cac.ophony.org

Finally, and fittingly, the last session I attended featured Famed Friend of the Institute James Groom, who offered his “Notes Towards an Open (Source) University.” Prof. Groom’s views have been well-represented on this blog, and though I urged him to rename his talk “Waging War on the Proprietary-Software University,” his diplomatic disposition clung to the more affirmative appellation. Groom’s presentation asked, in a way, why pay lots of dough for something mediocre when you can get something fantabulous for free? He presented and discussed a few cutting edge open source course management systems, showed how certain packages can be modified for use in the classroom, and asked the very important questions: why aren’t more folks exploring this stuff at a place like CUNY, and why is open source so underrepresented at this conference? The answer, it seems, was hinted at by one of the items raffled off at the close of the conference… Blackboard provided tee-shirts for the raffle! Drupal, WordPress, and Sakai ask not what they can do for you, but what you can do for (and with) them. Who knew the open source movement was so selfish?

(note: A few audience members were flabbergasted when the gentleman who followed James Groom, Florian Lengyel, Assistant Director for Research Computing at the CUNY Graduate Center, showed us that open source has recently become a more significant presence at the Graduate Center. See here.)