A really interesting post over on Bill Fitzgerald’s blog about integration of Moodle, Elgg and Drupal. He says it better, but the idea is that a school can run courses in Moodle (or indeed Drupal), provide PLEs for learners and teachers though Elgg, as well as some of the groups in the school for which a ‘course’ structure would be less appropriate, and then have Drupal as the public-facing website, with optional integration of selected Elgg posts via RSS.

As I’ve commented on his blog, this post has come at just the right time. I’ve been mulling over something like this for a while now – we have Moodle and Elgg working quite happily side by side, and are excited about the possibilities which Penny and Martin’s work in NZ open up for integration here, but I’ve been feeling that it would be worth bringing the public facing website into the equation, and would love to have some easy way of sharing at least some of our blog content publicly, and Drupal certainly looked the front runner there, especially when coupled with Elgg’s feedbook functionality.

I’m surprised his diagram doesn’t make more of Moodle; there are certainly things which he might use Elgg or Drupal for that I’d probably run in Moodle, in part becuase of the rich range of activity and resource support, and perhaps also the UI design – we’ve used it successfully for projects like the school magazine and staff communications, alongside the more traditional courses. He does, though, make a valid point about Moodle courses not being as student-centred as Drupal or Elgg based ones, however that perhaps makes the learning curve for many educators a little smoother!

I’d be interested to hear about progress towards integration with school management information systems – I know SIF compliance has been mentioned both here and in Moodle-world but I’m not aware of much progress.

A quick Google suggests that Moodle/Drupal sso is already available, and I believe the Elgg/Moodle integration work will sort this out here too, yes?

http://eduspaces.net/mberry/weblog/8795.html