Learning Aloud - Participants' Portal

Welcome to the Participants' Portal. This service developed using the open source software Drupal is designed to allow registered visitors a simple way to share ideas and resources.

Drupal is a very powerful content management system Here, it is being used to accomplish a couple basic, but important tasks.

1. Register users in order to control who contributes or manipulates content appearing on the Participatory Web site.
2. Offer registered users the opportunity to create a simple page (like this page) from which they can offer information or link to more sophisticated resources they host elsewhere.

A video tutorial describing basic portal functions is available.

ACCESS

The popularity of Learning Aloud resources has been increasing. Many have applied for access - most often for Meaningful Learning and the Participatory Web. Some of the content you will encounter here requires authentication. There have been some issues related to this process so I have decided to explain why I expect users to authenticate, i.e., provide a university affiliated email address.

Why do we require authentiation?

There are many reasons.

Probably the most obvious is security. We have run servers for many years and when you offer opportunities for user participation it seems you encounter those who want to use the opportunity for what we would regard as inappropriate purposes. For example, our social bookmarking site is not intended as an advertisement service. We want our site to be used and if the first listings you encounter when visiting the social bookmarking site are ads for male enhancement drugs it is unlikely you will return.

We are also protective of our content. While there is no charge for using the services and viewing the content we provide, we do not regard this as an open source project. We want to know who is using these resources and have a way to control access if necessary.

What do I do if I do not have an email account through an educational institution?

If you apply from a Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or whatever email service, you will likely receive a return email asking for additional information. We are willing to consider alternatives. All we want is a way to connect an email address with a real person. Perhaps a course instructor we can connect with an educational institution would be willing to list the names of individuals we should accept. Identifying your own web site (which contains a source of identification) would be another way.

We know some find this policy frustrating and seem miffed when we ask for additional information. It is not our intent to be difficult so we hope you are willing to respond and become a participant in this community.