Teaching IT with Open Source platforms: Quick start, real users
At USF, we’ve been using great open source software platforms like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla!, and phpBB in the classroom for some time. What’s really interesting about these open source platforms is that you can start using them with almost zero technology experience. They provide all the basic functions of a website, a starting point from which even non-technical students can add content, customize the look and feel, and add functionality.
The project website for our most recent Internet Applications course is now available at spring08.jpedia.org. Check out the projects, the course content, and the philosophy of technology immersion behind the course.
I believe that a lot of our technology teaching is done the way I had to learn a foreign language in school: years and years learning grammar, but never learning how to actually speak to someone. Instead of assuming that students build technology from a blank page, open source platforms allow students to start delivering functional sites ‘out of the box’. Soon, they’re hearing from their users, and their requests naturally motivate students to learn and do more with the technology.
We’ve had some success with this model over the past three years, so now we’re making an effort to spread the word to other schools and compare notes. We think that teaching with open source platforms can motivate students in ways traditional IT teaching might not. This is important, given recent studies suggesting that business students aren’t interested in IT not because of job concerns and outsourcing, but simply because they don’t find traditional IT topics interesting (Walstrom et al, Journal of Information Systems Education, Spring 2008).
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Internet Apps class, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 
on June 1, 2008 at 4:25 pm Rick Mathieu wrote:
J.P.,
I have been teaching a CIS course entitled “OS’s and Server Administration” for 2 years. Students learn to work in the Linux environment, install, secure and administer the LAMP stack, and install OS applications including Joomla! Here is a link to our course wiki: http://ictom.wetpaint.com
Keep up the good work.
- Rick Mathieu
on August 18, 2008 at 3:43 pm Using WordPress as a small business website | The J.P. Allen Blog wrote:
[...] Is there an opportunity for WordPress to dramatically expand its reach as a kind of generic small business solution? Useful sites can be put together now, with some tweaking and geeking. But, following the analogy from Stephen O’Grady’s talk at WordCamp on Saturday, maybe somebody needs to build a company on top of open source WordPress in the same way that Google is an ‘open source’ company that builds its must-have services on top of other software. A small business website service built with WordPress, but where 99% of the users don’t even know what WordPress is? Edublogs for small business, but maybe not even called blogs? Is this a good idea? Is somebody doing this? In the meantime, we think there are lots of good reasons to teach students about open source business platforms and basic content manage…. [...]