Drupal Con Munich 2012 / An opportunity to enhance students' HE experience

I want to signal to the community the series of talks hosted at this year summer meeting of the Drupal community which are related to educational practices in HE.

As student and young developer on this platform, I see many ways in which students could benefit from acquiring these new skills. I've said somewhere else that OER/P can make students more aware of what self-driven education is potentially able to offer them. This is in fact an older idea, but if we combine it with a strong digital literacy skill-set that's when the learning becomes very effective.

In this sense, expanding the existing digital skills students usually already have with a basic knowledge of how websites work represents a step forward. Hence DrupalCon this summer.

This talk in particular http://munich2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/drupal-showcase-courses-higher-education will look at alternative ways to teach and learn a CMS like Drupal. This other one http://munich2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/state-drupal-community-education instead will be a summary of all the Drupal projects currently used in educational contexts and will try to find ways to collaborate on these projects. Finally, this one http://munich2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/drupal-goes-school-guide-educators-bringing-drupal-classroom will explicitly explore ideas to practically integrate Drupal into classrooms to enable students to become active creators instead of passively browsing contents.

Consuming internet contents is not very different from consuming other types of objects: the more you know about what you're buying, the more specific, and eventually useful, your choice will be. It's the same with digital environments. If students knew more about them, how they work internally and what the best practices are, it would be easier for them to have a richer exchange with the internet.

I will report back on PA about these conferences also posting (hopefully) video materials to analyze and reflect over how we could implement the new ideas on both PA and other projects. I will also present and host a practical workshop during one of the hackdays to put them into practice, to draw students' attention on those ideas.