Building with Howard: Creating an Open Source Learning Environment Pt 3

This is part 3 of a series Howard Rheingold and I have been working on to demonstrate out the open how to create a learning environment using open source tools like WordPress, MediaWiki, and more. go here for all the videos so far. The idea behind this series is to get faculty and students interested in how they might fashion their own learning environments in a web hosting environment using their own domains. The first fifteen minutes of this video focuses on Howard’s approach to assessment in his Social Media Issues course, which will be experimenting with contract grading. From there we explored a few things in regards to the open source framework we are building.

• Finding and installing WordPress themes
• Integrating signins between WordPress and MediaWiki
• Just how clunky MediaWiki still is after all these years
• Customizing menus in WordPress
• Uploading header images and changing the background color in WordPress Themes

The point about how clunky MediaWiki remaisn was the source of a broader mini-rant about how long we have been using these tools, but how difficult some absic things remains. Integrating signups between MediaWiki and WordPress is still a major pain in the ass six years on—the WPAUTH extension for MediaWiki that I’ve been using since 2007 remains the gold standard. Also, to change the logo in my MediaWiki install I need to FTP in and change code in localsettings.php file—WTF?!

I truly would like to see a robust platform like MediaWiki become a lot more ubiquitous in the teaching and learning space, but an application that makes simple administrative necessities that difficult will not be an options for your average user. Also, why haven’t we made some of this stuff easier? And this goes for syndication as well. My thoery is because we’ve wasted too much time chasing the next platform that will sovle our problems and finally truly disrupt education—in other words,  most technologists are fools and zombies.