I am very excited to be traveling to Ireland this year for Drupalcon Dublin potentially to give my talk “Drupal and the College Classroom”. Drupal is a widely popular, scalable, and competent (if used properly), — not to mention secure — open source content management system for building great web applications of all kinds. I’ve been working with industry and organizations over the past few years creating specifically with Drupal. Recently I took the Acquia Certified Developers test and I am now a Acquia Certified Drupal Developer. The opportunities with open source web content management systems are endless. Go mbeannaí Dia duit (May God bless you.)
North StudioI am working with North Studio in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada to rebuild the Boone and Crockett Club‘s historic wildlife trophy database as a modern, scaleable, and highly accessible web application. The team at North Studio is collaborating with B&C’s internal team based at their national headquarters in Missoula, Montana. It is a complex project with many moving parts including data migration of legacy trophy and hunter data, a contemporary Drupal build, and Solr search integration. My role is technical project manager and Drupal developer.
“The Boone and Crockett Club is a hunter-conservationist organization founded in the United States in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt. In addition to authoring a famous “fair chase” statement of hunter ethics, the club worked for the expansion and protection of Yellowstone National Park and the establishment of American Conservation in general.” 2
National Science FoundationI have been working for a couple of years on two research projects through the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Penn State. The research falls under the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute within the university at University Park. One of the projects is called Shale Network and is a scientific collaboration space around water quality data in the U.S. Marcellus Shale Region in PA and NY. The second project is called Critical Zone Exploration Network and is a collaboration platform for 1,700 hydrochemists and other scientists working in this field around the world. Both projects are Drupal 7 migrations from older D6 sites, and we are working to make these primary hubs for scientific collaboration on environmental health both locally and around the globe. Both projects are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Struggles and Methods of Teaching Web Building to the Contemporary College Undergraduate
As the senior educators in this country, university professors have an obligation to respond to data such as the findings in this report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Educational Testing Service on the current state of millennials’ understanding, skill level, and ability to apply these important technologies to real-world problem solving.
“Despite having a higher rate of educational attainment than any previous generation, U.S. students 16-34 years of age ranked lower than most of their international peers in literacy, mathematics and technology problem solving. Those born in the U.S. after 1980 tied for last among the 22 participating countries in numeracy and technology skills, and 16th in literacy. Top scoring Americans in this cohort ranked lower than their peers in most other countries, and bottom-scoring Americans ranked among the lowest in the whole study.” 1
I am currently working on an article that describes my methods and struggles of teaching basic, intermediate, and advanced topics in Web design and development to college students. The intent with this article is to contribute to the ongoing discussion on how to improve U.S. students’ skills and understanding of these fundamental technologies in today’s global world.
Feature image: Old Main at Penn State. Photo by: Greg O’Toole.
Penn StateI am currently authoring some new components for an excellent course in the College of Information Sciences & Technology at Penn State University. The course is titled Advanced Enterprise Integration: Technology and Applications and pursues the expanded knowledge of information technology and systems integration issues across multiple application settings including specific methods for designing and building advanced systems. The format is online, hands-on, watch, learn, build. The technologies we’ll focus on are MEAN stack, Drupal 8, Reactjs, PHP, and I’m thinking of adding some Python/Django for fun.
