I totally understand the uncontrollable urge!

And I understand the attraction of open source, and I hate to be a cold-water-thrower (I’ve had plenty thrown on me on this subject), but sometimes, especially considering institutional inertia and the (often unlovely) concerns and realities of large institutions like CUNY, we end up making compromises.

And in that context, too, it seems that sometimes the financial balances aren’t all that clear–because in large institutions, it’s not always about pure balancing where $1000 is less than $1001.

I really hate to say it (and to see it) but smart programmers and instructional designers are sometimes harder to find (and harder to keep) than total proprietary packages. So a “free” open source solution can end up being more expensive–or even too expensive.

I don’t mean to say that we should give up, or that ideal visions are completely imaginary utopias, but sometimes the kinds of “exciting innovative work” I was talking about have to be done in spite of, rather than as a result of, institutional decisions and support systems.

Or maybe I’m just having a dark Tuesday!

And here’s the other important consideration–the fact that the institution (or program, whatever) uses Blackboard (or whatever closed CMS) does not mean that that’s the only thing available to classes in the program… Sure, in the CUNY Online Bac, or my own campus, Blackboard is the “official” CMS, but all the tools of the public Web 2.0, all the social software, is still out there. It’s possible, and really not too difficult, to have the best of both worlds–use Blackboard for what Blackboard’s good for, and use wordpress blogs, writely, YouTube (as my colleague Tony Picciano wisely recommends), mediawiki, tikiwiki, flickr, wikispaces, myspace, etc., etc., as needed, and when desirable.

This is an excellent point, Joe. Creating a virtual learning space with an assortment of Web 2.0 tools loosely bound together with rss (something I have been experimenting with using WordPress, bbpress, Mediawiki, and Drupal) seems to make a large universities investment in Learning Objects Inc’s blog/wiki modules useful only insofar as you have the class roster automatically populated by Banner. It is this administrative integration that seems to have dictated much of the investment in what are vastly inferior tools to the open source options freely available online. These open source tools can also be very easily walled if that is necessary, or even partially walled, that allows for a selectively open, online class community.

Think about the potential benefits for the CUNY Baccalaureate program if they were to offer online courses that still use the basic possibiites of BlackBoard (disscussion forum, administrative concerns, etc.) while at the same time taking the money they saved on Learning Objects Inc.’s various “web 2.0″ modules and putting it towards hiring a programmer/instructional Technologist who can help faculty design a space utilizing the best of breed Web 2.0 tools (wikis, blogging platforms, podcasting tools, contnet management systems, RSS readers, etc.) into their online courses. They could easily host the server space externally for $120 a year and populate the various applications for 20 to 30 professors in no time at all.

This would allow for the Baccalaureate program to start experimenting with some possible alternatives quickly and quite easily (it really isn’t too difficult) with much more sophisticated web appliations than anything Bb can come up with in the near future. Not only that, but faculty, administration and students will be able to tap into a community of research and development, gaining access to all the fellowships, grants, conference papers, exposure, etc. that go along with such innovative projects. Additionally, the CUNY Baccalaureate progrm can frame these re-cocneptualizations of the online teaching and learning landscape, as always already a pilot or beta, as the immediately begin to make headway into all the “exciting, innovative work to be done,” as you pointed out earlier in your comments on cac.ophony.

I agree with you entirely that this all too important work work needs to be done, and it needs to be done now by teachers, students and administrators together -the academy has already lost way too much time and ground on this regard over the last five or six years. It really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to wait for Learning Objects Inc., or any other proprietary software company for that matter, to make their tools “better” (or simply web 2.0 compliant) when far superior tools have already been around for quite a while now -at the low, low price of free.

Sorry I can’t shut up about all this, but some kind of uncontrollable urge comes over me when these great conversations about online teaching and learning are seeded, germinate and flourish using the very open, accessible tools that I think will revolutionize the open (source) universities that are ready and willing to take the plunge.

Thanks for feeding my urge to think about all the great stuff at the CUNY IT conference in a much more focused and deliberate fashion.