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**E-Tech Tools: OSS, Twitter, WordPress** **Group 1** Open Source Course Management Systems (CMS) are being widely used by universities, community colleges, K-12 schools and businesses. What are Open Source Course Management systems and what are some of the most popular tools used in 2010? CMSs are web applications that run on a server and can be accessed through a web browser. At the very simplest form, CMSs are designed to offer a wide variety of tools that can make both classroom and online class courses more effective. They typically provide easy ways to upload and share materials with other students, provide discussion boards, online chats, places to give quizzes, and record grades. The exceptional thing about open source software is the ability for users to have access to the source code, or essentially “what lies under the hood” of the software itself. This allows users to tweak the software if they feel the need to; they can write new features, fix bugs and improve the performance of the software. Unlike other software that many times requires expensive licenses and upgrade fees, CMSs can for the most part be accessed for free through the web.
 * Introduction **

One of the popular Open Source Course Management Systems (CMS) used today by over 30,000 educational organizations around the world is Moodle (Cole & Foster, 2008, p. IX). The name Moodle has two meanings. It is an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, and it also a “verb that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to creativity” (Cole & Foster, 2008, p. IX). Moodle was created by Martin Dougiamas in 1999 and has continued to evolve at a rapid rate as it has been “propelled by an active world-wide community of users and developers” (Chavan & Pavri, 2004, p. 67). He was a computer scientist at a University in Perth, Australia where he helped support a CMS that engineers had built for the university. He believed that in the development of a CMS it is needed to start with the perspective of the educator, not the engineer. Using his postgraduate degrees in Education and Computer Science, Martin began developing Moodle as an alternative to the current CMS that he was supporting at the university.
 * Moodle**

Moodle is a very cost effective CMS, as it is free and does not require any licenses, fees for maintenance, or contracts to use. It is available to download and may be installed on as many servers as the user wants. An added benefit is that no one can force you to upgrade or adopt new features. The number of users in the community is limitless and part of being Open Source Software means that if Martin Dougiamas decides he is going to stop developing the software, they cannot take back the source code, and there is already a dedicated community of developers that will continue to support the software development. Moodle was built on a sound educational philosophy and is now supported by a huge community of developers and users. It is highly competitive in the Open Source market, as it has a system of features that are easy to extend.

A single Moodle website can host a large number of courses and can be managed by one or more teachers. Courses can contain a wide variety of tools for the users. The tools available include activities such as discussion forums, student journals, quizzes, surveys, as well as online chats, assignments and workshops. Moodle also supports online grading and a file system where students store their work for future use as well as turn in their assignments to instructors. Other features that are included in Moodle are support for e-mail integration and uploading of multimedia objects for viewing as well as storage for future use. These are features that are very comparable to those in other online community software programs, however being Open Source makes Moodle much more cost effective. Moodle has also been expanded by additional developers over the last several years to include features such as an integrated calendar, and special language packages for those users that require special language translations.

Many times Open Source Course Management Systems are scrutinized because they are not easy for the average person to install and use. However, the Linux Journals 2004 survey results showed that over sixty-six percent of those that responded to the Moodle survey were actually teachers, online learning researchers and educational administrators who found Moodle to be a very useful and reasonably easy format to deliver content to students and enhance the face-to-face learning environment (Chavan & Pavri, 2004). In addition to Moodle’s low cost, the project has grown to include a large community of users that tend to agree that its “ ease of use helps bring Learning Management System technology within reach of those with limited technical and financial resources” (Chavan & Pavri, 2004, p. 70).

Twitter is one of today’s many new social networks, a service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? //(//Kuroneko//,// 2009 //).// It has given millions of people opportunity to broadcast their “tweets” in 140 characters or less. Twitter may be great for keeping up with what Ashton Kutcher is thinking or the latest diatribe from a profanity-spewing dad, but exactly how could this service be used in the classroom to support education? It turns out that many educators have found ways to incorporate tweets into their lessons. Students and professors can share direct tweets without having to exchange phone numbers. Professors can send reminders about upcoming tests, project due dates, or any news that needs to be shared via Twitter. Teachers can poll students’ opinions or get feedback on future projects or topics by using a poll-taking application within Twitter, (Rankin, 2009).
 * Twitter**

One history professor at the University of Texas at Dallas has fully incorporated Twitter into her class, using a weekly hash-tag to organize comments, questions, and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. She also tweets lecture highlights during class and projects a giant image of live tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests students refer back to the messages later when studying. The results so far have been mixed but it is clear that more students are participating in classroom discussions than they used to, (Kirkpatrick, 2009).

There are numerous Twitter tools that professors may use to enhance the Twitter learning experience. For example, there is Tweetree that puts tweets in context and groups entire conversations together, which would be useful for students and teachers to keep all comments in one class or one lecture together. There is also TwitPic that allows uploading pictures to Twitter, making it a great tool for sharing visuals for class projects. There are also tools and applications that allow for following interesting Tweeters, including professors at other universities. Social media strategist, Lon S. Cohen, wrote a recent mashable article that talks about the professors he follows and why. “Never before in history has it been easier to glean from the knowledge of others who will give it away to you for free. It’s equivalent to getting higher education. I’m talking about Masters level stuff. And it’s all available right there on Twitter,” (Cohen, 2009//).// Who knows what the future of Twitter may be, but it is clear that numerous professors are finding ways to use this social network for the benefit of students and learning.

**WordPress** WordPress is an open source CMS (Content Management System), “defined by dated entries, in reverse chronological order,” (Rethlefsen, Piorun, & Prince, 2009). M ost often it is used as a blog publishing application. A mature and stable product, WordPress was “born out of a desire for elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system,” (“About WordPress,” n.d.).

WordPress enables users to log-in to an administrative interface and directly edit pages in a visual editor similar to Microsoft Word, complete with fully customizable site templates for quick Website updates, (McMoreland, Tolnay, & Vick, 2010). WordPress fulfills primary purpose of technology education in being activity-based learning for “hands-on, minds-on education.” An excellent tool to promote students “solving practical, ‘real-world’ problems,” (Brown & Brown, 2010), WordPress presents many interesting educational possibilities for blogs: Publish private writings; collaborate on group projects; peer-review others’ work; and manage digital portfolios, according to Churchill (2009), who organized an experimental blog for students to access course material, post reflections, feature comments on others’ contributions, and regular participation. Student feedback indicated that what they liked most about blogging was to see others’ work to learning new perspectives and receiving comments on their own work. Teacher feedback found that “blogs added a new dimension” to their teaching effectiveness. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, a file format delivering regularly updated information online, helps teachers manage student’ blogs where ‘trace’ presence can be left with comments. Blogs can be embedded with RSS, ‘folksonomy’ (user tags), YouTube videos, photos from Flickr, or Slideshare presentations (Churchill, 2009). WordPress can be used as a central feedback and learning material service for courses as part of students’ distributed learning environment where using Web 2.0 technologies supports the personalized mediation of self-directed learning and constructing the personal learning environment (Pata, 2009), making blogs an ideal tool for setting priorities, making plans, and providing guidelines and instructions for different projects. Chen (2009) found that blogs enable greater efficiency and collaboration, improved section management, and the accessibility and integration of cataloguing resources.

Overall, WordPress is the Cadillac of blogs: Used by over 300 of the 10,000 biggest websites, making it the most popular blog software in use today; click link for chart of statistics __[]__. In education, students and teachers alike both praised their experiences using WordPress. The literature researched provided for many beneficial instances of its application, which bodes well for the practical implications in using such a stable, versatile, and elegantly designed software.

References  Brown, R., & Brown, J. (2010). What is technology education? A review of the “official curriculum”. // Clearing House //, // 83 // (2), 49-53. doi:10.1080/00098650903505449. __[]__ Chavan, A., & Pavri, S. (2004, December). Open-Source Learning Management with Moodle. Linux Journal, 66-70. Retrieved from __[]__  Chen, S. (2009). Can blogging help cataloging?: using a blog and other Web 2.0 tools to enhance cataloging section activities. // Library Resources & Technical Services //, // 53 // (4), 251-260. Retrieved July 15, 2010, from Academic Search Complete database. __[]__  Churchill, D. (2009). Educational applications of Web 2.0: Using blogs to support teaching and learning. // British Journal of Educational Technology //, // 40 // (1), 179-183. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2008.00865.x. __[]__  Cohen, L.S. (2/16/2009). // Twitter Professors: 18 People to Follow for a Real Time Education //. Retrieved from __[]__ / Cole, J., & Foster, H. (2008). Using Moodle (2 ed.). Retrieved from __[]__ [|%20source%20&lr&pg=PR4#v=onepage&q&f=false]  Kirkpatrick, M. (6/1/2009). // How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom //. Retrieved from __[|http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ how_one_teacher_uses_twitter_in_the_classroom.php]__  Kuroneko, M. (6/10/2009). // Twitter in the Classroom //. Retrieved from __[]__  McMoreland, L., Tolnay, M., & Vick, R. (2010). Public Libraries Giving High School Students a Break. //APLIS//, //23//(2), 67-73. Retrieved July 15, 2010, from Academic Search Complete database. __[]__ MySQL. (2010, August 3). In //<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;">Wikipedia // <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman,serif; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;"> online. Retrieved August 2, 2010, from __[]__ <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> Pata, K. (2009). Modeling spaces for self-directed learning at university courses. // Journal of Educational Technology & Society //, // 12 // (3), 23-43. Retrieved July 15, 2010, from Academic Search Complete database. __[]__ <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman,serif; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;">PHP. (2010, August 2). In <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman,serif;">//<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;">Wikipedia // <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman,serif; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;"> online. Retrieved August 2, 2010, from __[]__ <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;">Rankin, G.(6/8/2009). //50 Ways to Use Twitter in the College Classroom.// Retrieved from __[|http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2009/06/08/50-ways-to-use-twitter-in-the-college-classroo]__

<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent; font-family: Times New Roman,serif; font-weight: normal;">Rethlefsen, M., Piorun, M., & Prince, D. (2009). Teaching Web 2.0 technologies using Web 2.0 <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent; font-family: Times New Roman,serif; font-weight: normal;">technologies. <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;">// Journal of the Medical Library Association // <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent; font-family: Times New Roman,serif; font-weight: normal;">, <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;">// 97 // <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent; font-family: Times New Roman,serif; font-weight: normal;">(4), 253-259. Retrieved July 15, 2010, from Academic Search Complete database. __[]__ <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;">WordPress. (2010). WordPress usage statistics. In trends.builtwith.com. Retrieved August 2, 2010, from __[]__