As Blackboard swallows yet another LMS competitor I wonder if commercial learning management systems are still relevant as a classroom technology? They can be a convenient way for the faculty member to distribute class materials, or collect assignments. But do they have a future in the classroom? There was some discussion on this point at the Future of Everything Nercomp workshop.
Here is a quick list of some follow-up posts around the blogosphere from the WordCamp ED: NorthEast I helped organize a month ago. We also have all the speaker slides, handouts and other resources on the WordCamp ED wiki. Enjoy!
On the SocialLearn site there is an interesting opinion piece. Martin Weller raises the questions of how students used to the interactive, decentralized tools in their own lives will react to the traditional, centralized learning management system. His examples from The Open University are very helpful. The SocialLearn project sets up learners with a central profile for learning goals and tools. It also has an open API to allow other applications to be written to access and extend the content.
Middlebury College has an interesting project going, the Segue content management system — and they won at the Technology Collaboration Awards. Unfortunately the demo site doesn’t seem to be working at the moment, but in reading through their pages there are some interesting ideas. Every page generates its own RSS feed, which can be used to include internal references between pages — for instance a listing of recent blog posts is created utilizing the blog’s RSS feed. That sounds much more flexible than some type of fixed widget tool, or some arcane string of function calls. And any page can be defined as a blog. Wikis are in there too. Here is some more description from their site: Read the rest of this entry »
Here is a great post from over a year ago on the subject of Online learning systems, a more ‘unmanaged’ alternative to the WebCTs and Blackboards of the world (now pretty much the same thing.) Perhaps unmanaged isn’t quite the right word — I think self-managing, or self-organizing might be better. At least it sounds more positive.
In this month’s Educause Quarterly javier Ayala has an interesting article on electronic portfolios. He suggests that most e-portfolio efforts so far are approached from the perspective of faculty and staff. Perhaps greater success and adoption will be gained by looking at student needs and desires, and using that as a starting point. It only makes sense — after all it is the student’s portfolio. For my money learning management systems fall victim to this problem as well. We need to be providing students with tools that cut across all their courses, and allow them to build a resource that they can take with them upon graduation and continue to use for learning post-graduation. I think the concept of e-portfolios is a step in the right direction. But we need to keep student’s needs central to these efforts.
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!
Past listings from 2004 to the present
Need a home (or better home) for your website? I highly recommend HostRocket -- they are the best!
