Today we are talking about AI in EDU, how it can provide efficiencies, and how you might start using it today with guests Brian Piper & Mike Miles . We’ll also cover External Entities as our module of the week.
For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/494
Topics
- How are you using AI with your team at Rochester
- How are you using AI with your team at MIT
- What are the AI policies at your institutions
- On the ingestion side how do you manage consumption
- Tips and tricks to incorporate AI into your work
- Can you talk more about using AI to distribute content outside the web
- Do you have tips for managers
- How have you seen EDUs using AI other than as assistive technology
- What are your favorite tools
- Have you done adversarial testing
- How does AI in Drupal impact EDU
- Where do you see AI in EDU in the future
Resources
Guests
Brian Piper - brianwpiper.com
Mike Miles - Mike-miles.com mikemiles86
Hosts
Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Andrew Berry - lullabot.com deviantintegral
MOTW
Correspondent
Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
- Brief description:
- Have you ever wanted to connect your Drupal website to an external data source, to include their datasets into the presentation of your Drupal-managed content? There’s a module for that
- Module name/project name:
- Brief history
- How old: created in May 2015 by attiks, though the most recent release is by Colan Schwartz (colan), a fellow Canadian
- Versions available: 8.x-2.0-beta1 and 3.0.0-beta4, the latter of which supports Drupal 10 and 11
- Maintainership
- Actively maintained, latest release was less than a month ago
- Security coverage (though technically needs a stable release
- Test coverage
- Documentation: user guide
- Number of open issues: 77 open issues, 3 of which are bugs against the 3.x branch, though one is marked fixed now
- Usage stats:
- Module features and usage
- The External Entities module lets you map fields from external data sources to fields on a “virtual” entity in Drupal. This allows for external data to be used with Drupal’s powerful features like Views, Entity Queries, or Search API as well as use your local Drupal site’s theme to theme data from an external source
- The module does provide a time-based caching layer for external entities, but you can also implement a more custom cache expiration logic through custom code
- External entities can also have annotations, essentially Drupal-managed information that will be associated with the external entity, and accessed as a normal field through all Drupal field operations. This could allow you to have Drupal-based comments on information from a different website, for example
- There is a sizeable ecosystem of companion modules, to help you connect to different kinds of external storage, as to help you aggregate data from multiple sources
- In my Drupal career I’ve worked on a number of higher ed websites, and the ability to display externally-managed data is a pretty common requirement, either from an HRIS system to show staff and faculty data, or a courseware solution like Banner. I thought this would be an interesting tangent to today’s topic
