Download the CFP in PDF format here
In 2006, Blackboard purchased WebCT, its closest competitor in the Learning Management System (LMS) market, and also filed a suit against rival Desire 2Learn, Inc. on a controversial claim of patent infringement. In response, at its October meeting Educause issued an open letter urging Blackboard to abandon its suit on the grounds that the suit will stifle collaboration and innovation. Blackboard of course, is not the only closed source LMS out there. D2L, Angel, Turnitin.com, E-College, Criterion, and all kinds of other products populate the educational technology landscape. However, Blackboard's lawsuit and its claims outraged technologists, and more importantly for many of us, heads of campus instructional technology units; that outrage sharply increased interest in the role that can be played by open source technologies and communities in the development of educational computing.
The concurrent growth of open source Learning Management Systems (LMS's) such as Sakai, Moodle, and Open Source Portfolio will not, in and of themselves, necessarily replace or change the reigning corporate and/or campus bureaucratic models for educational technology exemplified by Blackboard purchasing and support. Because something is open source doesn't mean that the open source process and models will automatically promote and enhance the values important to the Computers and Writing community and to composition pedagogy in general.
Ideally, open source development, as both a technology and a concept, is grounded in values of collaboration, interaction, and respect for the user; these same values have also informed writing pedagogy of the process and post-process eras. There is, therefore, an important and enduring connection between the values that inform open-source technology and composition pedagogy. That connection, nonetheless, doesn't matter if it isn't enacted. For our values to find a place, we need to define them, assert them, and to ask for them to be designed into the architectures, interfaces, and features of both open and closed source products. We need in short to be users, designers, critics, and philosophers of online learning systems, both open and closed.
We invite papers that go beyond the easy claim that because open source is open, it is necessarily good and better, or automatically in-line with writing practice and pedagogy. Instead, we hope to look at what we must do to make the open source possibility a reality in light of our understandings on the philosophy, ethics, and politics of using writing technologies within the academy and other workplaces. We encourage participants to range beyond the narrowest definition of "open source" to explore the values and practices collaborative ventures can promote when we also work with or influence developers of closed source systems. In other words, what can we learn and use from open source possibilities and practices to change our relationship to, and the design and implementation of, closed source and for profit systems.
Papers may want to consider one or more of the following topics:
Submissions:
In keeping with this year's theme, the University of Georgia and the organizers of Computers and Writing 2008 have made a commitment to support open source technology. Towards that end, and in order to streamline the submission process, we will be using the <emma> open-source writing environment to collect proposals and disseminate information about the conference. In addition to accepting electronic submissions in more traditional proprietary formats such as Microsoft Word (.doc) and Adobe Portable Document Format, we are encouraging all potential conference participants to consider using OpenOffice (Windows) or NeoOffice (MacOSX) and to submit proposals as Open Document Text (.odt) files.
We will be accepting proposals beginning December 3, 2007; the deadline for submissions is January 24, 2008 at 11: 59 pm EST.