As the current coordinator of the digital writing collaborative at Miami University, I often find myself conducting professional development workshops and "informal teas" (pedagogy discussion groups) with composition instructors who teach in our wireless laptop classrooms. Although our university offers blackboard, many teachers and students have been dissatisfied with blackboard's lack of usability and customizability and have been interested in engaging students in blogging. (Have you seen blackboard's new blog feature?...well, it's pathetic). So, my goal was to offer teachers a free alternative to blackboard for making course sites as well as for enabling student blogging. For me, wordpress.com offered the perfect solution. (I know wordpress.com is a for-profit business, but it obviously has strong ties to the open source community). After an interactive 50-minute workshop, over 10 teachers were able to set up wordpress course sites (with multiple pages and subpages), and they were also able to teach students to set up their own blogs and/or to post to the whole class blog. Although the wordpress sites were public on the internet, I showed the teachers how to hide their blogs from search engines so they could choose (and their students could choose) to be only semi-public if they wished.

Thus far, the response from students and teachers has been overwhelmingly positive. Students have commented to many of us that they like our wordpress.com course sites (and their own wordpress blogs) so much better than blackboard, finding that wordpress is much easier to use and also much more like "real internet" sites than blackboard. At our last "tea" about blogging, teachers reported to me that they really preferred using wordpress to using blackboard (and we had a great conversation about pedagogical strategies for incorporating blogs into comp courses). Anyway, this semester, we had at least 10 instructors using wordpress, and I suspect we will have many more next semester (as instructors are increasingly promoting the software to their colleagues).

I recognize that a more full-featured CMS such as drupal would provide us with more options than wordpress (and indeed i have built drupal sites for my courses in the past), but for me wordpress.com won out because it was so incredibly easy for teachers to make the switch with only minimal instruction / support. I should note that the IT folks at Miami are very supportive of drupal, but getting a series of drupal sites built and supported still would have taken a good bit of labor.

So, I guess the lore here is that the key to convincing instructors to switch from a proprietary CMS is to show them the alternative is easy to learn (ideally an hour or less) and offers options that the proprietary system does not (such as the ability to blog, embed youtube videos, customize the interace through WYSIWYG means). For me, wordpress.com was the easiest blackboard alternative to sell to teachers, but I suspect that ya'll might have different experiences based on your contexts and backgrounds.

So, I wonder, do you all count "wordpress.com" as open source? In other words, is it really all that radical for me to shift my "business" from blackboard to wordpress.com? I like to think it is a positive political step, but perhaps I'm wrong.

And, do you think it might be possible for OSAAC to intervene to help make wordpress.com a better product for educational uses (and do you think that this would fit with the mission of OSAAC)?