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While I like Campbell’s suggestion regarding a Personal Cyberinfrastucture as an extension to the Personal Learning Environment (PLE), I do see some challenges moving from theory to practice. Let me elaborate from recent experiences. At my previous institution (Lethbridge College) we had our Multimedia (MM) students do exactly what Gardner suggested and required them all to get Bluehost accounts which are only $96.00 per year. Students used simplescripts and other CPanel (control panel) tools to set up a Joomla, WordPress and many other types of open source web-based tools. Some students rose to the occasion and experimented with all that these accounts had to offer and we even hired a few of these MM grads to work in Educational Enhancement Team. Unfortunately some of the students did little more than satisfy their assignment requirements and only a few got to the point where they full utilized what was available on Bluehost sever.
There are several reasons many students did not embrace or fully utilize the potential found in the the Cyberinfrastructure system. A significant obstacle or challenge is that despite the maturity of Web 2.0 Server administration systems like CPanel, Fantastico Installer, Simplesripts, phpMyadmin and many other unusually named sever tools, these tools are still just graphical front ends to some very sophisticated server systems. If one does not have the experience, knowledge or more importantly the desire to take on some aspects of the server system administration role then these systems can still be overwhelming. Even though you can easily create a new installation of the Joomla CMS you still need to understand that what a CMS (content management system) really is and how it is best used. These wonderful open source tools like Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress are amazingly powerful because you can configure them to do almost anything. Paradoxically, their power and configurability are their liability because you as the system administrator have to configure them to anything. Unless one lives in this realm on a daily basis and works as a system administrator many of these tools can be too overwhelming for the average individual who just wants to get their Youtube video up on their blog without having to understand how the blog engine works. WordPress has matured to the point where it can be used to be much more than a simple blog and to a certain point can fulfill the role of the traditional CMS but to even understand this subtle difference one has had to have years of experience in both the world of blogging and CMS. Many find it easier to go to wordpress.org or blogger.com to up their blogs within an existing infrastructure that is already pre-configured and requires little or no decisions beyond basic layout, colors and aesthetic schemas.
Another, challenge that has an even greater impact on students is that fact that like the students who may not want to be system administrators, very few faculty want to be or are even capable of being systems administrator of their own cyberinstrastructure. This means that there are very few faculty who can model this type of Web 2.0 utilization. I have personally been involved in the web since the early 1990s and have had one form of a website or another for more than 16 years and even I find it overwhelming and challenging at times to manage all the resources that are available. For example in my latest move from Lethbridge College to Abilene Christian University I have been faced with the challenge of moving the past three years of blogging from Joomla to WordPress. Because I don’t deal with these issues on a daily basis I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time researching, testing and experimenting in an attempt to make this happen–unless I can find a solution in in the next few days I will simply have point to a copy of the old site. There comes a point where there are just not enough hours in a day to do ones “official” responsibilities so when you add the responsibility of managing a cyberinsfrastructure there are just not enough hours in a day. Managing a cyberinfrastructure is much easier to do today than it was even a year ago but it still takes a significant commit of time to just stay up on the technology changes not to mention what happens when you run into challenges or have to deal with the latest security vulnerability.
Despite these challenges there still is an hugh appeal to being in charge and controlling ones own cyberinfrastructure. Perhaps over time as these systems will amature even more and the administration of these systems will be some less and less of an issue. If the changes in the past 5-10 years are any indication of what the future has in store we are not too far off from this becoming a reality. I agree with Campbell that we need to model the use of PLEs or the Personal Cyberinfrastructure if we expect our students to learn these skills and use these tools. I am doing my part and will encourage others to do so as well….
