I had a great meeting today with the principles in The Institute for Information Policy (IIP) here at PSU about how to enhance their web presence. It was interesting because these guys are all heavy hitters in their collective spaces … they are also very well respected by their peers both on our campus and in the international space. What blew my mind was how much they knew about the web and at the same time, how excited they got when we started to talk about the powers of CMS tools, RSS, and other “newerish” items they hadn’t really heard of.

At the moment, they have a grad student (who doesn’t?) designing and updating their site. They went over their goals with me … “make it look nicer and easier to use” is what they said. But when I was digging deeper, I discovered that they also wanted the ability to share more up to date news, connect with peers, raise their google rankings, write and publish their own content, understand who was showing up at their site, etc … they didn’t really know it, but they have some fairly serious needs and they came around to the idea that Dreamweaver isn’t going to cut it for them. I showed them Mambo and we talked about how critical it is that they have more control over their content and have the ability to update it quickly … what got them the most excited was the whole RSS concept. They just loved the idea of being able to syndicate their own content and were even more excited to be able to subscribe to other Research Center’s materials. The problem is, when we looked further, we discovered that all the other Research Centers they pointed me to don’t have RSS feeds and are pretty much static sites. It gave them an idea that they could actually jump to the head of the class in their space with a well-designed site. It was cool to see.

It was really just a chance meeting in that I rarely meet with faculty about technologies like web sites and stuff … I am usually more tied to the larger mission critical stuff we do in the Institute … but, I have been anxious to get a couple of the heavier hitting faculty at PSU interested in using some of these technologies so I spent the time with them. Well worth it. I felt like a salesman and actually caught myself getting excited about the nuts and bolts of it all.

What I was hoping for was a group of faculty who want to push the limits of the technology … What I got was a group that really got into it and are more than willing to both along for the ride and help drive! They all walked away feeling like the curtain had been pulled back on web technologies and they were seeing for the first time that, “hey we can do that!” That’s what I’d like to be able to create on a more regular basis — opportunities for faculty to take complete ownership over their IP and have the power to publish and push it. Sorts of laughs in the face of the traditional back office technologist who honestly believes that they must control it all … just not my style I guess. Have others had similar experiences with faculty getting on board and being jacked by being able to regain control over their use of technology?

There is so much going on all across the web as it relates to social networking, user centered content, and tagging that I can’t help but think a next generation LMS/CMS is sitting right under our noses. I have been giving the whole content delivery for education and training quite a bit of thought lately and I am really moving towards building a system that shifts the focus to the student and allows them a very open environment for learning and collaborating — all from within a single environment.

I think we made some good steps towards a more faculty centered approach with the Edison Services 2.0 release last fall, but how has it helped students? Sure, we have created a more efficient way for students to get at content, announcements, and other course related information, but it is still more faculty driven. I have been using WordPress from some time now and I really believe there is a new suite of tools sitting right around the corner — all built on the WordPress engine. The question isn’t when will we see it, but how much of the popular web should be included?

Thinking about tagging and what goes on over at flickr has me wondering if the whole concept of folksonomies should make its way into an eLearning space … I mean, what a better way for students to write, create, and share knowledge. If they can create and then tag their work so that it falls within some sort of community construct that makes sense within the contextual framework of the course, then let’s go! This from a Wired article I read this morning:

“The job of tags isn’t to organize all the world’s information into tidy categories,” said Stewart Butterfield, one of Flickr’s co-founders. “It’s to add value to the giant piles of data that are already out there.”

Looks to me like a whole host of sites — the popular ones with the early adoption crowd — are using this type of tagging to build community and to create user centered structure … sites like delicious are taking it to a whole new level … consider this, also from the Wired article and you’ll hopefully see that our eLearning environments ignore this new approach to web content delivery:

“It’s very much people tagging information so that they can come back to it themselves or so that others with the same vocabulary can find it,” said Thomas Vander Wal, the information architect credited with coining the term “folksonomy.”

“To me, they’re a great new organization tool for applications and large content sites,” said Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter. “Tags are great because you throw caution to the wind, forget about whittling down everything into a distinct set of categories and instead let folks loose categorizing their own stuff on their own terms.”

Now we have to do what we did years ago … take the good from the bleeding edge and get it integrated into our technology. The great thing is that the open source community has built us a base to create the new approaches. I’ll be exploring them more in the coming days and weeks. Let me know what you think.

Now that I have spent the better part of six weeks exploring different php/mySQL CMS packages, I have decided to write a short paper comparing them. I will attempt to pull in some interesting points to base my comparisons on and establish a set of model outcomes I used as a guide when I set out on this quest. I will look mainly at WordPress, Mambo, and Drupal … all of which are excellent tools in their own right. I have found, however, they all serve similar but different needs. I’ll be working on it the next couple of weks and will post it here when I am finished … look for updates along the way.

I would also like to collect some user feedback, so if any of you have experience with these three tools, please post a comment. I am hopeful that this paper will serve as a basic “jumping off” point for others looking to utilize these tools in the educational space.