Dave Lester’s Finding America

On Friday I had the pleasure of presenting ScholarPress at CUNY WordCampEd. I was blown away by the energy and excitement of everyone there (as you can see in the photo above), and fortunate to meet many Twitter friends face-to-face. And man, are they great. Special thanks to Joe Ugoretz (@jugoretz) for masterminding the event, in concert with Mikhail Gershovich (@mikhailg) and Luke Waltzer (@lwalter) of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College, and Matt Gold (@mkgold) of the New York City College of Technology. I also met Stephen Brier and Joshua Brown, among other CUNY faculty who I’ve followed from afar. I had a great time.

The day’s schedule offered a mix of traditional presentations, as well as opportunities for participants to choose their own paths. I’m a big fan of the unconference model, and I think this helped customize the event for many people there. We began with a presentation given by Jane Wells of Automattic who gave an overview of where WordPress is moving in the future. Next, I gave a presentation on ScholarPress, and Zoe Sheehan-Saldana presented on how she is using WordPress with her art and photography students. During lunch we hopped from room-to-room to hear about how WordPress is being used at CUNY, and I think the highlight of the day was Jim Groom’s keynote in the early afternoon. Michael Cripps blogged a great overview of the day focusing on Jim’s keynote, and I was able to record video of the keynote if you’d like to watch it.

The problems and questions around tools for teaching and learning were similar to many of the other universities I’ve interacted with, but the enthusiasm at CUNY is unparalleled. Mikhail noted that this event may be a turning point for WordPress at CUNY, while Cripps notes in his blog post that given the “abysmal performance of Blackboard 8 across CUNY in Spring 2009, an open source e-portfolio platform looks a lot more viable at CUNY than it did even 4 months ago.” Beyond those problems, there are some distinct highlights at CUNY. Blogs@Baruch is a terrific example of how WordPress Multi-User can be used as a platform to provide blogging to faculty and students. At Macaulay Honors College they’re using WordPress to build E-Portfolios for students, and the latest development is the CUNY Academic Commons. The academic commons is really interesting, because they’re using BuddyPress and WordPress Multi-User to create a social network that exists across all CUNY colleges. It has the potential to radically change how the university and colleges understand their own identities.

For me, the event demonstrated that there is a distinct need for ScholarPress, and also that the WordPress Education movement is growing. It’s hard to believe that this marked the fourth WordCampEd event since November. There are really exciting things happening at CUNY, and I hope that moving forward we can grow a collaborative relationship that makes open source a viable option for universities, faculty, and students.