VLE
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The long-awaited ‘education as fruit’ metaphor
I have just returned from the ALT-C conference in Manchester, where I held a workshop with Brian Kelly called 'Realising Dreams, Avoiding Nightmares, Accepting Responsibilities'. My role was to present the future, and then for us to discuss what the obstacles were to realising it, and the related issues for educators, learners and IT services. Here is my presentation: Dreams of future learning View more presentations from mweller. In my talk I decided to use an extended (tortuous some might say) fruit based metaphor. It begins to get rather pained towards the end, but stick with it, I think it comes to fruition (ahem). It goes something like this: Current…
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VLE vs PLE fight club
<Image Pirate Test by Danksy http://www.flickr.com/photos/petedanks/2770208173/> I did a debate with Niall Sclater for the upcoming OU course Technology enhanced learning around PLEs and VLEs, 'refereed' by John Pettit. We pitched it as me being the PLE guy and Niall the VLE man, for the sake of discussion, but we're probably closer in agreement than this would suggest. You can listen to the audio here (including jazzy intro and fade-out music). [Update, jazzy music is courtesy of http://www.oliverledbury.co.uk/] For a one take shot, I think it comes out reasonably well, although I am the least coherent of the three.
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Technology as metaphor (or I’m on e-Literate)
I was really pleased to be asked to contribute an article to the edition of On The Horizon that Michael Feldstein is editing. As part of the procedure all the authors are writing a guest blog post on e-Literate. It feels kind of like getting the opening slot on the Parkinson show (US readers – substitute with Leno). My piece is up now, called SocialLearn: Bridging the Gap Between Higher Education and Web 2 (surprise choice of topic, I know!). As well as talking about SocialLearn I wanted to make the argument that the technology we (individuals and institutions) use is a metaphor, or at least an artefact, for how…
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A PLE – VLE continuum
There’s been a bit of a PLE flurry of posts, generated by some Twitter discussion. Chris Lott posted that he couldn’t see why people think you can’t teach PLEs, or about PLEs. Scott Leslie argues that some don’t like the acronym: It’s personal, not monolithic” complaint with the term, which I get and agree with. My response is not to defend the “PLE” acronym but instead just say if it bothers you, come up with a different one, or don’t use a moniker at all, but more importantly, model model model it for the 95% of learners (and teachers) who are drowning in the tsunami of information and choosing to…
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Run me through the Blackboard business model again
So Blackboard has won the initial ruling in Texas, with Desire2Learn ordered to pay $3.1 million compensation. Obviously a stupid and dangerous ruling, but as the excellent Michael Feldstein points out, who’s made money out of it anyway? It strikes me there are three ways to be the market leader in an industry: i) Have such cool products it doesn’t matter how you behave (cf. Apple) ii) Have an average product and bully everyone else out of the market so the customer has no choice (cf. Microsoft) iii) Work with your customers to develop your product and get good will (cf. nearly every other tech company). I don’t have an…
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Blog as educational platform, VLE even
(http://flickr.com/photos/jbird/19650368/ JBrd) This is really an re. loads of other people post, but I wanted to pull them together for my sake anyway. There have been a few experiments recently in taking open content and putting it in a blog. Not mindbendingly innovative and yet very powerful when you see it. I remember Tony showing me something like this around the early 19th century which he had knocked together using a penny farthing, carrots and a chimney sweep (Update: it was Nov 06), and he comments on the recent stuff. Then recently David Wiley took some of his open education course and republished it in WordPress. It looks really neat,…
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The tension between out there and in here
Following on from the Facebook post, the work we have done has raised some interesting tensions between developing for a third party platform and those services provided by the institution, such as the VLE. These will be issues that many universities will have to face in the coming years, so I’ll list the ones I think are important here. I don’t have any answers to them, I just know they’re things we can’t ignore. I’ll use Facebook as an example to illustrate the points, but they can apply across nearly any third party application which isn’t directly integrated into the formal learning experience. Does having interaction across multiple platforms dilute…
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Do you need to love a tool for it to be useful?
A recent survey over at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (via John Dale) had responses from elearning professionals, asking them their favourite tools for learning. Can you guess the top 5? Here they are: Firefox Delicious Skype Google Powerpoint Now, given our recent VLE debates, on to the interesting bit. Where do you think Moodle came? Answer, a respectable 12th. And Blackboard? It didn’t make the top 100. Now, there are several things to consider here. Firstly, these were e-learning professionals that were surveyed, and their responses may well be different from the vast majority of other educators. The point being that Blackboard isn’t aimed at elearning professionals…
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Loosely coupled vs integrated again
Continuing our debate around VLEs (which I’m enjoying anyway), Niall Sclater posts that one of the dangers of the small pieces approach is that we have no control over external sites, and he uses (my favourite web 2.0 site) Slideshare being down as an example. Tony responds rather cheekily (he tags the post ‘baiting’) showing the OU site was down, to demonstrate that internally hosted systems are not immune from such dangers. I would suggest that in a loosely coupled system your risk is spread from a user perspective – if Slideshare was down, that’s fine I’ll do the wiki activity, or look at the YouTube clips, or read the…
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Some more VLE demise thoughts
A few people have responded either on blogs or in the comments on my (deliberately provocatively titled) post The VLE/LMS is dead, so rather than distribute my responses I thought I’d bundle them here. Niall Sclater refers to some earlier attempts at the loosely coupled approach: The model Martin describes of “loosely coupled teaching” was tried by Canadian schoolteacher Clarence Fisher who blogged about small pieces in November last year and had serious concerns about this approach Amongst these were different URLs and skills. I’d respond by saying a year is a long time in the online world, and a lot of these issues have become easier – you don’t…
