A few days ago over at TheByteBaker there was a post (Is WordPress professional enough?) that sparked some discussion.  The post was specifically about whether or not WordPress was professional enough to use as university webpages.

My answer is yes.

Web 1.0

A University is a place where the brightest minds come together and build a progressive community.  So why are so many universities behind on technology.  My university only allows for students, faculty, and student organizations to use standard HTML to build their website.  While professors in the computer science departments may easily be able to update their websites, what about the English and history professors?  In today’s Web 2.0 world, it is important for a faculty member to be able to update a website, to be able to share their knowledge with the world.

WordPress or Joomla!

It’s a no-brainer that a university should choose a free open source program to make the websites.  The question is which one.  I believe WordPress MultiUser would be the easiest to use and set up.  However, perhaps a better CMS(content management system) such as Joomla! would be better as an e-portfolio.  But I’m not sure how easy it would be to setup Joomla for multiple users and webpages (If anyone has knowledge on this let me know).

Just Use Facebook?

Some would argue that there is no need for professors and students to have websites because they can just use Facebook.  I agree that that Facebook is useful and has it’s place in networking, but it can’t do everything a website can do.  One reason is that Facebook is not Google.  Someone may go to Facebook to search for a specific person, but they won’t go to Facebook for “researchers in machine vision and machine learning.”

Getting Things Started

This topic is extremely interesting to me as I intend to start my own student organization that works to improve the use of technology on campus.  One of my first goals is to do this very thing, improve the websites.  It is my expectations that a better online environment would improve campus involvement and grow the community.  Student organizations would have websites that would allow them to communicate better with their members and advertise their events.

If you are looking for a good project to work on at school, perhaps you can do the same thing.  Because a university should not lag behind when it comes to culture and technology.