I am in Como for a conference on open source learning environments (FOSLET). The paper I am giving tries to set out three things: (Download wellerd2.pdf) i) The process of technology succession, which is analagous to plant succession. I argue that far from being detrimental many commercial VLEs have been beneficial because they have acted as primary colonizers, and have thus changed the environment so that other e-learning systems can now move in, e.g. portals and open source VLEs. ii) That open source VLEs represent a good compromise for the two groups of educators who are forced to co-exist in VLEs, what von Hippel terms lead and conventional users and…

We had a meeting today to discuss the architecture of the OU VLE. I was the project director during phase 1, and we made the recommendation that we should adopt a service oriented architecture. This was partly a pragmatic decision because although we didn’t have a VLE as such, we had over the years developed, or bought in, a number of the components, including conferencing, assignment handling, authentication, etc. It was also partly a recognition that this was where the world was moving to. I made the analogy today that it is like the claim that many sociologists and economists make (I think Castells is amongst them), that many developing…

At the PROWE meeting yesterday I was once again struck by the social values that are associated with different pieces of software. The project is looking at wikis as a tool for tutor support and also personal repositories/e-portfolio. They have selected ELGG as it seems to straddle both of these camps. While that is true technically, there are process issues that reflect the different values of these two approaches. This was brought in to focus when we started discussing lurkers. Some members wanted to discourage lurking. I was coming from a wiki mindset and thought this strange – after all most of us are ‘lurkers’ on wikipedia. But viewed from…

I’m just writing the conclusions to my book and one of the subjects that has cropped up recently is the tension between what we might term the web 2.0 mindset (as so eloquently set out by Tim O’Reilly) and the traditions in Higher Ed. While web 2.0 development is about perpetual beta, quick, lightweight assembly, the traditions of higher education are founded in research and liberalism. This means their software methodology tends to be rigorous (from the research background) and highly consultative (from the liberal history). So if you look at any documentation on say, acquiring or developing a VLE, they are the outcome of very thorough processes that usually…