I’ve been writing quite a bit for the Logic book, and am quite happy with the drupal presentation of it. But today I have run into a problem trying to copy and paste text from a Word file into a new Bookpage. The carriage returns in the text are not being obeyed in the drupal version. It’s 40 exercise passages, numbered 30-70 (which i began renumbering), but it’s coming out as one long paragraph! I have tried entering additional carriage returns in Edit mode, and they show up in Edit mode, but they don’t show up in “view.”
Earlier I cut and pasted a ten page Word doc (Arguments and non arguments) and it worked fine. these exercises were to be on a child page to that one.
i have used the image uploader. the images have gone on the homepage. is it possible to insert them right into the text at desired locations?
After so much encouragement and comments, I have to say something!
On enforcing the idea that students can only get credit for a post if they leave a comment too, I will probably approach it either by saying that each such assignment is worth 2 points, one for each aspect/ component, or else that you’ll get either zero or 2. That will depend on my mood when I write the syllabus.
Patrick showed me a drupal demo on monday, and by last night I had set up the chapter spaces for 6 chapters I think, and had filled in a little introductory content for each. I’ve found the drupal environment pretty intuitive to work in, but it took me a while to get clear about the parent/ child page stuff in creating pages.
So for instance, I have a page for Categorical Propositions. On that page I’ll have the text I write that presents the basic information I would also present in a lecture. Attached to that will be a “child” page which will list a series of exercises for the students, and attached to that another child page which will have the answers for them to check. So literally, at the stage I’m at, I am writing my own logic book on line, and the students will go from page to page electronically. and it won’t cost them $100 each for the book.
My original intention was to have the exercises be more interactive, which requires software. I’ve found a good quantity of open source software already made up, through the epistemelinks site. I haven’t had time to skim through very much of it yet, but at least some of it looks like I could use it immediately. One is the software for a published, very mainstream, and standard logic book, similar to the one i’ve just abandonned. I was surprised to see it on the web available for use free of charge! I think I can link to it on the drupal page, and for at least some of what I want to do, the software can be just right.
Patrick showed me how to upload powerpoints; it was easy with the “file attachment” button. Two things we need to work on are: how to have a group blog for sets of five students (or whether wikis would be better, like I used this past summer), and how to connect to open source logic software: links to urls? imbed it in the drupal page? I also want to be able to up load photos, and Patrick has suggested that we might be able, with Andy’s help, to convert powerpoints to videos and have them play in Flash right on the page instead of being navigated away from it.