4 Comments so far

1. Kimon Keramidas on May 19, 2011 5:27 pm

   I’ll come out against WordPress if you would like. I finished and taught in the ITP program at CUNY and was involved in the early discussions about how the CUNY Academic Commons would look and the question of platform commitment is one that always arises at these moments. Initially in the ITP program we experimented with WordPress, Mediawiki, and Moodle to balance Blackboard and simultaneously to provide students with a variety of choices as to how they would experiment with their coursework. In the Commons discussions I was always more of a fan of Drupal or a larger more flexible CMS that would be able to expand in numerous directions of functionality. In both these instances I was personally a little wary of WordPress because of the modes of digital fluency and authorship I think it inherently leans towards. Here’s why:

   To me, WordPress came out of a blogging framework and at its core it still functions that way. Plugins add functionality and interoperability with other systems, but the creative locus of the system remains the single-authored, dated text inputted into the back end of the system. The blog schema then positions that content relative to other other types of content based on its time stamp, greatly overdetermining the importance of when something is written relative to what is actually written. Furthermore that content is most often commentable but unchangeable by other participants. As a result the blog software inherently develops a number of immutable hierarchies of authorship and time that run counter to the flexibility of digital content. In this way I have always felt that WordPress reinforces a lot of traditional tropes of writing style and authorial voice rather than deconstructing their relative values.

   In contrast I have found wikis to be much more powerful both in their ability to really engage with the power of digital text and hyperlinking, as well as their ability to allow people to more easily transition from the idea of text as text to text as the constituent code of an integrated and designed web site. Wikis have no inherent hierarchy or predisposition to information organization. Pages are pages and text is text. Everything is organizable, linkable, and sortable based on characteristics of tagging, author and timestamp, but none of those characteristics are systematically encouraged. This lack of structure is important in a creative fashion because it can really allow you to figure out how the information on your site relates to itself, how you want users to navigate through it, and what kind of complex hierarchies you want to establish as time progresses and different information becomes more or less important. In addition to the freedom of control wikis provide, they provide a democratic (dare I say anarchistic) view towards authorship and the relative value of the individual in relation to content. The total editability of content (with a robust history of saves to prevent vandalism and loss) allows one to really engage with collaborative work and the value judgments we ascribe to content creation, ownership, etc. The wiki provides you with ways to track did what and when, but it also gives you the opportunity to ask why that tracking is important in the first place in a way that I just don’t think more controlled CMSes and WordPress in particular allow for. Furthermore, by getting authors to think about their content within the constructed hierarchy of a site rather than as part of a stream of posts, they can think more carefully about the challenging nature of positioning content in digital publishing frameworks and through practice allow individuals to enhance their digital literacy and their understanding of the sites they work with.

   I am responsible for integrating digital media into the curriculum at the Bard Graduate Center and I am amazed by how eagerly students and even faculty have taken to the flexibility and experimentation that the wikis we host on Wikidot.com allow them(the Wikidot sites are really inexpensive and have modules and functionality that go beyond your typical MediaWiki installation). Almost all of our classes and exhibition projects have wikis and our entire community willingly learns the little bit of code they need to to climb over the wiki barrier of entry. Students are even doing their thesis research on wikis and showing it to librarians as they go out on research trips. Just this last semester we even did an entire bespoke HTML site for a digital exhibition, and it was clear that the experience users had had with the wikis made it easier for them to jump into the code-heavy experience of working with CSS, HTML, and Javascript.

   I could go on about wikis forever (and it seems like I have). If you want to talk more drop me an email.

2. Aaron Knoll on May 20, 2011 11:49 am

   Thanks for the response Kimon. You definitely offered a lot to think about in here.

   WordPress has come of age is in its development as a CMS. Yes, one part of the primary function is single-authored, dated comment; however, the page function within it is hierarchial and more like a drupal based navigation. There is no implied date. I agree with you on a lot of points, but I’m not sure you’re not giving WordPress enough credit in that it is very suitable for working within an “implied hierarchy” (which is an essential skill for students/faculty becoming literate in web based scholarship) and altering said hierarchy as the Zeitgeist demands.

   The idea of a wiki as a preferred means of digital conversation has come back due to the current trend of curation on the web. I think the idea of a flat, and infinitely re-organizable system has a lot of power and potential for “mashing up” digital content and reconsidering the narrative that can be implied (or outright indicated) by traditional site navigation. But I’m curious how your users- particularly thesis writers struggle with the notion of the reduced authority of a wiki where all can participate, edit, and modify. I think in theses (as in many New Media Lab projects) that the notion of authorship and voice of creation is important.

   I’m intrigued, and I’m very well versed in wikis having used them throughout my career, but for better or worse they do not demand of the writer the traditional expectations (or tropes) that I think are essential in web publishing. The web has matured, and in many ways the way people navigate and read websites have become set. For people who are concerned with breaking the mold, defying expectations, and challenging readers- the notion of decentralized and infinitely linked documents might be attractive; however, for those for whom the knowledge is the innovation- not the platform, CMSs provide a more helpful framework.

   Though this is now me speaking, not so much my speaking as telling a student how to develop their project. We’ve had a few students very recently make use of MediaWiki and Wikidot for their projects- and they did so fairly successfully.

   Of your experiences is there any CMSs that you might say have been better than others in your experience at the Bard Graduate Center. What kind of content management systems (lower case, so Omeka, wikis, blogs, etc) are faculty and students using and are you offering? Do many request a wordpress site, and then you direct them to wikis as a better alternative? Or at they outirght interested in Wikis?

   I have your e-mail, but I think this is an interesting conversation that I don’t mind carrying on in the public sphere.

3. Kimon Keramidas on May 20, 2011 2:20 pm

   I’ll answer your CMS question first. We have a WordPress multi-site installation, multiple Omeka installations (one central and some for classes), our wikis, and I am willing to support Moodle or other systems for whoever would like (I even wanted to generate a hand-tailored Drupal LMS but just don’t have the resources necessary to make that happen). When I first got here two years ago there was no established setup. The first semester we had more blogs than wikis even and I was expecting to be managing a mostly WordPress house. But things changed, partially through my experiences but also through grassroots changes from the students and choices made by faculty.

   For the most part professors are looking for a place to post readings, images, and other course materials. Some professors used blogs to do this and students used it to post on a regular basis, but due to the nature of our classes and general pedagogical styles the blogs didn’t catch on quite as much. Ultimately the wikis inherently made it easier to upload and link to readings, with students even sometimes sharing scans with one another via PDFs on the wikis. One class however, a digital exhibition class, used a wiki to mock up a database so that the students could gather information collectively without all needing FileMaker Pro licenses. The professor and I created page templates (a Wikidot feature) to create pages for each object. In this way, students could post to the page from wherever, and add images, links, texts, and ultimately contribute catalog text and wall label text. We even enabled comments on each page so the professor and students could communicate about the progress being made. All very scholarly and all very research oriented. As the exhibition progressed pages were added to host audio files (with easily embedded flash players) and the exhibition design staff added links and images to drawings for the physical space of the exhibition and even prototypes of a touch interface we created for the show.

   This wiki kind of was a landmark moment because it reinforced the kind of object based material study we do here. Now all our academic program badsed exhibitions have wikis of this type of some sort, one even hosts 900 images under consideration, and it is easy for the students and teachers to be able to integrate that material with syllabi, written contributions, scheduling etc. Our Dean even has a wiki where he posts progress on his recent book work as he moves towards considering the possiblity of a digital project based on the work. I have also been able to template a class for the faculty that I completely taught on a wiki, complete with regular posts by students, tons of embedded content, and an end of the semester collaborative group project posted on the wiki and with footnotes. The use of the wikis now runs the gamut of functionality, with many of the students leading the charge as they learn the functionality and push the wikis further. Students then started doing thesis research and writing based on these models and in many ways are now driving the use of the tools just as much as me.

   As far as the wikis versus WP pages, you are right that you can use pages in WordPress to manage content, but to me those pages are really secondary in the construction of WordPress as a CMS since it was and always will have the stamp of a blog tool. I would imagine that having a lot them is difficult to manage, especially when linking to and managing menus of them. In wikis the name of a page is the link to it and once people figure out how to use brackets for links (a simple step) it is much easier to manage the site and create a structure and hierarchies. I also like that the wikis allow for editing and adding features to a page as you are looking at it and that there is no need for a separate back end. One thing that helps with all of this is that the wikis we use allow for the traditional anarchy and simplicity of the pure wiki, but supplement that with a lot of built in modules(like in page comments and image galleries with shadowbox) and functionality(footnoting, auto-tables of contents, parent-child relationships, per page CSS, page templating) that make them much easier and robust then a simple Mediawiki install. Furthermore, all of this is native to the wikis rather than a plugin that needs to be updated and managed. The full range may not be as robust as the WordPress plugins, but I find the actual usability and integration into the actual content much higher.

   Another point about functionality is I guess where I have found Wikidot to be the perfect solution for us. Wikidot comes with built in a discussion forum, you can easily add comments to a page if you would like using a module, and it provides for easy tagging and categorizing of pages. In fact, with very little effort it is easy to make a blog out of a Wikidot wiki that works just like a WordPress blog. There is even a background network of members that you can use to communicate with people for some social networking properties(though this is not as robust as something like Buddypress). With all of this functionality the wikis have become the norm and I think that in the end it will bode better for our students’ digital fluency and abiltity to interact with these kinds of sites. They deal with code on a small but regular basis, and can really expand and take control of sites in a constructive way.

   This gets us to authority and voice. In the previous post I was talking about authority being obliterated, but that is really in theory and not practice. Wikis allow for and expose for that possibility, but ultimately we have a relatively conservative program where traditional ideas of authority and academic knowledge persist. To that end, the wikis can be set up with limits of access and administration like any tool, and professors and students choose different levels to reinforce those ideas as they would like. Things are usually left open and the wikis are managed and used to identify whose work is who in a way that is not tied to administrative privileges, but rather the social contract of the class and the users of that wiki. One thing that is nice is that the wiki history tells pretty much who did what and when, but in a hidden less-prioritized way so that things can be open but authority and control can be maintained where necessary. I just like the idea that the pages are fluid and can be multi-accessed and that single voice is not part of the setup to be worked around. In two years we have yet to have a problem about authority or ownership, especially since we are a graduate program like the NML at the GC, and it is easy for thesis students to create a closed site that people can visit but make no edits to, so that the ownership of their work is not question.

   I also wanted to talk about the comment that the knowledge and not the platform being the innovation. This is something that I think needs a lot of talking about and should be a focus of any media initiative. Working in these media is an innovation no matter what at this point, as the models of success are so few and our understanding of the potential of digital content and publication is ultimately still very limited. We are developing fluency in digital media as we create and teach with them, so I would say that anyone in the New Media Lab should really be engaging with how they are constructing their project as much if not more than the content of their work. That is what I don’t like about WordPress, it is tied to a lot of old mechanisms of knowledge creation and authorship that are completely and utterly in flux if you think about where we are with digital publication and digital projects at the moment. Its ease of posting and following a format is actually a crutch that sets up patterns and paradigms for one to follow rather than encouraging one to experiment with creating new paradigms and structuring new patterns. CMSes after all do just that, they manage content for you by taking the challenge of coding and organization away from the user and automating it through templates, styles, hierarchies, and databases. Now that is not necessarily all bad, and it definitely has its place in many web projects, but it is undeniably limiting from the perspective of a fully self-made site.

   For instance, we were going to use Omeka for a digital exhibition that a class did this past semester. As we were discussing functionality, students began asking for dynamic visuals (shadowboxes, zoomifys) and non-traditional layouts that were going to be very difficult, nigh impossible, to do within the Omeka template structure provided in Exhibit Builder. We determined that the layout and structuring of the information was more important than the database backend that Omeka is so valuable for and decided to instead build an HTML site from scratch and instead simply point to the NYPL Digital Archive pages that contained the metadata we needed. The eight students then spent half a semester learning image-management for the web, HTML, CSS, and even some Javascript to make a site that many people think was created by an outside firm, all while doing significant research within the field of study for the course. Rather then write a traditional paper, or just upload images and text into a predetermined Omeka architecture, they had to think about the content as a site, compartmentalize and link pages and objects to one another, think of how to deal with large amounts of visual and multi-media material, and then actualize those ideas in code.

   So, how does this relate to wikis. The course site which had been for communication turned into a web development space where they were able to mock up pages, communicate with one another, and create punch lists for editing. Furthermore, it was apparent that their little experience with the code that the wikis require greatly prepared them to step into learning more complex languages. The platform and knowledge were integrated and integral, and the resulting work showed it. I may be a skeptic, but I think that a typical WordPress setup or even Drupal would not have provided the stepping stones they would have needed to make the project successful.

   At the BGC the wikis serve multiple purposes, and they have become the norm because it is easier to teach a single tool to an entire community rather than many. That being said, all CMSes are on the table if I think it is more appropriate for a class or project, in the end the wikis just make sense for us and what we do.

   I invite you to look at some of the sites I mention above (which if you ask me end up not really looking a lot like wikis as we think of them):

   Our Digital Media Lab’s wiki
   http://dml.wikis.bgc.bard.edu/

   My Interface Design Class
   http://interface-design-10.wikis.bgc.bard.edu/

   My Student’s Independent Study this semester on Video Game Material Culture
   http://video-games-culture.wikis.bgc.bard.edu/

   Our digital exhibition (still in late stage Beta)
   http://resources-bgc.bard.edu/19thcNYC/

   The course wiki that supported the making of that exhibition
   http://visualizing-ny-10.wikis.bgc.bard.edu/

   You can check our CMS driven institutional home page(http://www.bgc.bard.edu) as well to see how it is easy enough with CSS to keep the wikis within our branding scheme as well

4. Wordpress and Innovation – New Media Lab on June 28, 2011 12:08 pm

   […] other day I wrote a blog on the CUNY Commons about WordPress and its role within the New Media Lab which prompted some interesting discussion with Kimon Keramidas of the Bard Graduate Center’s […]