An Open Approach to Teaching Web Content Management

Antonio Vantaggiato of the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Puerto Rico has just blogged about the very cool approach he is taking to teaching his Computer Science students about Web Content Management. He’s giving theme the tools and the spaces to both experiment with open source CMSs in their own spaces and asking them to collaboratively build documentation of the results of their experiments in a wiki. I love this model because it nicely balances the importance of having individuals create and maintain their own spaces online while at th same time cooperating to build a group legacy of documentation and lessons learned. You can see the course site here and the course wiki here, both of which the students built and designed—another beautiful touch.

What’s more is that Antonio is having his students get their own web hosting and domain names to provide them the space to experiment (all of which will feed back into the course site), and to do this he actually found both free web hosting with 000webhost.com and free domain names with co.cc—so the whole thing comes at no cost to the students! Brilliant! This looks to be a grand experiment, and a very cool way to teach computer science students about open source, web-based content management out on the open web with their own open source tool box, domain, and web hosting that they can take with them when their done. More than that, the collaborative documentation promises to be both a very useful resource for the class as a whole, as well as for many beyond it. Kudos Antonio, and avanti!