:Victoria University E-Learning Blog

Hi all,

Ant here – my take on Ascilite was that it was good – lacked a bit of energy but was revealing and interesting in other ways. Like Dave I tend to agree that the Blackboard\Webct push towards eLearning 2.0 is more rhetoric than actuality.

However, all is not lost as we can integrate some of our social networking tools with WebCT. As I have posted before in other forums, Asim has set up a WebCT powerlink to Elgg (our social networking software) so we can continue to work with WebCT for all of our basic course management stuff and also use Elgg for social networking/blogging/wikis/communities.

I think  that what universities will use in future in terms of eLearning technologies will be a continuation of the past – a tension from the centre towards consolidation and streamlining (fewer technologies) but a nearly equal tendency from users and innovators towards using other technologies for specific purposes. As these become popular or even critical they will be incorporated, merge with or even supersede the existing technologies.

But don’t fret! WebCT will be around for a while yet people.
Ant

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Following on from my last post, my colleague has accused me of being windows-ist by refering only to Shrook which is a Mac only app. You can find an inferior windows version at rssbandit

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So I am back in the office. Ascilite was a good gig. There was a real buzz around Web 2.0 and what this is going to mean for elearning in the future. I think that that the linear platforms that we have like WebCT, BB, Moodle and Sakai could be at obsolete in there present form, sooner rather than later. Blackboard have announced that they will, shortly, be releasing a Blackboard 2.0. I think, philosophically, this is problematic. Sometimes I see the Learning Management System in the same way as I see Foucault’s (or Bentham’s) panopticon. The lecturer is in the middle and all the LMS cells surround the teacher. We peer into the cells and moderate the behaviour of the inmates. A little bit dramatic maybe, still what Web 2.0 technologies offer us is the opportunity to put the learner back to the centre of learning. LMS aren’t as successful as they could be because the system is locked down. Why don’t students chat in WebCT? Because it is inflexible. Why use Blackboard to communicate with your peers when I can have MSN messenger open all the time, and be contactable all the day, and choose to ignore someone, or ping someone. The beauty of Web2.0 apps, is that their distributed nature mirrors the distributed nature of knowledge. Knowledge isn’t just plonked in one place, it is in many places, and with many people.

At learning matters yesterday I show some great use of Web2.0 apps, people find it more like life I guess. And maybe that’s at the heart of how e-learning can we great learning – when we make it more like life. Designing learning platforms should perhaps be more life myspace, and less like online banking.

For those who would like a visual representation of Web 2.0 I found this on Scott Wilson’s blog (which is actually from Fred Cavazza’s visual mapping of identity)

http://ulik.typepad.com/leafar/2006/10/ulik_unleash_id.html

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I sorry that I’ve not been able to blog earlier, but have been suffering from a bad mix of dead battery and fried RAM!

Yesterday’s conference was an interesting start to the proceedings. Mike Spector from Floria State gave a witty, and perceptive keynote on his work on how experts and novices figure things out, ie that the process that professionals use in deciding how to do the things we do.

Next up there was a session on ICT Strategies and Institutional change. One of the speakers was Grainne Conole, from the Open University, formerly of Southampton University in the UK. The OU has decided that their Learning Management System from February will be the open source software, Moodle. This has feed right into the very vigorous debate that is happening in e-Learning work around the software that you pay for, and the software that you don’t. Of course it’s naif to think that moving to a LMS like Moodle or Saaki has zero cost implications. With a lot of Open Source material you have to pay for support, or where support isn’t available you have to make this resource available in house. Recently Charles Sturt made the strategic decision that they would go with Sakai. I guess we will watch what happens with the OU’s experience of Moodle, and what CSU experience of Sakai will tell us. Though maybe the future of elearning isn’t about a LMS at all, and where the interesting stuff will happen in the area of social networking…hmmm, more on that anon.

The afternoon was given over to podcasting. We at VU don’t have any real infrastructure for podcasting at the moment, but I hope to sort this is sooner rather than later. I know there are pedagogic issues around ‘just putting lectures on the internet’, but I think that more and more students are beginning to expect this sort of service as a routine thing. This sort of development will be incremental, but at VU we do have some exciting projects that we’ll be able to talk about soon.

I’m looking forward to hearing from Scott Wilson, this morning. Scott works for CETIS, which is a research arm of JISC in the UK. He’s going to talking about a JISC funding project on ‘personalised learning’.

Back into the hall!

David

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