We began this roundtable by talking about the availability of free and open source software for the classroom, and by setting up possible conceptual parallels between open source development philosophy and writing classrooms.

I’d first like to thank Rebecca Bias, who arranged for us to hold the roundtable in the Kermit Hall Video Conference Room and worked hard to beam Dickie in from his undisclosed location. I would also like to thank of the all of the roundtable’s presenters: Dickie Selfe of Humanities Information Systems, David Staley of the Harvey Goldberg Program in the Department of History, Ben McCorkle, Assistant Professor of English at the Ohio State Marion campus, and Doug Dangler, my colleague here at the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing.

This is a long post, I know–but our presenters offered a wealth of resources and made so many important points about using technology (open source or otherwise) in the classroom, that I thought I should get as much of it down as possible.

Dickie opened our proceedings by sharing a draft of an NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English)/CCCC (College Composition and Communication Conference) statement on open source software in writing classrooms. Highlighting several key points, Dickie pointed out that using open source software is less interesting as an option for controlling software costs (indeed, he pointed out that updating software accounts for only a third of technology budgets–more on this point later) than as a way of conceiving how knowledge is produced and disseminated in the University. In many ways, Universities already operate like open source systems: parallel, global development of projects and research, peer review, and regular publication schedules (see this fascinating article in Computers and Composition Online which talks about these parallels and explores what they can mean for the composition classroom). Dickie noted that open source software offers a way of reorienting the relationship between instructors, their students, and technical networks of support, a development that requires significant reinvestment of resources and presents its own challenges as well as opportunities.

Dickie then shared several student blogs from his recent technical and professional writing class (http://405c.blogspot.com/). His students were required to weekly post reflections on their professional ambitions on personal blogs (on blogger.com, a free blogging site), including three artifacts (books, online resources, images, or whatever) that would be useful to readers looking to learn about their chosen profession. Their work led up to a presentation on their profession to the class.

One of their assignments asked students to create podcasts of interviews through audioblogger.com (free like its parent site, blogger.com). Students could borrow equipment from OIT’s classroom resource center, or they could use their cell phones to call into audioblogger and make low-quality recordings of their interviews. They could then edit their recordings in audacity, an open source sound editing program, which Ben discussed in more detail later in the meeting. Dickie then discussed how he would open up his students projects and presentations to wider audiences, encouraging his students to invite people from outside of the class (such as the professionals they interviewed) to their presentations–creating a more open public forum for response and critique as in open source networks.

David Staley then shared his program’s work on the Department of History’s development of e-History, a popular site (second only to the History Channel’s site) devoted to presenting online historical resources to educators and the wider public. He noted his and his colleagues desire to develop rich media resources for the site, giving a very poignant example of a photographic montage project produced by a University of Iowa graduate student. The project was called “This is our enemy,” and interwove images from the internment of Japanese Americans, WW II propaganda, clips from political speeches, and Japanese music.

The project had been composed using a free photo montage program from Microsoft called Photo Story. David demonstrated the program’s very simple interface, noting that while the program was very easy to teach, it was much more difficult to teach students to use the program to make sophisticated, clear, and compelling choices to communicate their ideas. It is difficult to get students to think outside of print text conventions; David noted that graduate students often, for example, merely presented texts and images, rather than thinking about how visual and audio effects along with interactivity can reshape historical work. David also talked about how citation conventions have to be adapted for different projects–and that this can often be a barrier for historians who are skeptical about the validity of multi-modal work. Nevertheless, his program has been able to fund several compelling projects that are currently in development, and he hopes that more graduate students will consider producing similar work in the future.

Next, Ben McCorkle shared his work with basic writing students using the open source sound editor Audacity. He wanted to focus their work on assignments that were geared toward very specific, recognizable forms of composition. He asked his students to create PSA recordings, a genre they would be familiar with from radio and other media, and which had discrete, well developed conventions that students could latch on to. They did so in groups, starting with a written proposal for their project. Ben noted that the assignment “paid off” most when the students had to present their work to the class to be critiqued, where groups had to articulate their compositional choices clearly and gauge very directly how an audience (their peers) responded to their projects.

Ben noted, furthermore, that while many open source programs often do not quite have the broad functionality that their proprietary software counterparts have, Audacity was a notable exception. To provide examples of student work, Ben shared several sample recordings produced by his students, one “A” assigment, and one “B-” assigment that wasn’t quite as successful.

Dickie jumped in to talk about how technological support personel needed to be brought into any discussion about the use of open source technology. They, after all, would be the ones who would have to adapt open source software to local needs. Though open source technology offered software that was cheaper than proprietary software, resources saved by using needed to be reinvested in open source developments: time given to support personel to work on such projects, access given in the decision making process, resources to develop and maintain the software and the networks on which that software was used, as well as compensation for all that work. In the long run, such reinvestment is worthwhile, but requires a great deal of thought and cooperation from all interested parties.

Lastly, Doug Dangler talked about his experience teaching a writing class using only open source software. He made use of Audacity, an image manipulation program called GIMP, and a Website composition and management program called Nvu. Although the software allowed his students access to applications they might not otherwise have, he found that it was difficult to perform some important tasks with the browser. For instance, Nvu did not allow his students to easily compose their websites using frames, and they had to resort to using old fashioned, clunkier tables to organize their sites. Using the software forced him to work through with unexpected challenges with his students.

Whatever short challenges these four scholars faced in using open source and free software, they were eager to find ways of making their use worthwhile in the long run. In any case, resources are available to help instructors work through any difficulties they might face. Dickie has put together several programs for faculty and instructors in the College of Humanities. Writing Across the Curriculum consultants are also available to help teachers throughout the University carefully consider how to best use open source technology in their classrooms.

Chris Manion