At a recent meeting with the DTLT group, I was pounced on (okay…I exaggerate…let’s call it “challenged”) about my using Dreamweaver to edit code for Wordpress. I felt sheepish and a bit embarassed. Afterall, if you read the Wordpress documentation, there is a huge caveat emptor about using any type of WYSIWYG editing for Wordpress. One of my dear DTLT buddies said, “But, Dreamweaver SO wants to manage the site.”

I skulked away later, and went back home to try what they were using: an FTP client (there was some debate about Bluehost’s filemanager vs. “Transmit”) and a free Mac text editor (Text Wrangler). That experiment lasted one non-productive day, and I went back to Dreamweaver. Heresy? Just used to Dreamweaver? I’m not sure. Herein is my argument about using it.

1) I am hacking, not just using, Wordpress.

Unlike my spirited colleagues, I am digging deeper into the code to change the php, and to design custom themes and skins. For this purpose, it’s necessary to perform some global searches to find functions and variables in their various places within the Wordpress file tree. You could go online all day to find references to this stuff in the Wordpress support, but every theme is a little different. So, you need to quickly find references to various code snippets so you can piece together how what you are doing will affect you. In my non-Dreamweaver day, my search was manual and spotty, and no code came out of that day that I could use. The next day, I went back to Dreamweaver, located the five lines of code I needed withing about 5 minutes, and spent the day busily testing variations, eventually solving the problem and moving on.

2) Dreamweaver has built-in FTP.

I kind of like that I can edit and upload in the same program that gives me a global search and replace. I’m lazy that way.

3) Dreamweaver doesn’t add any proprietary code if you are not using the site management function

If you don’t want Dreamweaver to manage your site, just decline its occasional offers to do so (e.g., “Update links?” click “no” and get on with it).

4) Dreamweaver site management is not all bad.

You can use cloaking if you want to update a function within one theme but not another. And a log is generated, giving you ongoing documentation of what you are doing as you happily hack away.

5) Dreamweaver gives me color-coded text.

Text Wrangler did this, too, but didn’t really do it on a granular enough level for me. Dreamweaver knows what the code means, and color-codes comments, queries, and the like, for easy scanning. Again, a productivity plus, particularly with my over-40 eyesight (my DTLT buddies are much more youthful).

So, call me a 90s style coder, but I see absolutely nothing wrong with using Dreamweaver when you’re hacking Wordpress. If all you want to do is change a font color, or upload a header image, it’s an elephant gun for a mouse, for sure. But, if you really want to get a handle on what’s under the hood, I think I’d prefer to use a program designed to do just that, and very well.

Sorry, friends!

It’s free and it’s being used by Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT, so IT MUST BE GREAT!!!!!!!

Hold on, there. As with all things that aggregate, I am trying enormously to figure out why, in this day of RSS and LDAP authentication, and a joyful open source-o-rama, iTunes needs a market beyond the iPod.

I got my first OSX install in 2002 on my little G3 laptop, and iTunes was super-cool. This was when iPods were a glimmer in someone’s eye. At that time, what iTunes did was splendiforous. We especially liked the little animated graphics that synched with the music. We’d hook the laptop up to a projector, launch the graphics, get on a great techno radio station, and you had a party.

Then our son was born, but that’s another story…

Since then, the iPod came along, and iTunes had a home. With wifi on your iPod, you can get consume feeds without the weight of a laptop, and you’re good to go. The desktop iTunes allows for easier browsing, purchasing, music while you work, and other pleasures. However, when it comes to delivering content related to teaching and learning, the limitations become apparent to me. But, I’m not MIT, Stanford, or Berkeley, which means I have lots of room to be very wrong here, so let me hear it!

iTunes U seems to offer two things:

• hosting for media files
• ability to subscribe to a feed of files that will download to your iPod easily based on course-specific subscriptions

 iTunes seems to offer the following problems:

• An architecture that’s based in course enrollment, which is kind of a retro-course-management approach associating a person with content for with the primary container for content being the section of the course vs. the individual, which is the “wave of the future” (IMO)
• Inability to discriminate on subscribers to content. That is, it’s either public or private. If it’s private, that simply means you need a University LDAP account, and, apparently, that means I can subscribe to any feed from any course at the entire institution. I’m told by my colleagues that there are Fair Use issues with this, but this is not my area of expertise.
• The ability for students and faculty to upload all kinds of digital files, which mimics a course management system’s “digital drop box,” but without any of the communications tools, however lame, that a Blackboard or Moodle might have to notify folks that the stuff is now there. The paradigm of personal responsibility and the likelihood that the student should be downloading their feeds regularly does emeliorate this somewhat, but, it’s still a semi-familiar concept without any of the familiar, however lame, tools. I don’t think faculty have iPods strapped on ubiquitously yet, but, who knows?
• Here’s a big one for me: on the faculty-member’s (non iPod person’s) end, they are tied to a client. Yes, it’s a ubiquitous client, but for some reason, that just seems so 2002. Where is an LDAP-authenticated, web-based iTunes widget, that they can put on their blog, or any darned other place they want? Seems like it could happen at the server side, and when you login to that server with accounts/containers organized by individuals, via your blog (which fakes out authentication, and shows you the feed) the files are all there.

I know I’m missing something, and I’m sure it’s obvious, and I’m sure I’m dumb here. But, the whole “client” thing just gets me so—AUGHHHHHH!!!

Movin’ those iPods and iPhones, baby! But, teaching and learning, I’m not sure. It seems sort of locked-down-bill-gatesy to me. Convince me I’m wrong.

Here’s the trouble I had with our last Ronco meeting. It’s probably human nature, but, we were getting to the point of describing a plug-in, an appliance, and very specific functionality. For me, that kind of clipped my creativity right off at the stem. I felt like the concept was much, much smaller than I had envisioned. I need the scope to be broader than a “technology” at this point.

I also have a problem with defining it as a “set of tools” because I find that too limiting. Where I’ve seen this, from the inception of that email (and many discussions preceding), is as a re-thinking of how — I’ll use that ugly word — “enterprise systems” have been cast in relationship to teaching and learning. I’ll try to explain in a terribly inarticulate way.

Higher education systems have reached the end of an era of letting the vendor population define what is needed for enterprise learning environments. In a way, the tribute to Course Management Systems at Educause 2006 felt more like a eulogy of sorts, and seemed oddly timed. I attended subsequent meetings and conversations peppered by folks in higher ed IT and their corresponding vendors. The former was pushing the envelope, the latter, fearfully, explaining why the envelope can only be pushed SO FAR. You get the idea.

We can’t allow our experience of course management systems to enter into the conversation here. I would posit that describing Ronco as a “set of tools” is based on this notion. When I hear that, I hear an enhanced Blackboard, and that limits me.

The contrast, for me, is that, in the past, we have bought systems that contain our teaching and learning activity within the institution. We buy them for their scalability, but, in the end, they are large containers. I don’t see Ronco as a container. I see Ronco as a constantly-evolving membrane of sorts, allowing for information to pass in and out.

I’m increasingly thinking that Ronco is the entire organization, and there is no software or Internet solution that can exist as the be-all-and-end-all solution. If so, we’d all walk out the door after the last line of code is written, and give everyone the number to the Help Desk.

More thought required, I guess…

I abandoned this blog a year ago because blogging on my profession was difficult without my “no-boundaries-shooting-my-mouth-off” style of writing. But, being here at Faculty Academy 2007, I am compelled to start fresh.

We were just treated to a talk by Karen Stephenson on networking in corporate culture. She made clear so many dynamics that I experienced in the corporate world, and even more powerfully in the organizational world of higher education from the administrative perspective. Silos, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and networking.

Most talk around here since the new president came (an unceremoniously went) has been about breaking down silos. Technology itself, and the portal project we just finished, has this almost utopian mission to help do just that: democratize access to and control of information, thereby facilitating the breaking down of silos.

Still, even with brand new online tools, as in the analog world of paper, phone and fax, I’ve seen those who want the responsibility of managing and manipulating information, and those for whom it’s a burden. So the ideal of silo-busting seems difficult when people are still people, and hierarchies, are so invested in continuing to be who they are. Darn those people!

Back before I telecommuted, I would eat every day in the faculty staff dining room. I’d sit with all different people from day to day: administrative staff, plumbers from the physical plant, an occasional dean, and art professors. I just liked to know people since it made the job interesting. But, I was strangely alone in this habit. Most of the tables I joined were entrenched in terms of a rather consistent day-to-day population — even a consistent choice of table position in the room. So the experience was one of being some sort of human “free-radical” going in and messing with the DNA of otherwise stable cells.

All this is not to say “boy am I awesomely social, or what!” but rather can we expect the technology alone to change the way people work, to make them feel empowered to change tables, if we don’t also address the underlying culture that keeps them at the same tables, even in the same jobs, year after year.

The wisdom of Dr. Stephenson’s talk (insofar as I am even feebly equipped to understand it) seems to be that the underlying hierarchy does not need to change, or be transformed, by some cool technology. But, the technology’s place may be to capitalize on the networks that already exist, and strengthen them rather than just concentrating on breaking the silos, which are here to stay.

Tagging seems to do this, and Alan Levine’s talk about odd groups, and little apps that do little things, seems to speak to this. We join ideas through a network, and find like minds, but the technology becomes more and more transparent — as transparent as getting in your car and getting on the highway, neither of which existed 150 years ago. To phrase it better, the notion of the “killer app” as the embodiment of the ultimate technological solution for what ails us seems to be fading away in favor of a single person simply choosing the little apps (silos) that they want to utilize and tag (network OR hierarchy, or both, depending on what’s consuming them).

Our administrative systems, closed and “killer appy” in their scale and complexity, hold lots and lots of information about the person within the hierarchy of the institution. It seems that tagging, with the nodes being people, their departments/disciplines, and their little apps, would account for the networking component that can become the backbone of the notion of heterarchy.

Which gets to the Ronco, and it’s unique relationship between one’s current relationship to the institution, and then beyond graduation (or separation) when that relationship is no longer relevant, but the content produced during the active years remains a part of the body of work that defines the life and fleshes out that relationship as historical fact.

Viewed within this looser framework, technology could indeed be a key component in building heterarchy within the walls of the university. The rubber will meet the proverbial road in terms of the privacy of personal information and the notion of intellectual capital as currently defined. But, it seems that if technology is not going to transform everything, it sure is a necessary component to making that tranformation possible.