kosta's blog

I have now taught my Content Management Systems class twice for the University of Kentucky. This time it was online, taught to library and information science students. I have already written up my thoughts on Drupal as an LMS.
Now I want to describe the class itself and compare it with the first time I taught it face-to-face.

'Third boy, what's horse?'
'A beast, sir,' replied the boy.
'So it is,' said Squeers. 'Ain't it, Nickleby?'
'I believe there is no doubt of that, sir,' answered Nicholas.
'Of course there isn't,' said Squeers. 'A horse is a quadruped, and quadruped's Latin for beast, as everybody that's gone through the grammar knows, or else where's the use of having grammars at all?'
'Where, indeed!' said Nicholas abstractedly.
'As you're perfect in that,' resumed Squeers, turning to the boy, 'go and look after MY horse, and rub him down well, or I'll rub you down.
- Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

The foundation of the class is hands-on development, which means the following:
- you don't learn Drupal or CMS by talking about, but by creating a CMS of your own on your own
- the instructor is there to facilitate your learning and get you unstuck when you are confused
- even though it is all about practice, we don't teach the students where to click in the GUI; we teach them why to click there
- following from the above, even though the ending two thirds of the semester are all about practice, we start with the foundations - understanding what content management is, and what web technologies it relies upon.

Class structure

You can see a full syllabus and schedule here; let me point out the key elements:
- 40 "tiny tasks" throughout the semester - small applied checkpoints to monitor your mastery of the skills
- 3 short papers based on readings (mostly selected from the excellent A book apart series) that illustrate adjacent fields - knowledge management, content strategy, and mobile development
- a Drupal Sprint - a 24 hour window to create a CMS from scratch, to test students' strategy and time planning skills, as well as their knowledge of Drupal
- a final project - a full-blown CMS on which we work throughout the semester - from the initial ideas to one-on-one consultations, to peer reviews, and finally to a complete product.

Online or face-to-face?

Having taught it twice in both formats, I can say it can be done either way; I liked the online version better - probably because it was my second time doing it and some of the original bugs have been worked out the first time around. There were two big changes I had to make going from face-to-face to the online environment:
- write down explicitly as many ideas and explanations as possible and provide them as resources on the course support site
- deliver more of the materials (videos and articles) early in the semester since the students need the resources up front to start working on their ideas and kept coming back to them throughout the semester and asking questions.

Next steps

Here are a few things I would like to do differently next time:
- run the course sites and the student sites off of a robust platform optimized for Drupal rather than a generic shared hosting solution
- have full transcripts of all videos; improve the video delivery interface taking cues from the beautifully designed and beautifully usable interface of coursera
- have more guest speakers (ran out of time this time)
- add a private communication tool for students at the course support site (private messages rather than forum messages or comments)
- connect the course into a two-course sequence with our Information Architecture offering, moving all the theory out into the first semester (like our discussion of content strategy) and then going more in-depth into Drupal in the second semester.
- scale the model I have developed for Drupal to teaching other IT skills (computational linguistics, analytics, usability, etc)

If you are interested in learning more about my course or if you would like to collaborate on any of these ideas, let me know or just post a comment here!

I just finished teaching my Content Management Systems class. This time it was online, taught to library and information science students. I will write more about that experience and compare it with the first time I taught it; for now I wanted to share my thoughts on Drupal as an LMS.

Why not just use BlackBoard?

Many years ago, when I taught at OU, BlackBoard was actually cool and nice. It was pretty lean out of the box, but you could learn the tricks and re-arrange the blocks and then even embed HTML into them - paving the way for RSS and all other kinds of import tools, meaning you could pretty much have anything you wanted in it. When I saw it again after a long break last year, I had the impression that their developers have spent the last five years cramming every bit of fancy (but largely useless) tech into it and burying the simple and elegant stuff so deep that it is next to impossible to find.

I hope bloating can be resolved in future versions, but one thing can't - the closed proprietary nature of commercial LMS. I think using proprietary systems for simple things like LMS in public universities is tantamount to high treason - especially when there are beautiful and reliable open source projects like Moodle (I taught a class in Moodle in 2007).

So it is clear why BB is not a winner - it sucks and it costs money; but why not use Moodle? Normally, you wouldn't want to re-invent the wheel, so an existing solution is better than a custom-made one. I went with Drupal over Moodle for two reasons: one, this is a CMS class, so what better way to get the students to experience a CMS than to let them use it from day one because the course support site runs on it? Two, I was curious to see myself if it could be done. There is a joke in the Drupal community that you use WordPress to build a blog and you use Drupal to build WordPress; I think there is a grain of truth in it. I have spent days and weeks as a child with LEGO and it clones; Drupal is my grown-up LEGO, it is awesome to be able to build complicated systems out of a pile of parts.

Limitations and logistics

There were two issues that I didn't want to deal with. One, I would have very limited flexibility if I stayed on university-run services and servers; I needed a Wild West environment for my students to be able to experiment in. So I ran it off of my own shared hosting server. Two, I didn't want the responsibility of handling sensitive information like grades. So I kept all my grades in Blackboard because everyone at my university already has an account in it and we are paying for it, so we might as well use it to do the dirty work.

Keeping it lean

If I proclaim that BB sucks only because it has too many features, then the last thing I want to do is re-create the monster in Drupal. I want my LMS to be lean and clean. That means several things:

- if not sure about a feature, leave it out
- use core modules and core functionality as much as possible
- do not use contributed modules that hack core, i.e. try to force Drupal to behave like not-Drupal
- keep the number of contributed module to a minimum
- prefer general-purpose contributed module to highly-specialized ones

There was a panel at DrupalCon Denver where the presenter asked how many people had sites with over 50 contrib modules - almost all hands went up. Hands still went up when he raised the number to 100; a few went up even at 200. To me that sounds scary, and it sounds lazy. It is like sending 200 people to the ISS, knowing that most of them are certified psychopaths, and expecting the station to function smoothly in the long run.

Modules: Content organization

Views / CTools http://drupal.org/project/views
Starting the Drupal module list with these two is like listing your lungs as part of the equipment for a diving trip. They are indispensable because they are awesome by themselves but also because there are many wonderful things that have been built on top of them.

Date / Calendar http://drupal.org/project/calendar
Chronological organization of content is essential in a course that has a fixed schedule, due dates, holidays, and office hours. Date and Calendar running on top of Views is winning combo. There are other modules like Full Calendar; but all I want is a simple well-integrated calendar, and good support for Date fields in my content types, so this is all I need.

Token http://drupal.org/project/token
Tokens make Views ten times more powerful by allowing re-writes. Tokens also come handy in other places like webforms and email templates. I iz in love with tokens.

References http://drupal.org/project/references
I think you can't really claim that you are in the content management business unless you are creating links between related pieces of content. References allow you to do that. Relation does it better but I am used to References and they work, so I won't abandon them just yet although I am keeping my Relation knowledge current (like the Mac OS X of PowerPC days having a clandestine clone in x86).

Modules: UX

Automatic Nodetitles http://drupal.org/project/auto_nodetitle
A beauty of a module that depends on another beauty, Token, to allow you to hide the title field on content creation forms. It works wonderfully when no meaningful title exists, or when a meaningful title is best created on the fly from a combination of other fields.

Comment Notify http://drupal.org/project/comment_notify
We definitely need discussion board functionality, but it cannot live by itself - it needs to be situated with the content it describes and discusses, so comments on every page are better than a standalone forum; but once you have that, you need a good way to be notified when your questions are answered, and this is what this module is for.

Fieldgroup http://drupal.org/project/field_group
Sometimes there is a lot of content that all belongs together on one page but it is too long for one page; making some parts of it collapsible makes it manageable.

Field Permissions http://drupal.org/project/field_permissions
I locked out all unregistered users from the course by unchecking the "View published content" permission for anonymous users; I then used content-type level permissions to control what students could and couldn't do. But there were times when I needed to delegate access at the field level - for example, I created an appointment system where I wanted the students to be able to grab a slot they need (=edit the name field) but not be able to change the slot time (=edit the date field). Field Permissions allow me to do just that.

Webform http://drupal.org/project/webform
This is not technically about usability or user experience, but it can be, if you have an anonymous webform available at all times for people to submit ideas and vent - and be able to say things they may not say to you in person, so you can continually improve your teaching and the tools through which you deliver it.

Modules: Administration

Module Filter http://drupal.org/project/module_filter
There are tons of things you can do on the admin side, but there is only one thing that you can't do without once you try it - the Module Filter module that reduces that endless module page to a manageable length, lets you search modules, and hit the save changes button without having to scroll.

You have probably heard it by now. Facebook has acquired Instagram for $1bln. The best (humorous) reaction I have seen so far was chx's appeal that he will have to stop using Instagram (you can be forgiven if you are not familiar with Instagram, but not if you don't know who chx is). The worst reaction - and sadly, not because it was bad humor but because it was dead serious - was this tweet:

12 employees. 31 million users. $1 billion dollars. That's the kind of leverage focus gets you.

This is utter nonsense, and dangerous nonsense, at that. The implied lesson is that any small company could sell for a billion - as long as it focused. This is about as accurate as arguing that buying a one dollar lottery ticket can win you $100,000,000. The statement is true; only the real chance of it being true is so infinitesimally small that for all practical purposes the statement is false. The same applies to the 12 employees / $1bln dollar equation. False in an overwhelming majority of cases, true in one extremely rare uncharacteristic case. Statistically, a sample of one doesn't mean a whole lot - means nothing at all, really.

You could say this is a lousy comparison - after all, lotteries are random, and companies aren't - it's all about focus for Pete's sake, focus is what makes this one company rise above the rest and defy trends and theories. You could say, yes, this is an outlier; yes, this is unique case - so let us not turn up noses at it and write it off as a fluke, but study the success of it in detail and learn from it and try to replicate it.

But we are not offered to study it in detail here - we are offered one quick summary, a one-word solution - "focus", which for a start-up company of several employees translates into "work 80 hours a week, eat ramen noodles, sleep under your desk, and forget about exercise and life". This is a very lousy proposition, especially if your chances of success are small. At least in a lottery you can buy a ticket for a buck - you don't have to ruin your eye sight, your back, and your prospects of a family life to give it a try.

What is really scary to me is how often we are given tech outliers as a source of inspiration. As we get caught (in the academe and outside of it) in the technological vortex of me-too projects, we never look at the mean anymore - only at the top .0001%. For example we say "Apple achieved 500% growth in one year in such and such segment let's figure out how they did it" instead of saying "an average tech firm grew 3% in that segment, let's learn from them, and let's not forget to look at firms that lost share this year and see what they did wrong". We say "MIT has a great iPhone app, let's ape that" instead of saying "Most university mobile apps are a pain to use and an embarrassment; let's try to avoid adding ours to that list".

What you learn from outliers upon inspecting them is the combination of the unique conditions that have created them (and the realization that you don't have any of those conditions in your case). If you are going to look at numbers, your safest point estimate still comes from the measures of central tendency (mean, median and mode) and not from the new "science" of outliers.

Part of my job is helping UKIT develop a Drupal support infrastructure. To that end, I sometimes meet with Drupal developers on campus to help them with their projects. Last week I talked to a web developer (I will protect her identity) in a large unit here at UK.

She has very limited familiarity with CMS or with Drupal, very little time, and a list of duties so long it is hard not to entertain suicidal thoughts when looking at it. She is expected (single-handedly) to migrate their existing web presence into Drupal, and along the way to build a ton of new functionality - some of which will require the interaction with other systems on campus, which most likely means additional programming (in which she has zero experience). And as a little aside, her boss asked her to add functionality for both mobile phones and tablets.

This sounds like full-time jobs for at least three people with high end IT skills, and instead we are going to have part of the time of one regular employee. Why does anyone think this could work?

I think the most likely candidate is management's ignorance of the complexity of the problem. They see the switch from a web brochure model (=a bunch of static pages organized into a simple tree) to a CMS as something similar to selling a Ford and buying a Toyota; while in fact it is more like trying to give up a bicycle and getting a submarine to do the same work.

But even below that is the problem of technology in general and information technology in particular being offered as a magic solution. The late Steve Jobs is perhaps the finest example of spreading the myth - in fact, the original iPad advertising copy described it as a "magical device". He was so fond of pitching Apple software and hardware as fast and easy to use, that there is a whole video made of clippings from his keynotes over the years where he always concludes the demo of a feature with "Boom!" to show how a task that used to take forever is now super easy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8L39UwOS-Y

This approach is not new - as early as 1888 George Eastman famously claimed to be doing the rest if you just press the button. But it is ubiquitous and because of that very harmful to the professionals working in the field.

It is no surprise that modern CEOs and administrators think that switching to a CMS involves pushing a button (and BOOM! - it is done). That means that as you work on these projects, you want to be very clear up front with your clients about the complexity of the task. You have to educate them about the time and resources that it takes to create complex systems like CMS. The best project may fail if you don't educate the client and set the expectations right.

Everett Rogers's magnum opus was diffusion of innovations; but he has made another significant contribution to science in the form of a book on the history of communication studies as a discipline (Rogers, E. M. (1994). A history of communication study: A biographical approach. New York: Free Press.). It is a book full of great historical details and surprising revelations - such as the realization that the discipline was originally started with oil money, and sustained with corporate injections ( = early research on media advertising campaigns) and CIA funds ( = intercultural communication). Dirty money trails aside, Rogers tracks three fundamental ideas that influence the development of communication theories; the discipline stands on the shoulders of three giants, namely Darwin, Marx, and Freud.

Throughout my education, I have been accustomed to seeing Charles Darwin as one of the giants of science (speaking of that quote, Darwin is buried next to Sir Isaac Newton himself in the Westminster abbey). Darwin's name brings associations of a somber bearded man, the book about the descent of man, Galapagos finches, evolution, and survival of the fittest. It is a dry image; associated only vaguely with the more romantic and less bookish notion of a sea voyage aboard a ship by the name of the Beagle.

The Darwin of the Beagle era is none of that, as the reading of his diaries demonstrates (http://lensyoga.com/node/charles-darwins-beagle-diaries). We see a young man, full of wonder and anticipation, tirelessly collecting specimen at sea and on land, and writing copious research notes about the process - with none of the certainty and finality that we are accustomed to associate with his name.

The Beagle Record is even more revealing. Here the selections from Darwin's diaries are complemented by excerpts from Captain Fitz Roy's narratives; but even more importantly, with Darwin's letters to his family and to John Henslow, his mentor at Cambridge.

The Darwin of the letters is anything but dry - adventurous, tumultuous, sometimes full of hope and great anticipation, and at other times gravely depressed and doubtful - but above all witty, energetic, and occasionally almost mischievously childish and sarcastic. This is not the Father of Science Darwin - it is the Darwin who tirelessly rides for hundreds of miles with gauchos across South America, who remarks about a travel companion that she daily increases in every direction except height, who climbs vertiginous mountains of Tahiti and sleeps in huts made out of banana leaves; and who repeatedly tosses the same iguana into a pool of water "as far as [he] could throw it" to see why the animal is so averse to being in water - the lizard invariably returns straight to him because it has no fear of man (and no natural enemies on land), but it instinctively fears its numerous aquatic enemies.

We see a man - or rather two men, Darwin and FitzRoy - driven by a sense of duty; one tirelessly collecting animals, fossils, and geological samples for the advance of natural history; the other making a decision to invest his own funds to purchase a schooner to expedite the survey of the coast of South America which is the primary goal of the Beagle's voyage.

Reading the Record has made me see the human dimension of Darwin's life; but it also made me respect him and his companion for this unfaltering drive of Duty; a drive so strong that Robert Fitz Roy 30 years after the voyage took his perceived failure to perform the Duty so seriously that he commited suicide (and Darwin himself greatly undermined his health as he worked night and day upon his return to produce the publishable report of the voyage). This feeling of Duty (and the heavy toll it takes on its bearer) is perhaps best expressed in Fitz Roy's letter to Captain Beaufort (August 15, 1832):

Oh that time and Resources could be multiplied in proportion to the demand - I would then give you and myself satisfaction. Every fresh step only shews me a multitude of others which ought to be taken; and the more I scribble and think, the more I find to scribble and think about.

The Beagle Record: Selections from the original pictorial records and written accounts of the voyage of H. M. S. Beagle. Edited by Richard Darwin Keynes; Cambridge University Press, 1979

The earth is being destroyed, at an ever accelerating rate.
We humans are the source and the agents of this destruction.
It means that the writer and the readers of this manifesto, you and me, are responsible for the destruction that we cause with our actions.

But since it is us who did it, it is us who can and must undo it.
The crisis is so deep that small changes won't do. Big change is needed.
The problem with big change is that it is drastic and violent, and violence is not an answer. Violence is never an answer.
We must therefore implement small positive changes into all aspects of our lives, so that they can accumulate and turn into big positive change, just like our seemingly innocuous little changes made in the name of progress and growth combined to precipitate the current crisis.
And for this to work, the changes must be woven into all of our actions, into the very fabric of our lives.

Our personal lives must change - we must stop being greedy mindless consumers and use less stuff.
We must develop habits, hobbies and friendships that don't depend on stuff or consume stuff.

But changing our personal lives is not enough. Our professional lives must change too.
Jobs that are defined through growth, progress, and expansion must be redefined.
Work must lead to the reduction of needs or more efficiency in using and protecting what we already have.

Changing our lives is the only way to be at peace with ourselves. Be the change you want to see.

This is a truly remarkable book, beautifully and lovingly edited by Richard Keynes and published by Cambridge in 1988. To a student of Darwin and evolution it provides the day-to-day backdrop to the scientific life, the context to the process of discovery and thought; but it stands very well on its own not only as a superb travel narrative, but also as a coming-of-age story of sorts, as we observe Darwin's very character transformed by the voyage. He is 22 when the Beagle sails and 27 when she returns; he is invited to join the voyage (without a salary) by Capt. FitzRoy, who is his senior by only 4 years. He starts on the right note - amazement and anticipation, and inevitably arrives at the only possible conclusion by the end of the journey - a mindset of tranquility and tolerance, nevertheless marked by an undeniable firmness and resolution of character. One should forgive Darwin's occasional misspellings (carefully preserved by Keynes and retained by me in typing up the quotes below) and admire his style - its elegance, its poetic quality, but also its love of the absurd and the ridiculous.

December 17, 1831 - Devonport
It is necessary to have gone through the preparations for sea to be thoroughily aware what an arduous undertaking it is. It has fully explained to me the reasons why so few people leave the beaten path of travellers.

January 24, 1832 - St Jago, Cabo Verde Ids.
After our one o'clock dinner, Wickham, the Captain & myself went to the famous Baobob tree & measured it more accurately.
(in the Narrative of the surveying voyages of HMS Adventure and Beagle, FitzRoy wrote: In a valley near the town is a very remarkable tree of the Baobab kid, supposed to be more than a thousand years old; but I am not aware of the grounds upon which such assertions are made).

March 6, 1832 - Bahia
The greater part of the day has been spent in idly lying on deck. - I am not surprised that people are so indolent in a hot country; neither body nor mind require any exercise; watching the sky is sufficient occupation for the former and the latter seems well contented with lying still.

March 15, 1832 - Bahia
In the evening I went to the Hotel d Universe, where by the help of three words "comer" to eat, "cama" a bed & "pagar" my host & myself contrived to agree very well.

June 11, 1832 - Rio de Janeiro
The air is motionless & has a peculiar chilling dampness. - Whilst seated on the trunk of a decaying tree amidst such scenes, one feels an inexpressible delight. - The rippling of some brook, the tap of a Woodpecker, or scream of some more distant bird, by the distinctness with which it is heard, brings the conviction how still the rest of the Nature is. -

June 30, 1832 - Rio de Janeiro
Went to the city to purchase several things. - Nothing can be more wearisome than shopping here. - From the length of time the Brazilians detain you & the unreasonable price they at first ask, it is clear that they think that both these precious things are equally valueless to an Englishman. -

November 17, 1833 - Montevideo
The church is a curious ruin; it was used as a powder magazine & was struck by lightning in one of the ten thousand storms of the Rio Plata. - Two thirds of the building was blown away to the very foundation, & the rest stands a shattered & curious monument of the united powers of lightning and gunpowder. […]
The inhabitants do not require much education in their representatives; I heard some men discussing the merits of those for Colonia; "that although they were not men of business, they could all sign their names". With this every reasonable man was satisfied.

November 20, 1833 - spending the night in an estancia on the Rio Negro
The Captain at last said, he had one question to ask me, & he should be very much obliged if I would answer him with all truth. - I trembled to think how scientific it would be. - "it was whether the ladies of Buenos Ayres were not the handsomest in the world". I replied, "Charmingly so". - He added, I have one other question - "Do ladies in any other part of the world wear such large combs". I solemnly assured him they did not. - They were absolutely delighted. The captain exclaimed, "Look there, a man, who has seen half the world, says it is the case; we always thought so but now we know of it". My excellent judgement in beauty procured me a most hospitable reception; the Captain forced me to take his bed, & he would sleep on his Recado.-

November 29 - December 4, 1833 - travelling between Mercedes and Monte Video
At Mercedes I asked two men why they didn't work: - one said the days were too long; the other that he was too poor. The number of horses & profusion of food is the destruction of all industry. - Moreover there are so many feast days; then again nothing can succeed without it is begun when the moon is on the increase; and from these two causes half the month must be lost.

December 28, 1833 - Port Desire
The plain, as is universally the case, is formed of sandy chalk, & gravel; from the softness of these materials it is worn & cut up by very many vallies. - There is not a tree, &, excepting the Guanaco, who stands on some hill top a watchful sentinel over his herd, scarcely an animal or a bird. - All is stillness & desolation. One reflects how many centuries it has thus been & and how many more it will thus remain. - Yet in this scene without one bright object, there is high pleasure, which I can neither explain or comprehend.

March 21, 1835 - crossing the Andes on the way between St Jago and Mendoza
When we reached the crest & looked backwards, a glorious view was presented. The atmosphere was so resplendidly clear, the sky an intense blue, the profound valleys, the wild broken forms, the heaps of ruins piled up during the lapse of ages, the bright colored rocks, contrasted with the quiet mountains of Snow, together produced a scene I never could have imagined. Neither plant or bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted the attention from the inanimate mass. - I felt glad I was by myself, it is like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in the full Orchestra a Chorus of the Messiah.

July 20, 1835 - Lima
Lord E. Clinton & a Frenchman were riding & were attacked by a party of Soldier-robbers, who plundered them so completely, that they returned naked, excepting their drawers. - The robbers were actuated by warm Patriotism; They waved the Peruvian banner & intermingled crys of "Viva la Patria"; "give me your jacket". "Libertad Libertad" with "Off with your trousers". -

October 9, 1835 - Galapagos Isds, observing giant tortoises
In the pathway many are travelling to the water & others returning, having drunk their fill. - The effect is very comical in seeing these huge creatures with outstretched neck so deliberately pacing onwards. - I think they march at the rate 360 yards in an hour; perhaps four miles in the 24. - When they arrive at the Spring, they bury their heads above the eyes in the muddy water and greedily suck in great mouthfulls, quite regardless of lookers on.

September 25, 1836 - reflections upon the voyage coming to an end
It must be borne in mind how large a proportion of the time during a long voyage is spent on the water, as compared to the days in the harbour. And what are the boasted glories of the illimitable ocean? A tedious waste, a desert of water as the Arabian calls it. No doubt there are some delightful scenes; a moonlight night, with the clear heavens, the dark glittering sea, the white sails filled by the soft air of the gently blowing trade wind, a dead calm, the heaving surface polished like a mirror, and all quite still excepting the occasional flapping of the sails.

I have been doing Drupal 7 training for UKIT since last December. I have taught 6 sessions, 60 people, most of which were beginners in Drupal.

I always start the session (after my introduction) by asking the participants to tell us who they are, and answer two simple questions - What project brings you here? and What do you think Drupal is? These questions let me adjust to the needs of the participants, and also to gauge their IT knowledge level.

There are a few answers that are recurring:

University supported CMS
Since UK is now behind Drupal, people want to know what it is all about, they want to evaluate the solution for their needs. This one is particularly common if their sites are at the end of the cycle and they are looking for an upgrade path.

Ability to delegate
This is probably the most common reason - not wanting to be the sole gatekeeper on a site, but being able to delegate content editing and creation to several people in several different users. A variation on this from more advanced users is to expect an editing path - setting up different roles and approval processes.

No HTML by hand
People want a high-level tool that will do the dirty tagging for them. They are then very disappointed when you tell them Drupal doesn't come with a WYSIWYG editor out of the box. I like to tell them that Drupal is so much more than a web-based Dreamweaver, but they usually refuse to listen.

Modern technology
This one has many flavors - SEO, analytics, social media, video, flash, PHP, HTML 5 - people want a system that would support all the modern stuff, and that would not lag behind. They are usually not disappointed - they see how easy it is to integrate "modern" into Drupal, and how fast the community responds to change.

Magic
This one shows up every now and then unfortunately. Perhaps Drupal is that magic tool that we have been promised all the time by IT people - one that would do all the work for us? These hopes must be squished, which I do right away. You still have to do the work, and if you want a big complicated site, it is going to be a big, complicated job.

Only occasionally do I hear anything about advanced ideas - something like integrating with other systems like Blackboard - but that is to be expected since we are dealing mostly with newcomers.

Having read four volumes of John Fowles, I proceeded with both relief and caution to something entirely different, encouraged by a friend's recommendation - Kurt Vonnegut's "Slapstick". To use an airline turn of phrase, on initial approach it seemed like a completely different landscape; yet at close range it was remarkably similar to Fowles - the same autobiographical tone, the same troubled sadness and concern for humanity's lunacy. Only of course (fittingly for a book with the title Slapstick) the message is delivered in a frivolous and grotesque fashion:

The way Mother described Heaven, it sounded like a golf course in Hawaii, with manicured fairways and greens running down to a lukewarm ocean. I twitted her only lightly about wanting that sort of Paradise. "It sounds like a place where people would drink a lot of lemonade," I said. "I love lemonade," she replied.

There is a generous measure of self-negating mockery, both at oneself and at one's country - for example, when one of the characters is asked to comment on China's withdrawal from diplomatic ties with the U.S., she promptly and firmly replies, "What civilized country could be interested in a hell-hole like America?". The explanation provided by the Chinese themselves is even better: there is "no longer anything going on in the United States which was of any interest to the Chinese at all".

The image of Manhattan turned into the Skycraper National Park - deserted, overgrown, populated by only a very few survivors that have adapted the city's now useless infrastructure to their own daily needs - is strangely familiar to a modern viewer thanks to WALL-E; but it was pleasant to discover an earlier occurrence of the theme.

I usually try to finish my blog posts with a sentence or a paragraph that brings closure; it lulls me into narcissistic complacency, an illusion of observing my literary and intellectual strengths. And I will end today, uncharacteristically, with a Vonnegut quote and an invitation to anyone (including myself) who is inclined to take themselves with seriousness and admiration: "Why don't you go and take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut?".

The first volume ends with Fowles's success with his first published novel, "The collector"; and follows his most successful years commercially until his wife's death in 1990; yet we learn from the diaries that these are not necessarily equally successful in terms of peace and happiness. John and Elizabeth leave London for East England; and the tone of the journals shifts from that of an involved participant to that of an observer. This of course is not to say that one causes the other; but rather both the move and the shift are caused by Fowles's inability and unwillingness to fit into the increasingly materialistic and removed style of life - that he observes not only in London, but also in his self-imposed exile in Lyme Regis; as well as in the US in Los Angeles, Florida, and Boston.

4 January 1966, Boston
… we feel enveloped by the Roman generosity to favored guests. Once again the Roman qualities of America overwhelm one: everything based on power, on mean gold rather than the gold mean. America is in a way the inability to think of gold metaphorically.

18 January 1966
The sexlessness of American women - there is a sort of compact well-groomed hardness about them, a sexiness learned by recipe, an assertiveness that really asserts the opposite of what is intended: a queasy masculinity rather than an offered femininity. Of course men (and the whole society) must partly cause this; but it is distressing how few rebels there are. How so many women here assume their Americaneity. No quietness, no tenderness.

22 January 1966
We drove to Miami Beach, where a monstrous regiment of huge hotels stand whitely against the stale Carribean. To see the size and vulgarity of these establishments, the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, the Doral, is the only reason to go to the place: they are so vile, so nightmarish, so (alas) American, that they cannot be missed. In a way it is the city of the dead - all the people there are old, uninspired, industrial debris. In the lifts the women of fifty and sixty stand like cattle. One has to push them aside to get out. They drift round the lounges like somnambulists, from meal to meal, from room to room, bound, chained, as the black slaves were once chained in the slave ships, to a moronic routine in a moronic world.
In a way it is a European city, a monument to the dream of countless generations of unprivileged European peasants. They dreamt of an aristocratic city like Venice, perhaps; and they translated it, when they had the chance, into Miami.

5 November 1966 Lyme Regis
The fault of our society has been to emancipate women but to refuse to furnish (to train them for) their freedom. They are to be equal to us; but the only equality offered them is ours, the male definition (in social and career terms) of the concept. So the only ones who gain are the masculine type, the ones who can copy them. All that has happened to the true women is that they have been turned out, like so many cage birds, into a world where they cannot fend for themselves.

15 January 1967 London
Dinner with Twiggy, the latest idiocy in the fashion world. Impossible, really, to dislike her. Such innocence. Once can no more blame her than a bird for pecking fruit-buds.

31 October 1968 London, upon meeting Denys Sharrocks
Then he confessed that he has written a few commencing pages of a telly play recently, but 'as soon as I was back in my office on Monday, I had all the pressure of reality on me'. It's rather like some free man saying, I couldn't do it because I had to report to the Tower to be racked. I mean there is something medieval in his determination to be determined by what he hates.

1 November 1969 Boston
We toured around antique shops that day. New England has lost its charm for me. Not that the houses and architecture are any less pretty, but I hadn't noticed before the poverty of culture - in all this area, no animals. No cows, no horses, no sheep. No fields. Nobody walking. Nobody working their gardens. Just the quiet endless flow of cars. Everybody going somewhere but arriving nowhere. They seem to me like people in a dream, quite unaware of how narrow and imprisoned their way of life is. At one antique shop there was a herb garden: a sudden human touch. Thyme, chamomile, marigold, mint. And old woman made it.

19 November 1969 San Francisco
The pleasure of seeing - we arrived about five - office-workers streaming home on foot; the scaled down buildings, even the slow-moving traffic. It is very noticeable, the humanity of people's faces here. This is still a human, a concerned, an honorable city. One that knows it is in danger; eyed, after Los Angeles's blindness.

29 December 1970 Lyme Regis, after a friend's visit
From the moment he gets up he discussed ideas, opinions, definitions - no wonder they finally gave Socrates his glass of hemlock. One can stand just so much of this furiously intellectual, mental approach to life.

24 March 1983 Lyme Regis, upon reading Matin Amis
Nausea, in the Sartrean sense, seems far from dead; and a decided cold shoulder turned on any humanist view of life - tolerance, generosity, and classical observer role for the writer. There is a marked shift away from the common reader-writer assumption into a generally waspish personal hatred of all that is not similarly waspish. A literary century gone very sour.

24 March 1988 London, upon visiting the zoo
Its cruelty, for the mammals, is what strikes one: their various cage neuroses; the jerboas springing monotonously against the glass, even the endlessly circling, pointlessly darting fish. Hell haunts so many cages, once one starts translating them into human terms; that we should condemn so many species to look like this, half-live like this.

23 May 1988 London
To London. That long south-western approach, from Basingstoke on, confirms me in my hatred of the Great Wen; the endless suburbia, overcrowding, antheap of it. Only a sick race on a sick planet could not see the folly the human race has lead itself into, the city mania, the way need for money and economic success has perverted every decent value. In London you see it also, a kind of a fixed look, half-avaricious, half-determined, in the people going home from the office; of the trapped in a certain way of life.

26 July 1989 Lyme Regis
In form I might belong to humankind; in reality I seemed one of a ravenous self-destroying horde of rats. I am glad there is no god. If there were I cannot imagine that we rampant, myopic and insatiably self-centered creatures should be allowed to survive a single day more.