I broke away from productive dissertating last Friday to attend a panel on innovating with open source at the 2007 CUNY IT Conference featuring our fearless leader, Mikhail Gershovich, City Tech English Professor Matt Gold, and University of Mary Washington Instructional Technologist and frequent cac.ophony reference, Reverend Jim Groom. Each brought his “A” game.
Mikhail showed off this blog and some of the course blogs we’ve been running, and also demoed to oohs and ahhs VOCAT (which, hopefully, will get a more detailed presentation on this blog once it’s rolled out) while touching on the benefits of “soft money” when trying to break out of traditional teaching and learning molds. Matt talked about his experiences teaching through WordPress, MediaWiki, and SMF Discussion Boards in the CUNY Online BA program and in a traditional face-to-face class, and displayed how distributed class blogs (each student has his/her own) empower students to see their educations as tied into broader communities of knowledge. These approaches also helped his students develop technological “fluency” as they mastered the material of the course, a project that colleges should be grappling with when they discuss their general education curricula. Jim played the part of the prodigal son, sharing with us what he’s achieved using WordPress MultiUser at UMW. In a community of approximately 3200 teachers and learners, UMW has 800 individual and course blogs up and running on one installation of this software. “Running” is the key word. With Jim as their muse, users–students and faculty–are finding creative ways to connect within courses, across disciplines, and beyond the boundaries of the university. To explore this fantastic project, click here.
This was a truly inspiring panel, and raised some important issues. Though Jim put his finger most solidly on the question (and just built it out here), each presenter touched on the tension between administrative concerns that usually favor proprietary software solutions and innovative teaching and learning achieved through open source. For instance, Blackboard is successful primarily because of its strength as an administrative tool– students are auto-enrolled, grades can be calculated and submitted, it links with e-Reserve. Blackboard, however, rarely wows or gets students excited about participating, and applications like the blog and wiki feature in JournalLX simply fake the funk when it comes to the malleability and connectedness we saw displayed by the presenters. Applications like WordPress, MediaWiki, and SMF each empower users to shape information and experience however they need to.
Jim argues in his post that this tension is at the very core of what it means to be an instructional technologist. Joe Ugoretz, who is the Director of Instructional Technology at the Macaulay Honors College (Jim’s and my former stomping ground) echoes the question, and points out that information technology and instructional technology aren’t the same thing. Joe hopes that a more mutually beneficial balance of power between “administrating” and “teaching and learning” can be worked out. The MHC is a hotbed of experimentation in teaching and learning, like the BLSCI, and with Joe now running the show over there it would be great if we could explore connections and partnerships. There is great work being done on teaching, learning, and technology throughout CUNY but, in part because the ultimate target of such work is the classroom, few apparatuses exist for such knowledge to really resonate out and through the lives of CUNY folk. That the panel on open source at the CUNY IT Conference was much more highly attended than last year was promising. Perhaps next year these questions can be better represented in the design of the conference.
ahh Luke, you are too kind. But you know I love it!
I have gone on record ove rthe alst two years saying that I bleed CUNY. And in many ways I think CUNY, with all its myriad challenges, would be a fascinating space to open up the work being done within and between departments on individual campuses as well as between campuses. You suggestion here Luke is a powerfully promising one.
I also agree that this year's conference had better turn out for Open Source, and the next may suggest an even greater gravitational pull, but this would require some work on a number of people's part -particularly the students and faculty.
Here is a nice coincidence that might suggest something larger afoot at CUNY. Independently of the conference, someone at Brooklyn College was put in touch with me by a mutual friend regarding WPMu. This person is interested in pursing open source alternatives for faculty and students to publish online for teaching and learning and more. He has to approach the IT department with a proposal of some kind, and WPMu was one of the tools he is interested in.
All this to say, I think CUNY may be ready to explore other possibilities, and with the range of students and experiences that walk through the halls of any given campus, what a beautiful matrix of thoughts, reflections and ideas would come out of such projects. It truly excites me to no end.
I haven't been on the CUNY dole for years now, but I would gladly work towards thinking through the possibilities of all these tools at any number of these campuses. because I believe it is both important and potentially revolutionary in very subtle ways. The plain fact is, the BLSCI with the work Mikhail, Tom Harbo, and yourself are doing is unquely poised to show them how this all works.
But to do this you need to act quickly, have very little administrative overhead, and run the thing wherever you can. It doesn't have to seem"official" it just has to be compelling enough to show all the folks around the CUNY system that it can work and it is a viable alternative. It also means sales pitching a few really good faculty who can make this fly as a teaching tool.
I really believe you are all at crucial point of making in-roads and building on the work you have all already done. It only takes a couple of compelling projects to capture the imagination of a community. More than that, it would only take a small fraction of the thousands and thousands of students in the CUNY system to make a radical impact on the internet mediaated educational network in NYC.
Make the myths, Morrison!
Thanks so much, Luke, for attending the panel and for writing up such an excellent recapitulation of our discussions.
Your post and Jim’s comment have me thinking about a few things:
1. We need to make the Open Source panel an annual tradition at the CUNY IT Conference;
2. We need to establish an online directory of all open-source projects in the CUNY system, in an attempt to create a better sense of community among those of us experimenting with such technology in the classroom;
3. We need to get you onto this panel next year!