Yesterday, I talked about CMS Report's five most read articles that were published in 2007. Today, let's talk about seven of our articles that remained at the bottom of the dog pile. Listed below are Seven Great CMS Report Articles that you few people read.
I just can't believe the year Drupal is having. There has been an explosion of Drupal sites almost everywhere you turn. Drupal is very popular with the masses in 2007. So popular in fact, that I wonder as with all things popular if we'll be seeing 2008 as the backlash year against Drupal as it has quickly evolves as a litmus test for open source CMS (one of my predictions for 2008).
The latest Drupal-based site to flash on the screen of my browser is the portal (currently in beta) for the European Commission sponsored Science, Education and Learning in Freedom (SELF ) project. The site aims to be a community-driven platform for the production and distribution of educational materials. Its sustainability depends on the building of a strong community of users and participants of the platform. The site may actually be live by the time you read this post.
I found this article via Creative Commons' Science Commons. In the Financial Times article, "The irony of a web without science", James Boyle writes:
I really can't display every open source project's invitation for college students to apply to Google's Summer of Code. But just like the invitation from Drupal, WordPress would be another one of those projects I wouldn't have minded working on when I was going to college.
All I can do is shake my head in the direction education has taken in the United States. I've written about this topic in the past, a little here and on another blog of mine. In one of those blog posts, I wrote the following.
American society as a whole seems to have less value for education, especially in the sciences and math, than when I was growing up. Maybe I’m more sensitive to these numbers since I am a scientist at heart…but isn’t anyone else disturbed by this trend? While I feel there should have been something done to help reverse this downward spiral sooner, I’m glad at least that it is finally getting some some well deserved attention by the Bush administration.
College students in the United States are not showing up in those university programs that are focused on physical science, computer science, math, and engineering. There are a number of politicians, parents, and students that will blame the public school education system for the current state of education in the United States. I have some serious doubts whether fingers should really be pointed in the direction of the teachers or even school system. I think in many ways, those fingers should be pointed right back to the parents and their children. Perhaps life in America is so good that by the time the student becomes a young adult, life hasn't prepared them to face the challenges and disappointments they need to do well in the sciences.
Dries Buytaert, lead of the Drupal project, invited students on his blog to participate in Google's Summer of Code and at the same time help improve the Drupal core. This is Google's third year for the program which hopes to encourage college students to work on open source projects. Chris Dibona, Open Source Program Manager at Google, wrote:
I have never really worried whether I was certified or not. This Computerworld article gets right to the point:
Depending on whom you talk to, certification programs are either borderline rip-offs that provide little useful knowledge, or valuable hiring tools that make it easier for IT execs to pick the most promising new employees.
Available from vendors focusing on their own products, or outside organizations offering multi-vendor training, these certificate programs are expanding to fill the many specialized technology subsets that have multiplied along with the growth of data storage and other IT areas.
Now this isn't to say that I don't have a few IT certifications under the belt and didn't receive some benefit from them. One of the most intensive IT certifications of recent years was in IT security and another to "please" the crowd was a certification for migration to Microsoft's Server 2003. By the time I was done with those certifications though, I didn't know enough to get the job done.