published the personal data and standardized test scores of tens of thousands of Florida students on its Web site, where they were available for seven weeks."

According to the article, the breach -- likely caused by human error -- exposed some very sensitive data:

"One file on the site contained information on about 34,000 students in the public schools in Sarasota, Fla., where the Princeton Review was hired to build an online tool to help the county measure students’ academic progress. The file included the students’ birthdays and ethnicities, whether they had learning disabilities, whether English was their second language, and their level of performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which is given to students in grades 3 to 11."

In another folder on the same server, several files containing the names and birthdays of 74,000 students from Fairfax County, VA, were exposed.

On a related note, a prominent test preparation company will soon be looking for an experienced web security expert. The qualified applicant should be able to meet or exceed the skillset laid out in this document.

This post is adapted from my post over at Sylvia Martinez's Generation YES blog. Her post is titled Why open curriculum wikis won’t work. As my title suggests, I have a different viewpoint.

From my comment:

There is an enormous gap that is not addressed between wiki curriculum and delivery in the classroom — you allude to it in your closing when you say: “But hoping random lesson plans can knit themselves into a coherent curriculum is just magical thinking. At best, teachers may find a few nuggets they can adapt for their own classrooms.”

So, the problem here isn’t in wiki-style curriculum repositories. The problem is twofold: first, most existing repositories are content silos; second, the workflow of teachers isn’t considered in how open content is published. Neither of these issues are inherent in open content or wiki-style curriculum tools.

The Knight Drupal Initiative proceeds apace. Last week, two additional projects were approved to be forwarded along to the Knight Foundation, and there is a third strong proposal under consideration. If you are a Drupal developer, and/or have an idea about how to combine your love of open source software with your desire to change how we communicate, get a proposal in.

We are in the midst of refining our proposal prior to submission to the Knight Foundation. It's been a useful process, as it has forced us to take a step back from our thoughts and ideas and find a method of communicating them to a general audience. This post gives a summary of what we are thinking; if you are so inclined, please leave any feedback in the comments.

Need: What journalistic or public need will the proposed project address? How was the need identified?

Schools, non-profits, community organizations, and traditional media have all struggled with how to update their approach to their mission through effective use of social media. Over the last few years, while mainstream media outlets have made forays into these areas (albeit with limited success) smaller organizations have been constrained due to financial and technical barriers. Our Local Publishing Platform seeks to eliminate the technical barriers and minimize the financial barriers.

The Aggregation Hub seeks to eliminate another issue affecting smaller organizations ranging from local papers to community-run advocacy groups around varying issues: frequently, these organizations have limited knowledge about similar work being done by other groups. The aggregation hub, at its most basic, would provide a centralized resource for groups with a common mission. Over time, the aggregation hub could serve as a springboard for greater collaboration. With services like Twitter, we have seen the power of loose connections, and how in specific circumstances these types of lightweight connections can lead to more meaningful exchanges.

These needs were identified in a variety of ways: primarily, we observed common patterns of community involvement and development as part of our own work, as we are actively involved in several different online communities. Second, countless people – from clients to other social media professionals to heads of community organizations – identified a subset of these needs as issues they were struggling within their own organizations. As we talked with different organizations doing a wide range of work – from organizing resources around School-Based Health Care, to running online magazines for K-12 students, from supporting Action Research as part of Teacher Professional Development, to developing Community Published Journalism platforms, to building out a news and services directory to support agriculture among rural communities in Southeast Asia, a set of common needs emerged: people wanted to publish easily from a variety of sources, and collect these posts in a central place. Taken individually, these are all interesting projects; taken collectively, they have the potential to shift how we view “news,” and who has a right to “make” it. While these ideas have been around for a while (depending on how you want to look at it, they can be sourced to the advent of the Social Web or, arguably, to the advent of the web browser as Tim Berners-Lee first envisioned it, the promise has yet to materialize. Sophisticated, easy to use tools remain beyond the reach of many grassroots communities. This project aims to meet that need.

Proposed Project: Briefly summarize the project for which Knight Foundation funding is requested. Relate the project to the needs identified above.

As described above, the needs can be condensed down into two discrete categories

1. Local Publishing Platform: A more efficient means of communicating.
• Accepts input from web and mobile devices;
• Seamlessly handles images, audio, text, and video;
• Easy to install, maintain, and use;
• Can support simple group blogs to more structured channels or magazines;
• Can support publish-on-demand alongside community rating and editorial review.
2. Regional Aggregation Hub: A more efficient way of creating community knowledge.
• Low barrier to entry – participating groups do not need to make significant changes to their current procedures;
• Over time, accumulated content forms a searchable archive of information contributed by different community members and organizations;
• Provides a means of both highlighting the work of individual organizations, and amplifying the voice of loosely connected groups;
• The strength of loose ties -- shared content in the same “space” creates an initial connection that can be used as a starting point for more comprehensive collaboration.

Within both sites, various methods of “visualizing” a community can be employed. This visualization can be rendered based on geography, content, tags, users, frequency of posts, or any combination thereof.
In our proposal, we request funding to build these two resources. The Local Publishing Platform will address the needs of individuals and organizations as they communicate their message to a broader audience. This site will be available as a downloadable platform from Drupal.org, and will have a full suite of documentation describing how to install, modify and use the site. Our goal is to build a base profile that can be installed within the space of about 15 minutes (an average time of a standard Drupal install). This initial install will contain some sensible defaults to support several common publishing scenarios.

The second site, the Aggregation Hub, will be made available in the form of a site recipe. Like the Local Publishing Platform, all the code needed to build this site will be freely available for download from Drupal.org. The documentation will describe how to install and configure the site. As the expressed needs of the Aggregation Hub cover a broader range of functionality than the Local Publishing Platform, documenting the base install and additional use cases will allow us to build a tool that will be useful to a larger audience.

Both of these projects can be replicated and installed by any organization that wants to use it. To emphasize: this is not software as a service, and it is not a tool that an organization needs to rely on a third party to provide or support.

Two articles with an interesting contrast going on right now -- one on John McCain and a recent speech he gave on Georgia, and the other about a student expelled from Semester at Sea.

First, it appears that a speech given by John McCain on the Russian invasion of Georgia borrows, without attribution, from a Wikipedia article on Georgia (note-- for the Wikipedia article, I am linking to the revision current on the date of this blog post, as wikipedia articles change over time).

I first read about this at the Political Insider.

It appears that a Wikipedia editor pointed out the similarities. The Political Insider provides three example; the first two contain clear overlaps, where common phrases appear verbatim in both texts.

The third example provided on the Political Insider blog, however, is more interesting -- in the quotation, given below, I have highlighted all of the "to be" verbs in the Wikipedia version, and I have italicized two key structural elements:

Begin quoted excerpt

In 2003, Shevardnadze (who won reelection in 2000) was deposed by the Rose Revolution, after Georgian opposition and international monitors asserted that the 2 November parliamentary elections were marred by fraud (1). The revolution was led by Mikheil Saakashvili, Zurab Zhvania and Nino Burjanadze, former members and leaders of Shavarnadze's ruling party. Mikheil Saakashvili was elected as President of Georgia in 2004. Following the Rose Revolution, a series of reforms was launched to strengthen the country's military and economic capabilities (2). (Wikipedia)

vs.

Following fraudulent parliamentary elections (1) in 2003, a peaceful, democratic revolution took place, led by the U.S.-educated lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili. The Rose Revolution changed things dramatically and, following his election, President Saakashvili embarked on a series of wide-ranging and successful reforms (2). (McCain)

End quoted excerpt

A comparison of the two passages shows a reliance, in the Wikipedia quotation, on "to be" verbs. The McCain speech, however, uses none, and the resulting text of the speech is less verbose -- this is a common side effect, and benefit, of using fewer "to be" verbs: quicker, more active phrasing. However, the italicized phrases mark the organizational structure of the excerpt: Fraudulent parliamentary elections sparked the Rose Revolution --> which led to a series of reforms. This structure, along with a few key words, survives intact from the Wikipedia article to the McCain speech, and this is one of the more common forms of unintentional plagiarism that I saw back when I taught writing to high school students. Clearly, this concept is difficult for writers at all levels to master. On its own, this would certainly be a borderline case, and one that would merit a conversation on what constitutes original work, and what deserves citation. Within the context of the first two examples, however, this appears to be an extension of the plagiarism cited earlier.

And, on a related note, a student was recently expelled from the Semester at Sea program for plagiarizing from Wikipedia. Maybe we need to put all the speechwriters on a boat...

Over on his blog, Will Richardson has an interesting post on using the power of cloud computing. The comment thread also gets interesting; some responders conflate the idea of cloud computing with the more general notion of web-based tools and Software as a Service, but one of the other issues that gets either overlooked or undervalued is the issue of student and faculty privacy. It's also clear that in some cases, the terms and conditions of these services remain unread or ignored.

I left a version of this post as a comment on the blog, in addition to an earlier comment. As this comment has been caught in the gaping maw of spam prevention for the last 24-36 hours, I figured I'd post it here as well.

One commenter asks whether Google is liable for any data loss.

RE: "Do they (Google) have any liability for lost documents?"

No. See the Terms of Service

Two relevant sections:

"13. Warranty Disclaimer. CUSTOMER UNDERSTANDS AND AGREES THAT EACH SERVICE MAY CONTAIN BUGS, DEFECTS, ERRORS AND OTHER PROBLEMS THAT COULD CAUSE SYSTEM FAILURES. CONSEQUENTLY, THE SERVICE INCLUDING ALL CONTENT, SOFTWARE (INCLUDING ANY UPDATES OR MODIFICATIONS TO THE SOFTWARE), FUNCTIONS, MATERIALS AND INFORMATION MADE AVAILABLE ON OR ACCESSED THROUGH THE SERVICE, AND ANY ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND ANY USE THEREOF SHALL BE AT CUSTOMER'S OWN RISK."

and

"15. Limitation of Liability. IN NO EVENT WILL GOOGLE OR ITS LICENSORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, AND INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DAMAGES FOR INTERRUPTION OF USE OR FOR LOSS OR INACCURACY OR CORRUPTION OF DATA, LOST PROFITS, OR COSTS OF PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES, HOWEVER CAUSED (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO USE, MISUSE, INABILITY TO USE, OR INTERRUPTED USE) AND UNDER ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO CONTRACT OR TORT AND WHETHER OR NOT GOOGLE WAS OR SHOULD HAVE BEEN AWARE OR ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE REGARDLESS OF WHETHER ANY REMEDY SET FORTH IN THIS AGREEMENT FAILS OF ITS ESSENTIAL PURPOSE; OR FOR ANY CLAIM ALLEGING INJURY RESULTING FROM ERRORS, OMISSIONS, OR OTHER INACCURACIES IN THE SERVICE OR DESTRUCTIVE PROPERTIES OF THE SERVICE."

The convenience of the service is also mentioned.

RE: "As soon as we go to Google Apps, all our students will have a similar conventional email address so all students will be able to use Docs, Calendar, GTalk, Reader, Sites, etc. in a collaborative way."

This type of comprehensive user experience makes an ideal terrain for data mining. One user ID can be tied to chat content, email content, various documents (both created and read) and links followed from all these documents. Additional mining can include looking at groups of students, and student surfing behavior based on time of day. This is advertising gold, and it gives some amazingly useful information about a coveted advertising demographic.

For a cautionary tale on privacy, see this post that goes over the recent Viacom suit against Google, and lays out some of the privacy implications. Imagine that a media company has detected copyright violations coming from within a district. Then, read the article linked above. Substitute "Google Apps for Education" for "youtube." Then, imagine your district's cost savings vaporizing faster than you can say, "I wish we had invested in our own infrastructure" as gaggles of lawyers flood your district. For extra fun, imagine the lawsuit involves students under the age of 13. Considering that you can sign into YouTube with your Google ID, it's conceivable that many students would use their school account for their personal video use.

Seriously, folks. Think long term, just for a second. We don't encourage our students to cut corners. We should have the same expectations for our critical infrastructure. Open source virtualization options exist; these options would deliver some of the same advantages of cloud computing, but without selling out student and faculty privacy as the price of convenience.

An Overview

If you have an interest in new media, new approaches to traditional media, online publishing, community work, or a basic interest in how to use the web to communicate within a community, you need to stop reading this post and check out the Knight Drupal Initiative.

Okay. Glad to have you back.

This initiative, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, aims to support Drupal-based projects that lower barriers to participation in community development and new media. This program has several distinguishing characteristics, including:

• A transparent community review process -- all projects are publicly reviewed, with monthly reviews/meetings taking place via IRC, and these IRC sessions are logged and made publicly available.
• The program is ongoing, and accepts rolling applications. In other words, if you are a Drupal developer and have an idea that will change the way people interact with/make news, you need to get your thoughts together, and submit a proposal.

Also, take a little time and review the existing proposals -- there are currently three proposals slated for review. As mentioned before, this is an open review process, and anyone with constructive feedback can participate in the review process.

Finally, all interested parties can play a role in the monthly meetings when proposals are publicly reviewed. The next meeting is slated for August 7th, at 3:00 PM Eastern time.

Our Proposal

We submitted a proposal in early May. The full writeup goes into more detail, but to summarize, our proposal aims to simplify the process of community building -- and support grassroots media -- in two ways: first, by creating a powerful, flexible platform that can be up and running within 10-15 minutes; and second, by creating a platform that multiple organizations can use to share information about related work on a regional, national, or international level.

At the risk of stating the obvious, these tools will be freely available for any and all to use. In our proposal, we also dedicate time to document how to use and extend these tools. Our goal is to build and document a resource that can be used by anyone.

We are incredibly happy to announce that our proposal has been vetted and approved by the Drupal community, and recommended to the Knight Foundation for consideration. In other words, we have passed the first hurdle. Now, we are working directly with representatives from the Knight Foundation as we complete our official proposal. As things progress, I'll post updates via the blog.

All of our Knight Drupal Initiative posts will be available here; with their own RSS feed.

Over on the Infinite Thinking Machine, Wesley Fryer has a blog post about creating a Netflix-style website for readers, with an emphasis on COPPA compliance for readers under 13.

Here's how I'd go about building that site using Drupal.

The main functional requirements:

These requirements are pulled and paraphrased from Wes' post; any that I have added are italicized.

• COPPA compliant -- no personal data collected from minors without the prior consent of an adult;
• Readers can rate books they have read;
• Readers can create lists of friends; these "friendships" can be one way, or reciprocal;
• Readers can write reviews on books; these reviews can be shared publicly, or privately between friends;
• The site should recommend books to readers based on their likes and dislikes of other books;
• Readers should be able to see what their friends are reading, and any reviews/recommendations of their friends;
• Readers should be able to keep a reading log on the site; this reading log should have the ability to be public or private;
• Readers should be able to form public and private groups/communities.

There are other features that will need attention, of course; for example, a site like this will require a detail-rich user profile page, and pages for recent recommendations, featured books, featured readers, etc.

Building the Site:

As a start, in addition to Drupal core, we'll need the CCK, Views, and Organic Groups modules. These modules will provide the main functionality to power the site. Other modules will be discussed in context below.

For user profiles, we'll use the Bio module.

For book ratings, we'll use the VotingAPI and the FiveStar modules.

For friends, we have a few different possibilities, and the best choice for the specific site would require some module evaluation. The shortlist: Buddylist (the original module of this type in Drupal, which we have used and liked in the past); Buddylist2 (an upgrade of Buddylist that looks promising, but it is younger code and we have yet to try it); and the Friend and Notice modules (also newer than Buddylist. Another possibility is the User Relationships module, that came out around the same time as Buddylist2. The "best" solution here will require some analysis of the existing code, cross-referenced against some precise descriptions of the desired functionality. This is also a place where the right design and UI is critical.

Views of friends recommendations, reading lists, etc: the Views module.

Reading log: CCK, with access control via the Coherent Access module.

Book reviews: CCK, with access control via Coherent Access

COPPA: this requires some custom development. We actually have some COPPA code that we worked on a while back that we need to dust off, clean up, and release. At its most basic, we need to branch the registration process, with all users under 13 directed to get their parent, or (alternately) to enter their parent's email address. The specifics would need to be vetted with legal counsel.

Content Recommendation: this is where things get interesting, and we have a few options. The shortest route could be dusting off the Content Recommendation Engine. We could also get some basic recommendations by looking at content a reader has reviewed favorably, looking at other readers who have reviewed that item favorably, and then drawing from their lists of recommended items. Also, creating lists of similar items when looking at both books and book reviews would be a nice feature to have. In short, content recommendation would also require some custom development, with the Content Recommendation Engine, the Similar by Terms module, the Similar Module, and the Memetracker all having code that could be useful/relevant for this project.

Public and Private Communities: Organic Groups, with Views to customize how content is presented within groups.

Module List

A list of the modules mentioned in this post:

http://drupal.org/project/og
http://drupal.org/project/views
http://drupal.org/project/cck
http://drupal.org/project/bio
http://drupal.org/project/votingapi
http://drupal.org/project/fivestar
http://drupal.org/project/buddylist
http://drupal.org/project/buddylist2
http://drupal.org/project/friend
http://drupal.org/project/notice
http://drupal.org/project/user_relationships
http://drupal.org/project/coherent_access
http://drupal.org/project/cre
http://drupal.org/project/similar
http://drupal.org/project/similarterms
http://drupal.org/project/memetracker

Wrapping Up

This is a quick overview. As with any implementation, the details would need to be clarified to the point where we could generate solid design mockups of the key screens. But, given what I've seen of the functional requirements, Drupal would provide an ideal platform for this functionality. Building this site in Drupal, from open source components, and documenting the process would allow any organization who wanted a site like this to create it; or, several schools could join together to use a common space.

Much discussion on the internet concerning the AP's new Pay By The Word policy. Gary Stager had this comment on Will Richardson's blog:

Why shouldn’t journalists and publishers get paid for their work?

Here’s a suggestion for edubloggers who believe that all intellectual property should be free - let’s stop paying teachers.

They just deliver content that is freely available elsewhere, right? Why is hard earned public money being given to teachers? They’re so 1.0!

From Cole Camplese, Should it all be Miscellaneous?:

The idea that we can follow a book filled with instructions on how to do information architecture, web design, usability, and so forth may be crazy.

Some great conversations going on about structuring dialogue within organizations, and the inherent tension between freely flowing conversation and institutional control over the messages contained within that conversation, and the need for quality control over content affiliated with an institution.

In addition to Cole's post (linked above), D'Arcy Norman has a couple of good posts that provide some context.

I don't usually pass these things on.

Particularly in the case of videos -- but this, created by Tony Hirst, was too good not to share.

Thanks to Brian Lamb for posting about this.

From an Op-Ed in the June 1 online edition of the NY Times by Brian Greene: Put a Little Science in Your Life

The entire piece is worth the read. If you are pressed for time and need to choose between reading this blog post and the article, choose the article.

Note: this is a comment that is currently in the moderation queue of the original blog.

Hello, Ken,

In reading through this post (as I did, a couple times) before replying, I was left wondering if you had actually read any of the posts you linked to. For example, you link to the post Authority is not truth — in this post, the author links to a very detailed analysis that debunks some blatant inaccuracies of a WaPo article. What is the matter with that? It’s an excellent model of critical thought. Read the article. Please.

Okay. This is starting to feel like a movement.

The men at the factory are old and cunning

The Summer of Code application process is underway. Along with some good folks at The Oregon State Open Source Labs, we have put together a proposal to share content between Moodle and Drupal.

In combination with the recently developed functionality to author and export content from Drupal in IMS LOM format, you could author courses in Drupal or Moodle, and use those courses interchangeably in Drupal, Moodle, or any other LMS that imported IMS LOM.

The planning for the Summer of Code is well underway.

This summer, we're working within the Drupal community, and with the Open Source Labs.

If you're a student, and want to get involved, read over the project lists (linked to above), and submit a proposal. Students receive 5,000.00 for their work.

So, if you're a college or university student anywhere on the planet itching to expand the amount of freely available code in this world, sign up and make a proposal.

Over on his blog, Miguel Guhlin asks:

Anyone have suggestions on how to respond to this question? I welcome all brainstorming ideas...

We are ready to implement a student portal (with teacher and parent portals to follow) for our 1:1 campuses. We would like for this portal to be a web-based, searchable, "pretty"

While "pretty" is subjective, this is one place where spending a little time with either an ID or a graphic designer, or both, will benefit your site. "Pretty" has a frequently overlooked cousin, "Usability" -- sorting out your navigational structures (done in Drupal using the core block and menu items), and making sure your theme enhances these architectural decisions, will often get you both Pretty and Usable, which is a winning combination. Starting with a solid base theme, like Zen, helps you theme your site in a time-efficient way, particularly if you and your team are learning how to design/theme in Drupal. Drupal can be themed pretty effectively via css alone; if you have someone on staff who can work in php, there really isn't much you can't do. Also, if there is one element you decide to outsource, the theme is a pretty good choice.

I just came across this tool for Mediawiki: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Send2Wiki

This extends the possibilities for using mediawiki as a remixing engine for open content repositories that are otherwise closed. I particularly like the pdf to wiki functionality.

A tool like Send2wiki, combined with the WikiArticleFeeds Extension to generate RSS feeds for republishing/reorganizing in an open content repository would allow a great de