In the many rounds of budget cutting and belt tightening over the last 16 months one of the causalities for many has been training budgets. And that is probably not entirely a bad thing. For a single employee a standard week-long training class can run $2,500 for just tuition, plus travel and lost time in the office. But something needs to fill the gap, as a commitment to continuous learning is essential:
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.
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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