Yes, yes, and yes!!!

Was that clear?

Like Wikipedia, the trouble with the ideas you’re expounding is that they only work in practice, not in theory.:)

That’s a facetious way of saying that I agree with you, which you knew already. Stephen’s comment shows one way that location-agnostic content publication could fit beautifully within the paradigm you’re exploring. Here’s the deal. Content management cannot scale in terms of real school unless that content is managed by the content creators themselves. To ask students and faculty to think about content management is also to ask them to think about content creation, and vice-versa. The work Claudia’s done with online journals demonstrates this, as does (in a smaller but even more varied way) the blogging experiments in my film class this term. When students create their own publishing environments, with a simple and extensible and customizable tool, in an open web paradigm, they begin to push out from “papers” into what the essays are meant to be, or at least what I mean them to be: informed, literate explorations. Aggregations. Syntheses. Stark and revelatory juxtapositions. Multimodal. And they can stamp the experience they create with their own unique sensibilities. Yet all that individual expressiveness is in the context of expert guidance and instruction. A happy meeting.

We need to talk.

The Web vs Drupal is certainly a strawman, but may nonetheless exemplify to some degree the relationship between a personalize vs. group CMS. The idea of branding the this individual CMS in terms of WP has more to do with thinking through it for a campus environment than any particular dependence on a single tool -although I have my tendencies towards fanboy-dom. The notion of an OpenID URL that talks to other sites and manages one’s online identity is powerful, and I appreciate you suggesting it here. As way to begin playing with such an idea would be -to quote you above- “the creation of a large number of individual CMSs.” This is exactly what a more robust campus experiment with something like WPMU might afford.

I think Wordpress.com or blogger may do this just as well, but I am interested in avoiding the increased monetization of spaces like WP.com, while eager to design in to such an experiment the possibility for everyone on a campus (a somewhat controlled and provincial starting point in its own right -I know) to manage, customize and re-imagine their own online space. Give them across the board access within their own space to install as many plugins as they want, grant them access to their theme code (free of charge), give them a few gigs of storage (free of charge), and create a rich network of support that is geared towards creating, fostering, and sharing open educational content through a wide variety of online tools and services.

Moreover, why shouldn’t administrative and academic departments also be expected to take ownership of their web presence, making certain information is freely available to a larger network, and being open to online discussions. The way most campus CMSs are set up now, showcasing student work and sharing institutional knowledge becomes prohibitive because of the obstacles towards arranging the permission and access to a Contribute key, etc. Shouldn’t public institutions and public employees have an obligation to share both the process and the resources with that public that is funding their work?

I think so, and the idea of openness has just as much to do with the conceptual architecture of the networks as it does with people’s willingness to share. I believe that the simpler the process is, the more people will share, engage, and benefit from the work being done within any given set of educational networks. An amazing side-effect may be the changing role of the student from a consumer (to use Freire’s “Banking Concept of Education” to an active, participant in a process of framing experiences from numerous points along the spectrum of expertise -an important element of openness that should not, nor need not, be under emphasized.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Stephen. It’s exciting to think through this within the very networks folks are theorizing, and your framing of this distributed nexus of ideas and learning is constantly forcing me to re-think. For example, now I have to do more research on OpenID, damn!

Rather, the post draws the distinction between, if you will, individual content management and group content management.

Individual content management is, obviously, simpler, because you don’t have to deal with a raft of permissions (though this will change in the future).

But group content management is needed, as D’Arcy points out, when you have websites that are the result of group collaboration.

This is necessary because most people do not have individual content management systems. So there is no place for them to put their contributions to a group site. Even with individual CMSs and aggregation, it is not obvious how to build a group website without a group CMS.

The problem with the group CMS is, in my mind, one of ownership. Unless you own the Drupal installation, you are putting your content on someone else’s website, which means that you are subject to their restrictions, and any restrictions that they are subject to.

What we need (and where we are headed) is place-independence of content submission. So, if I type, say, this post, it doesn’t matter whether I typed it here on your site or over on my site.

When I submit the content, the CMS will do a few things: because I typed it, it will send the content back to my OpenID URL, where my system will process it however I want it to. Your site will become aware of a posting associated witht he original post and may, depending on how it regards my OpenID (is it a friend? a friend of a friend?) display either the full text or the link.

The creation of a large number of individual CMSs, which is a pretty logical result of OpenID, will combine with identity management systems to allow both individual CMSs and group CMSs to manage permissions in pretty much the same way, through sets of both associations (FOAF) and memberships (groups).

Actually, your comments in the discussion of the NV session were unbelievably generative for my own ideas about blogs that play CMSs on TV. As were your comments on D’Arcy’s blog post yesterday and today. The logic above is by no means entirely stable, and I may be seen as discounting the CMS entirely, but I think what might be packaged with the framing of the design and frame of the CMS is an idea of centralized management but distributed authorship -something that I’m not so sure will be of that much concern in the near future given all the amazing things everyone in ed tech, and elsewhere, are banging there head against with rss, rdf, tag/category feeds, etc. Do we want to manage all this information centrally, or do we want to access it quickly and easily no matter where it is?

I’m not sure, this is just one Fanboy relentless push for sponsorship:)

I agree that the students, professors should be using WPMU, but I also think the university more generally (i.e. administration, staff, etc) might consider also using WPMU. You could have one theme for departmental stuff, and allow each person in a department to manage their own space accordingly. With dynamic subdomains, you can create a more nodal space to share resource by individual that is ultimately pushed into more common areas. I really think WP (or WPMU more specifically) could be used as an academic site for teaching and learning throughout a university as well as a brochure site.

Point being, for all the power and extensibility of Drupal, it may not allow the folks who are creating the crucial content to take responsibility of the space. Making the push for opening up course content to the world through faculty and student work (the real thing people want to see online) extremely less prevalent. It fits quite nicely with empowering the entire university to quickly and easily push their content onto the web and pull content off of it into their space -and they take full possession. That would seldom happen with drupal as the application stands now -and I could see have a few installs for certain kinds of management, but I’m not sure the privileging f the CMS logic is necessary anymore, even for larger -institutional sites. We just need more ways to connect the dots!

Of course anytime you agree with me in any way I am bound to think you are right on the money

@Dnorman — yeah, it’s the *shirt* I was admiring in that pic…

I switched my blog back to WP because it’s the best tool for that particular job. It’s also good at a bunch of stuff, but Drupal simply rocks hard at a lot of really high-end stuff.

My blog might be running on the Cooper Mini of CMS (cute, fast, powerful enough for every day use), but I still have the power of my Ferrari-Humvee (sick power, insane flexibility, off-road capability) lovechild of a CMS in Drupal ready to go for lots of other stuff.

That said, I really think most personal knowledge management is best managed by WordPress. Students should be using it. Faculty should be using it. But the institution websites to support everything should be running Drupal or the like.

But, really, isn’t Sarah’s white shirt a good enough reason to keep Drupal going?