Charlie Lowe announced that he assembled a group of writing teachers interested in using Drupal in education. The group is mostly comprised of PhD students and faculty in Computers and Writing, a subfield of Rhetoric and Composition studies. They plan to commit themselves to improve and extend the existing Drupal documentation. Read on for the full announcement.

Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 13:51:17 -0400<br>From: Charlie<br>Subject: A group to improve documentation and promote Drupal for education<br>I have assembled a group of over a half a dozen writing teachers<br>interested in using Drupal in education. The group is mostly comprised<br>of PhD students and faculty in Computers and Writing, a subfield of<br>Rhetoric and Composition studies (so don't think of us as your typical<br>literature teachers). As researchers, we are interested in both<br>electronic communication and using computers to facilitate writing and<br>learning. From what we have seen, Drupal seems one of the best open<br>source platforms for online classroom communities for the following reasons:<br>*ease with which each site member can have and post to their own weblog<br>*sophisticated control of content through taxonomy and node system (most<br>content management systems depend on creating separate modules for each<br>content type)<br>*wiki-like web authoring features of the collaborative book<br>At the same time, Drupal is also effective as a weblog/website for one<br>individual (in this regard, seems superior to MT). As our profession<br>becomes more engaged in using weblogs in the classroom, Drupal will be<br>particularly attractive to teachers since it can be used as a<br>teacher's main site and a classroom site.<br>Now, none of us are coders on the caliber of the Drupal developers. In<br>fact, some of the group has no coding training or experience at all. But<br>we are all writers who study how writing works in online communities and<br>what software is effective for classroom use. So what we can do is<br>better prepare Drupal for a wider range of users by decreasing the<br>learning curve necessary to install, administrate, and use Drupal by<br>*extending existing administration documentation<br>*developing site user documentation<br>*producing alternative formats for the above documentation, such as pdf,<br>to make it easier to work with Drupal help and instructions offline<br>*preparing Drupal distributions for classroom use and an individual<br>blogsite, pre-configured Drupal installs with distribution tailored help<br>*helping with Drupal developers with ideas for improving usability for<br>end users.<br>*developing additional texts offering suggestions for teachers on how to<br>use Drupal in the classroom<br>*promoting Drupal within our discipline<br>Dries has suggested that, instead of forming a separate Drupal community<br>to handle the project, that drupal.org could make a place for us within<br>the community.&nbsp; If the developers are willing, we'd like to join in.<br>Over the next few months, we'd like to begin contributing to the Drupal<br>handbook. Some of the group are new Drupal users and have already been<br>taking notes about the questions they have for configuring and using<br>individual blog sites, looking for places to expand the exisiting<br>documentation. Myself and another teacher will be using Drupal in the<br>classroom in just a couple of weeks. We will be considering a basic<br>Drupal install configuration for the classroom and also hope to be able<br>to offer some usability suggestions at the end of the term (students can<br>be useful usability testers because about a quarter of the class is<br>always looking for a way not to complete an assignment and then tell the<br>teacher what that problem is :) This fall, one of the faculty members in<br>the group is teaching a technical/professional writing class. He wants<br>to make evaluating and assisting with Drupal documentation an integral<br>part of the class (more details to come later).<br>Thus, I'm hoping that through our participation, we can help to make<br>Drupal a better platform for all users.<br>Any questions, concerns, suggestions or objections?<br>Charlie Lowe<br>&lt;a href="http://cyberdash.com/"&gt;http://cyberdash.com&lt;/a&gt;