I’ve read a number of blog posts and articles about learning management systems (LMS) and personal learning environments (PLE) as of late. LMSs, once the darling of educational technologists, have been getting a sound thwacking inspired by the recent Blackboard patent lawsuit victory. In almost a stars-aligning continuity, PLEs have been gaining more attention and support as “Web 2.0″ technologies have improved, broadened, and gained in popularity amongst communities. Several aspects of both have risen to the top of my constantly-refilled cup of questioning: LMS as a “walled garden”, PLE as perhaps pedagogically superior but strategically tenuous or immature, and the lack of full debates between the two approaches to technology-enhanced education.
George Siemens blogs up just exactly the news I’m interested in week after week, and on the 28th he posted up a reference to Peter Tittenberger’s short piece The Strength of Garden Walls found on his a touch of frost blog. This article describes the percieved value of institutionally administered learning management systems and social software tools as “walled gardens” for their ability to provide teacher control over user access to learning materials and tools, and the distribution of the participants’ input and output.
(I should restate that, for most institutionally administered social software tools are set up specifically to inhibit or even disallow public access and public viewing, often out of fear of legal repercussions for providing access to students’ personally identifiable information (e.g. in the United States, FERPA in higher education and K-12). For example, LMS’s natively restrict public access, typically don’t allow publishing of student work outside the password-protected site, and authentication access is often provided only through the institution’s student information system. So walled gardens don’t really provide teachers with control, they simply give teachers a box of handcuffs, sans keys.)
My perception is that most of the prominent folks involved in new teaching and educational technology believe that the walled garden approach is “bad”, that LMSs are “bad”, and that open, learner-centered strategies, such as personal learning environments (PLE) are “good” (or at least “better”) because they better reflect or adapt to current Internet-driven trends in networked information and social connectivity. To elaborate:
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Educators who believe in fostering authentic learning experiences have become increasingly disillusioned with the walled garden of the LMS. Increasingly popular “real world” Web-based social software has cast many LMS tools as redundant.
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Many institutionally adopted learning tools, driven by the perceived needs of the institution, directed by non-faculty IT, and limited by the pace of administration, are rarely able to maintain currency with readily available “real world” tools simply because the institution has neither a massive, global audience to demand innovations, nor the breadth of competitive capitalism to fund and incentivize them. Tools provided by education-centric companies such as Blackboard often come in packages, overproduced versions of real-world tools tightly bound to provide a one-stop-shopping experience, and therefore a supposed panacea for all educational technology needs. Few Web application companies would commit such an act hubris–Google has proven itself fairly capable of such a Heraclean act, with competitors Yahoo! and even Microsoft taking tentative stabs of their own.
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Educators personally committed to ideals and philosophies of openness–open source, open access, open publishing–are also frustrated with LMSs and other institutionally controlled software for their innate closed-ness through restriction of access for both contributors and readers.
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And while distinctions between the accuracy of definitions and theories of collective intelligence and connective intelligence are being debated, they share a common recognition that there is significant value in community-involved (influenced?) and socially-invigorated education. Educators who ascribe to such learning theories also find the walled garden approach to be too limiting and lacking provisions for social networking within the institution, let alone the world.
These common postures (I’m abusing that word this week–thanks, Scott) taken against the “walled garden” approach to educational technology are sound, but I do not want to suggest that the LMS is therefore obsolete, for I have presented (and probably insufficiently) only one side of the issue. I daresay there are as many sound arguments the use of walled gardens and even the traditional LMS. And though I have seen Scott Leslie weigh pro’s and cons of “loosely coupled” approaches and even one or two ed tech bloggers recognize the continuing significance of the LMS, I’ve not yet seen a full and complete debate involving people genuinely committed to each of the two sides. (If anyone is game for staging one, my alter-ego would be happy to suppress my doubts completely and take the pro-LMS side–in fact, my ego would probably not let me resign that side to anyone else!)
In my opinion, a really good debate on the subject would illustrate philosophical differences between the two sides, and might even invoke political stances (technology adoption in education [if not pedagogy in general] as “conservative” vs. “progressive”; information access and publishing as an issue of power, definable through capitalist or socialist anarchist ideals, etc).
Even if the outcome of such a debate was largely in favor of an authenticopenconnectedcollective strategy, there are of course still questions about how a PLE is LE really looks and acts like, if it is teachable. Just today on Twitter there were a number of provocative questions about the value of PLE, either as a term or as a “single”, methodological approach.
Add to that the problem that I personally still can not say with total conviction that the LMS is obsolete. Folks like myself have talked up the potential value of PLEs, but broad adoption of the PLE is currently impossible because key technologies and services are still being developed (e.g. good hubs of aggregation [go eduGlu]) or have not yet been widely adopted (e.g. OpenID). Compound that with faculty and administrative anxieties regarding new technologies and teaching approaches, and I can only conclude that the LMS will be around for a long time yet. So until fully viable (every need) and broadly accessible (every application) alternative strategies and methods become available, we might as well openly examine, in good-faith, the value of the LMS, the benefits of walled garden systems, and our reasonings for choosing one or the other.
I will write more about this when I have time, but I don’t generally see PLEs as being opposite LMSs.
PLEs, to me, also encompass the idea of the PLN (or maybe the other way around).
At any rate, I do see some value in the LMS, particularly for business process concerns, though for some applications pedagogically as well. I see no reason that the two ideas, PLE and LMS, can’t– to a large extent– work together. I tend to put Blackboard as the centralized authenticated portal– some things need to be protected– that can lead students to the open stuff.
For me, it’s a matter of emphasis. The things a closed LMS does (being generous here) well (auto-enrollment, ties to single authentication from student info systems, closed discussion, etc) are known solutions to important, but limited problems. So I tend to focus on how and when to go beyond those bounds and to question the assumptions of what needs to be protected (aside from, as you note, matters of law).
Similarly, I focus on constructivist, community-centric approaches though I by no means believe that lecturing and other more passive and/or transfer models have no place! I just feel that, typically, that part has already been figured out. I don’t usually run into situations where people are in danger of not using their LMS enough or not lecturing enough…
I can agree that the 2 don’t necessarily have to be opposites, though recent discussions paint the PLE as the supposed heir apparent to the LMS throne. When I started thinking about PLEs my vision included the LMS as a hub of sorts, but the more I teach within an LMS and dream up new ways of doing things without an LMS, the benefits of the LMS become less conspicuous in my image of robust and viable PLEs (I grant that this may be short-sighted, and that I am not giving enough credit to the LMS right now, but I can later on, with a hot beverage and a snack).
Let me poke a bit at the LMS vs PLE proposition:
Doesn’t the core concept of an LMS at least downplay or even inhibit the use of other tools by “locking in” teachers to their particular (I almost said “peculiar”) variety of “solutions”? It’s not quite that way yet, because the LMS lacks certain very popular tools, but I imagine the UberLMS of the future would have everything in a neat package, no?
And on the other side, wouldn’t a better selection of stronger PLE tools and implementations be able to replace the LMS entirely and for everybody? I felt that way a little bit with Google Apps and Sites this week…
My very narrow view of the utility of the LMS derives from the privacy and protection it can provide. There are simply some interactions and artifacts that don’t benefit from being out in the public and that can even be damaging if they find their way there.
Of course other systems can be protected, but if (and these are important assumptions) the same capabilities are present in the LMS and the students can easily get there without any added layers of authentications– and if they are likely to already be familiar with that environment– then why not use it?
But this is a pretty narrow conception of things and I tend to opt for openness as the default position. Once we get into traditionally open tools locked away in the LMS (such blogs limited to the classrooom) and/or tools that are truncated in functionality (such Blackboard “wikis”) then I start wanting to wail and rend my educational garments.
It’s an open question how many characteristics of an LMS a system can take on before it effectively becomes one. Google Sites are a good example– they are running perilously close to the edge because though they provide a potentially protected environment, they seem to have truncated quite a few of the features that make wikis attractive to me…