In March of 2002, Clancy Ratliff and I founded Kairosnews: A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy using PostNuke, a popular open source content management system (CMS). I had been both teaching with and conducting Blackboard workshops for other teachers for about two years up until that time. During that spring and following summer as I posted to and used the many features on Kairosnews, I remembered the many criticisms of Blackboard on the TechRhet listserv and became more and more dissatisfied with the "course in a box" teaching experience of Blackboard. I decided to try an experiment. Even though PostNuke lacked some course administration features (e.g., grading), it seemed far superior for online discussion with options for creating both weblogs and forums within one site.
So in the fall of 2002, I taught my first class using an open source content management system and have been using them ever since. What follows is a brief description of open source content management systems and some reasons why I believe that these applications serve well as virtual classroom spaces. For those that are still "stuck in the box," I hope the text will provide justifications for you, too, to explore possibilities for experimenting with these versatile Internet community platforms.
