EricHoefler.com

Update/Note: This post relates to Joomla version 1.3 and earlier. I have not used version 1.5 or above.

For a few years, I’ve been using Joomla (previously Mambo) to run an “interactive” website for students in AP English, humanities, and creative writing classes at my school: WSHSBeyond.com. This provided some “social” web work before the term caught on. Now, with additional extensions, the site provides a pretty excellent (though not perfect) social learning environment.

In case there are others searching for a way to move their students online, I thought I’d give an overview of what’s great and not-so-great about using Joomla as a solution.

WHAT WORKS WELL

First of all, Joomla can provide an excellent “walled garden” for students, and it’s particularly suited for creating a social network built around a discussion forum. Here’s how we use it:

Profile System: This is the heart of site (thanks to Community Builder). Each student has a profile to collect their work on the site and their links to other sites. In our install, students use the following tabs:

• Comments: Like most social networks, students can leave comments; I don’t attach any “assignments” to this–I think building a genuine community is part of the point.
• About Me: Provides text boxes for students to share information. (An early requirement in the course is to complete the “about me” tab in a way that reveals the student’s personality and interests). These areas allow for HTML, so that opens up room for even more creativity.
• Contact Info: This tab mainly provides links to other off-site pages, such as the student’s Google Reader Shared Items page, del.icio.us archive, and Elggspaces profile.
• Course Info: Students list other courses they’re taking.
• Profile Gallery: Students can upload images.
• Connections: This works like the “friends” feature of most social networks.
• Blog Entries: This tab collects all the blog entries students submit to the site blog.
• Forum Posts: This tab collects all the forum posts students submit.
• E-Writings: This extension allows students to upload their writing, leave reviews and ratings, and discuss the writings in the forum.
• MyBeyond: This extension allows students to create HTML pages or to build other pages that collect RSS feeds, mp3 files, and images. We plan to use this as a way to construct an ePortfolio that collects the student’s “best work” throughout the year.

Members List: Students can browse through all the members of the site, sort by grade level or class, or search by name.

Messaging: Students can send on-site messages through each other’s profiles, or send emails through a form to other students. The actual email address of each student is protected in both cases. Only if a student replies to another student from their email account will their email address be revealed.

Forum: We use Joomlaboard to run the forum. It’s simple but effective for our purposes. Each post shows the student’s avatar and links back to his/her profile. The forum uses BB code to format text and insert links, and students can attach image and text files to a post as well as “subscribe” to topics to receive emails about new posts on that topic. Only the “Course Forums” have an assignment attached to them. The other forums are available for students to use or ignore (another aspect of building community). We allow posts to appear immediately without approval, but the option to approve each post does exist.

The assignment for the English 10 and English 11 forums are similar: pay attention to popular culture, the news, your friends, etc. and make connections between these things and the theme for the course. In English 10, the theme is “perceptions of truth, beauty, and goodness” in cultures around the world; in English 11, the theme is “perceptions of American cultural identity” as defined by various groups.

Our course forums are open to the public, so feel free to stop by and read what they’ve been saying.

Site Blog: We give students “author” privileges and use the “submit news” feature that comes with Joomla to create the site blog. Currently, we use this as a way to allow students to post about topics that will interest most of the users of the site, or for teachers to post site announcements or other information that students may find interesting or helpful. The only limitation is that each post sent from a student must be approved before it will appear. However, if you’re using Joomla as a walled garden, that might be perceived as a benefit.

Wiki: We use MamboWiki, which is really just a bridge install of MediaWiki. It’s a nice, seemless install and was our main wiki for a while. However, I’ve recently moved away from this because the requirements of using MediaWiki code to format the page is sometimes more hassle than it’s worth. I understand the value of learning this (since it’s what Wikipedia uses), but I also think MediaWiki (and Wikipedia) should move to a WYSIWYG format.

WHAT COULD BE IMPROVED

While this is great for the most part, the limitations of the wiki and the blog are my only complaints about using Joomla.

Wiki: I still use the MediaWiki installation to create individual pages on the site that students can edit (for example, the “Help Using This Site” page). For the class wiki, though, I prefer WikiSpaces because they are so much easier to use. Unfortunately, this requires another login for students, but the ease of WikiSpaces seems worth it for me.

The Blog: The site blog allows anyone to comment (with links totheir profile). However, as I mentioned earlier, only “authors” and above can post, and these needto be approved by admins before they appear. This is good if yourconcern is for a walled garden with screened content, but not so great ifyou want to run Joomla as a multi-user blog platform (and the OpenWP bridge doesn’t quite cut it, either). Instead, my studentsalso have accounts on the “eStudio,” an Elggspaces site for their personal blogs and filesharing (over which they have genuine control). To make the connection between the main site and their personal blogs, students list their Elggspaces URL on their main profiles for easy linking, and include their Elggspaces feed on an RSS page in their MyBeyond tab. Again, though, this is another account and login for students.

Other than these two limitations, Joomla is pretty great. Perfect would be an integrated wiki as easy to use as WikiSpaces, with individual blogs fully integrated that were completely customizable by users and generated independent feeds (with podcast/videocast capabilities) like Elggspaces. (I keep trying to convince my programming friend to help me make that perfect tool, but he works 50 hours a week already!)

If you do give Joomla a try and discover some other ways to use it, I hope you’ll leave comments here or send me an email. Also get in touch if you run into problems, just want to share experiences, or are looking for ways to connect your classroom with others.

Happy webbing!