Jim Groom

CUNY WordCampEd

May 22nd, 2009

The Clarion, CUNY’s Newspaper of the Professional Staff Congress, recently reported on the persistent woes the CUNY system has been experiencing with the centralization and upgrade to Blackboard 8. What becomes painfully clear is how married large university systems like CUNY have become to an all-in-one solution for instructional technologies. And even the thought of moving away from the CMS logic becomes extremely daunting.

The cost to switch to another learning system would be enormous,” [Manfred] Kuechler said. But he added, “We need to start looking into other systems so they don’t think they can take us for granted.

Why is CUNY playing the attention-starved lover in this relationship? What a flaccid threat, especially when it’s just previously qualified by the recognition of the enormous cost any move would away from BlackBoard would represent. When did BlackBoard become the Don Juan of CMSs, leaving neglected lovers like CUNY with no choice but to flirt with alternatives in order to get some much desired attention? How did CUNY get into a situation wherein they are beholden to a corporate playboy like Bb for guaranteeing that teaching and learning can occur seamlessly throughout the university? And a slightly larger question, can Bb even be understood as a “learning system”? What does that mean? For me, the greatest of all learning systems is only a browser and an internet connection away, and last time I checked it was pretty damn cheap. The internet should be CUNY’s learning system, and the folks in charge of technology should be investing in ways of making this experience fluid and easy for individuals and classes to quickly discover, share, and collaborate.

[Download Clarion, May 2009]

Image credit: Looking4poetry’s “Protest against France’s immigration laws”

From a quick look at Baruch’s Computing and Technology Center (BCTC) information page it becomes readily apparent that there has been innumerable problems resulting in extensive downtime over the course of the Spring semester. And while it’s true that no system is perfect and sooner or later everything goes down, one of the immediate problems with a proprietary system like BlackBoard (as opposed to various open source tools) is the impossibility of troubleshooting the issue because you can’t access the code.

Universities have put themselves at the mercy of corporations for some of the basic course management needs that fuel their entire system. Why is the academy capitulating all the power over our data to corporations, especially those that charge them a ton for some very crude and basic functionality, i.e., class rosters, simple file management, a grade book, some quizzes, etc. Where is the teaching and learning in all of this? It is, by and large, nothing more than a management tool that, in terms of value, universities are being charged astronomical prices for a sub-par service, which is ostensibly compounded by sub-par support in CUNY’s case.

The BlackBoard status alert page accompanied by a series of “alternatives.” Are there such things? If so, what are they?

Is Open Source software even an option?

Well, according to BlackBoard’s CEO Michael Chasen it really isn’t:

In the end, he [Michael Chasen, CEO of BlackBoard] said, colleges will choose Blackboard over open-source options because buying software works better for most colleges than being part of a do-it-yourself project, which he said takes more staff time to customize. “I really don’t believe it makes sense,” he said.

Besides, he said, Blackboard essentially has more programmers devoted full time to its software than open-source projects do. His basic message: We’ll win because we’re better.

Jeff Young’s “BlackBoard Buys Another Rival, To Customers’ Dismay”

Image Credit: BionicTeaching

Blogs@Baruch was built on the following core beliefs:

• College students should write regularly in all disciplines and in a variety of formats and genres
• Faculty should have available support for their efforts to create avenues for student communication
• Open-source technology has an important role to play in the future of higher education, and colleges will gain much from experimenting with a wide-range of open-source technology solutions
• Community users of centrally-administered software should share both the burden and excitement of innovating with technology. While a strong support network is necessary, a do it yourself ethos should be prominent
• WordPress Multiuser is the most powerful and flexible blogging system available, and can be effectively customized to fulfill a wide range of the communicative needs of the college community

Visit the elegant alternative, with an impressive amount of up time: Blogs@Baruch

The Academic Commons of The City University of New York is designed to support faculty initiatives and build community through the use(s) of technology in teaching and learning. The free exchange of knowledge among colleagues across the university is central to better educating the student body and expanding professional development opportunities for faculty research and teaching. Creating networks and support systems that are enabled by easy access to quality digital resources will nurture faculty development through sharing replicable materials and best practices. The Academic Commons is expected to grow in a flexible manner, taking into account the changing dynamics of political, social, cultural, and technological environments affecting the university. This evolving community will help prepare The City University of New York for the current and future educational challenges it faces.

Eportfolios@Macauley

And in a way, that’s what an eportfolio is. It’s a digital representation of your cabinet of curiosities, your wunderkammer, your museum of you. You get to build it, put your artifacts into it, design it, redesign it, think about, show it to other people, get their comments, and tell them what you think.

Your eportfolio continues to change and grow–and you continue to look back on it. But first you have to start building it!

Is the idea true that as long as there are courses, semesters, credit hours, etc., there will be Course Management Systems? Maybe, but I also think it’s true that universities are ignoring what’s happening out in the open web, and that is extremely dangerous. The axis of learning, as a result of unprecedented access to resources and people, is shifting from the course to the individual, and in many cases is becoming both more informal and demonstrative.

It strikes me as very different from the nodal logic of most CMSs, which are very much pointed to a center, and driven by the logic of representing information in structured boxes. This design is more about efficiency than effect and in many ways it is not a natural organization of information, rather it is rigid, with angled corners that smack of a man-made apiary.

The scattered, more de-centralized system that affords the individual user far more control over their own space seems, to me, more akin to the internet than centralized nodes of control/entry that characterizes most CMSs and LMSs? Think about Wikipedia? Why does that de-centered structure work so well?

Image credit: Pintxomoruno’s “Slovenian Beehive”

What does it mean to re-imagine the idea of “learning systems” on the axis of the individual as opposed to the course? Well, this is where I think the work we are doing at UMW, in particular with UMW Blogs, may be of some interest. But first, take a look at Serena Epstein’s self-published collection of over 10 different course blogs while a student at UMW Blogs which was rather effortlessly transformed into a personal blog/website/portfolio.

WPMu is like a huge beehive with no center, it’s scattered and unruly like the internet. And that is one of its greatest strengths. Think about it, anyone with a blog on the system has their own unique sub-domain that they can enter through, not unlike a cell in a beehive. A system that is both porously open and de-centered suggests a different, almost naturalistic, element of design, loosely joining a series of cells into a honeycomb, not with wax but with RSS glue. So someone using a WPMu blog has the ability to be part of a community, yet at the same time have their own unique space that they control entirely.

Image credit: Bern@t’s Flickr stream.

Dr. James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, speaking at this year’s Faculty Academy at UMW about access to information should, and is increasingly, “defaulting to open.” Boyle examined the power of open networks for teaching, learning, organizing, and sharing information far more effeciently and effectively than ever before, brilliantly tracing three examples: the birth of the internet, Wikipedia, and Open Source Software.

Image credit: Serenae’s “Hand Gestures”

De-centered, distributed publishing is a flow of information we are not used to, it’s anarchic, somewhat confusing, and difficult to follow unless we are in the “natural” flow of things. Yet, that is the key here, once in the stream (and the idea of a stream here is a much larger aesthetic and design shift that the internet has been undergoing and reflecting more broadly for a number of years now) the trace of the arguments, discussion, and ideas become that much more naturalized to the movement of information within a community while at the same time keeping the power of design (think themes and widgets here) as well as the overall control of the space in the hands of the individual.

Image credit: Freewildebeest’s “Overflowing with bees”

Numbers for UMW Blogs as of last night:

Users: 2862

Blogs: 2293

Like Blogs@Baruch, Macauley Eportfolios and CUNY’s Academic Commons, UMW Blogs is powered by the open source application WordPress Multi-User.

Blogs will become aggregation points,” the shamefully youthful, soft-spoken Mullenweg explained, as he mapped out the future of blogging for me between bites of Dutch smoked salmon. “They will become our personal hub. Places where we store all our personal media content such as our flickr photos and Twitter posts.

From Andrew Keen’s “Blogs are Dead, Long Live the Blogs”

What do I mean by this? Well let’s take a jump out of this presentation to this site and take a closer look.

Each light a beacon of an individual expresion that we conenct via constellations of RSS!

An interesting experiment worth mentioning, particularly given the nature of the CUNY system. UMW cloned it’s installatiion of UMW Blogs for Longwood University. The service is still hosted on the same database and shares the same files, plugins, themes, etc. The only difference is it has it’s own unique domain, and can create it’s own specific environment. Two schools running off on installation, sharing costs, resources, and opening up some fascinating possibilities for connecting students and classes from different institutions. Read more about this here.

Image credit: Enygmatic’s “Attack of the Clones”
Disclaimer: I am not a fan of the first 3 episodes of Star Wars, i.e., Episodes 1, 2, and 3. This image was a cop out.

Serena Epstein’s self-published collection of over 10 different course blogs while a student at UMW Blogs which was rather effortlessly transformed into a personal blog/website/portfolio. And for some examples of personal and faculty blogs hosted on UMW Blogs, but mapped to their own domain take a look at the following examples:
http://bradefford.com
http://mcclurken.org
http://susanfernsebner.org

As well as at least two student created literary journals and the School Newspaper site;
http://ripplejournal.org
http://pendulumjournal.com

Finally, I just want to take a moment to say how unbelievable it is for me to see CUNY potentially breaking out of the BlackBoard stranglehold, and embracing new and vastly improved publishing platforms for New York City’s finest. It almost brings a tear to my eye to think that CUNY, the largest public city university in the US (which has a rich history of open education and hardcore leftist thought), might once again rise from the neo-liberal ashes of NYC and become a leader in open education through an elegant, affordable, and kick ass system like WPMu. This stuff is real, and it impacts people in real ways, and watching people like Joe Urgoetz, Matt Gold, Boon Borges, Stephen Brier, George Otte, Luke Waltzer, Mikhail Gershovich, and a host of people I am forgetting bring full blown, open source publishing platform frameworks into at least 3 colleges in this 22 college system is nothing short of awesome.

It marks for me some great triumph of a community of lost and goofy graduate students helping to make good on commitment to openness that public institutions all over the country have all but forgotten. I’m proud of what we are all doing, and I’m not gonna stop talking about it ’til somebody pulls my cold, dead hands from this lectern.

The revolution is now!!!

Image credit: Bionicteaching’s WordPress Revolution