I hope that my sporadic attention to this blog will become more regular as I begin to solve a rather vexing puzzle that I created for myself a few months ago. I signed up at the community college for a course called Web Programming with PHP and MySQL so that I could work toward developing computer applications that would promote my contructivist pedagogy. The course, taught by Chris Lott, was actually part of the impetus to begin this blog in the first place. I was in over my head with the programming, but I learned quite a bit about a number of things related to HTML, PHP, and relational databases.

One of the course requirements was to develop a project. True to form, I took on a rather large challenge to create an online writers workshop. I was successful in getting it to display and edit student writing, and sorting it according to categories, but I bonked on the admin part of the application. This is a critical area for two reasons. There is a need for absolute control over publication since I’m working with little kids who might write about all kinds of personal stuff that would not belong on the internet. It also has to be dead simple to administer.

The course took up most of my free time and a fair amount of my waking hours at work were devoted to thinking about the innumerable problems that were being presented to me. I am not, and will never be, a computer programmer. But I believe that I could work with an existing program, or reverse engineer something to suit my needs. Since the last several months have been framed by the feeling that I just “got off the boat” so to speak with regards to web technologies, I should mention that I also discovered content mangagement systems (being previously unaware of their existence) and recognized their potential usefulness for educational purposes. I would like to give kids tools that are simple enough for them to create, publish, and share multimedia texts. So I have been learning PHP and hunting for a CMS that might be customized to do the job. The problem (is there only one?) is that these tools are for the most part too complex for the average elementary school teacher, or student, to manage to use. My job, then, is to simplify something so that even a kindergartener could use it. Not a simple task!

At the risk of working on my writers workshop project and possibly only achieving what might be the poorly executed recreation of the wheel, I decided to look around at the available open source content management systems built with PHP and MySQL. I’ve loaded Drupal, e107, Mambo, Moodle, phpslash, and PostNuke onto my old iMac and played with them all. I think they are all too complex for what I have in mind right now.

So…I found the WordPress Wiki plugins page and am exploring the possibilities there. I like the wiki support pages because the community is large and active. I am also less intimidated to begin hacking on a program that uses only 13 database tables, as opposed to Moodle-the most extreme example from my list- with 97 tables. I gave up on Moodle when I discovered that there were no blogs and the journals module was not accessible to guests or even other class members. I don’t think elementary kids are going to jump right into a forum and start responding to each other in print. They don’t operate like that. If using and writing plugins for WordPress becomes a fruitful avenue, the functionality of this blog site should also begin to increase.

As it stands, I need to learn a lot more about the entire domain of social software. I’m taking a course from Chris on that very topic beginning a few weeks from now!