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.