Our teaching case, using WordPress as a simple content management system for small business, has been nominated for the Best Teaching Case Award at the 2008 WITS Technology Instruction in Business Curriculum Competition. Nice!
The teaching module, “Instant Websites: Using WordPress as a Content Management System”, is now available:
Slides from my talk on “Web 2.0, Open Source, and the Mass Production of Knowledge: Why Collective Platforms Might Hold the Key to Understanding a Knowledge-Based Economy” are now available.
Thanks to the USF Faculty Development Committee for supporting my research this summer.
While WordCamp 2008 attendees were likely impressed with the huge number of page views (6.5 billion per year - roughly one for every person on the planet) and monthly unique visitors (up to 160 million per month) being racked up by wordpress.com, I was focused on a different number.
2,604,288. That’s the number of people running WordPress blogging software on their own websites, with their own web hosting. You’d think that only a hard-core techie fringe would choose to pay for their own web hosting, and deal with the geekiness of it all, when they can get WordPress for free on wordpress.com. But, as of this morning, 3,870,299 blogs were running on wordpress.com. That’s a close race.
In other words, the do-it-yourself web crowd is looking mainstream, not fringe.
The one-click install revolution on web hosts has made this possible. The amount of software/web services power at your disposal with today’s inexpensive web hosting is ridiculous. Take a look at a typical menu of open source software choices (this one is from Simple Scripts). Blogs, wikis, forums, serious content management, e-commerce, CRM…often the best software in its category. We know people are using install scripts, because of the growing number of blogs that are launching with slightly out-of-date versions of WordPress. (Script services are often behind the latest version, one of the downsides of using one-click installs vs. slapping it together by hand.)
Not all is perfect in one-click install land. Upgrades and backups are nowhere near as painless as getting started. But it’s been good enough to compete with free, and it keeps hope alive for a more open web future: not everything has to happen through Google, Yahoo!, MSN or even wordpress.com.
I’ve developed a teaching module that helps students start to create a simple business web site using WordPress. The students launch a new site on a web host via an install script, come up with a simple category structure, and download/upload a new theme.
As an example of a business WordPress site, I use nextbusnews.com. NextBus is the groovy technology that tells me real-time how late my next MUNI bus will be (more details on how NextBus uses WordPress as a simple content management system here).
It amazes me that only 36% of US small businesses with net access have a web site (as reported in the Wall St. Journal last week). This is 2008, not 1998!
Is there an opportunity for WordPress to become a kind of generic small business solution? Business sites can be done now, of course, with some tweaking and geeking. But, following the analogy from Stephen O’Grady’s talk at WordCamp on Saturday, perhaps someone needs to build a company on top of WordPress, in the same way that Google builds its services on top of open source 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 without even using the term ‘blog’? 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 management via WordPress.
(I’m going to wait on an official release of this teaching module until after I hear from reviewers at the WITS 2008 Technology Instruction in Business Curriculum Competition.)
I’m tired of out of date, expensive textbooks.
I’m tired of fighting copyright fair use battles.
I’m tired of students being trapped in my class, when other students and teachers around the world are grappling with exactly the same issues.
I want easier ways to share the useful parts of my classes with the world.
So I’ve signed the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education. By signing it, I’ve promised to use and improve openly available education resources. I have to release my own teaching materials openly. And I have to encourage USF to adopt policies encouraging open education.
I believe that university teaching is ripe for change. There haven’t yet been any great successes (that I know of) among the projects to create wikipedia-like textbook replacements. It will take a robust online community to make it happen. But once a successful model appears that shows the benefits of a common, open education resource for academic area X, other areas will quickly follow.
I look forward to the day where everything in my class - readings, students assignments, discussions, and projects - is a URL pointing to an open resource.
More on the Open Education movement:
SF Chronicle Editorial - Bringing open resources to textbooks and teaching.
OpEd on Open Content from the ISKME foundation.
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).
The CIT (Center for Instructional Technology) Innovation Award celebrates the “excellent use of technology in education” at USF. One of the 2007 awards honored the use of wikis, open source, and podcasting at the business school. The India tour wiki and the MBA podcast series were singled out for special praise.
The 2007 CIT Innovation Awards.
Thanks to all the hard-working USF students who made this possible. I wish I could share the award check with each and every one of you!
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. Thanks for visiting The J.P. Allen Blog
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