It seems to me that in the higher ed tech world we often try to “do it all” ourselves — we want to own and maintain the hardware, we want to develop the applications, we want to run the training and support, and we want to host all the content. And these aren’t all bad instincts. It shows we want to provide a high level of service to our users and we place great value on the intellectual capital held in the stored information on our systems. But the tech world is changing quickly (like that’s some kind of news flash!) and we can’t continue to control everything and still innovate at the pace our users expect and the technologies demand.
My wife, a faculty member at Western Connecticut, and I were discussing how effective our institutions course management systems were in the classroom. She finds her undergraduates don’t respond well to email, and suspects that’s because they don’t check it very often. I am starting to see a similar trend in our graduate students, although I think they may also be missing messages amidst the flood of email spam that is now ever present. And she hasn’t found the on-line course discussion tools very helpful — ditto for me. If you require on-line discussion, and grade it they will do it, but in my experience it feels forced. And participation drops off immediately once the requirement/grading is removed.
Social networking is the hot web 2.0 buzzword these days — so maybe that’s where the answer lies. But our students are already in their social networks, probably either Facebook or Myspace. So why not take advantage of this existing technology, and offer our students an easy way to incorporate their educational life into their network? So why not have a Blackboard – WebCT – Sakai — Moodle — etc. plugin to provide integration with Facebook. Facebook has published a public API, and it looks like there’s already a Blackboard compatible link.
The goal here should be to work to leverage technologies that work well, support open standards, and develop tools to integrate technologies that doesn’t require a wholesale move to one vendor — things change too quickly for that. The MetaWeblog API is a good example of this idea. I’m writing this post using ScribeFire, a Firefox extension that posts entries directly to my blog. It make it very convenient for me to post comments while researching websites, pulling quotes, checking sources, etc. We should be doing more of this type of integration in the Course Management space.
Task Force on Social Networking Software — see the comment on a Facebook – Sakai mashup
Disparate 2: Wishful Thinking for eLearning (was: Moodle as New Facebook)
– further thoughts on new features for course systems.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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