Flexknowlogy

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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Writing is fun. Writing is fundamental. If you don’t write, you don’t know what you think. Jeffrey Zeldman on Twitter

In the spirit of knowing what I think as Zeldman so aptly puts it, and adequately preparing myself at what is essentially the starting line of this blog: My intention for this ‘blog is to lay out, as frequently as time allows, commentary on (and hopefully arguments for or against) new and emerging theories and practices related to the field of educational technology. I am keenly interested in how humans learn best, and how technology can improve that learning by increasing efficiency and enhancing pleasure.

My intention is to challenge assumptions–both yours and mine, to force myself towards objectivity as much as is possible, and to entertain as many sides of an issue as possible. This does not mean my explorations will attend to all sides of an issue, only that, through my own thinking and our engagement in dialogue, many sides of an issue can be explored or examined. That’s the point of the Internet, no?

Having said that, though it may not enhance my reputation, it certainly can’t hurt to be above-board and describe some of the philosophical nodes from which I tend to operate. I do this more for my own benefit than for the benefit of any of my readers; following a discussion with a pair of much-respected colleagues that ended up getting close to the heat, I asked myself, “What are the beliefs that underpin your approach to analyzing and implementing teaching practices?”

I believe in scientific realism, and tend to favor arguments that are backed up by empirical evidence.

I believe in the powerful utility of logic, and have little respect for arguments that don’t at least try to adhere to the fundamentals of logic, that is, valid arguments consisting of sound premises that lead us to conclusions, though those conclusions may not always be tidy.

These are the tools which I employ (though perhaps crudely at times) to evaluate teaching theories and practices.

I am not afraid to state that I try to live my life guided by a philosophy of moral objectivism. I have no use for any sort of dogmatic relativism which allows serious dialogue to discombobulate into a failure to attach meaning to language. Which leads us to the fact that I am generally conservative in my mindset–a concept which I find frustrates or confuses some of my colleagues who may unfortunately think that conservatism = closed-minded-ness, resistance to progress, or religious fanaticism. In their true form I abhor all of these. On the contrary, while at its core conservatism means favoring gradual change over radical change, recognizing the value of “how we’ve done things” for the measurable fruits we currently enjoy, my orientation towards scientific realism provides me with ample reason to continually reassess my beliefs and correct my practices based on new evidence.

So in a nutshell, I believe that there is objective truth, and I believe we can get at it through analytical, science-based approaches. This relates to teaching because every time we teach we are practicing a skill that is guided by our theories and shaped by our philosophies, whether we know it or not. Many of us do not know what directs our teaching, but that does not make it directionless.

When I think about my students, I put myself in their shoes. I think of the time I as a student am investing. I think of the money I am investing. I critically assess the value of the teaching and the learning. To horribly mangle in paraphrase Harold Bloom I’ve concluded, “Life is Too Short for Bad Classes.” (Which must be allowed to explain, in part, my habitual absenteeism in high school and college!)

And so I scrutinize new “engaging” approaches to teaching and learning as much as I scrutinize the old “boring” approaches. I scrutinize the time wasted on technology usage as much as I scrutinize the time wasted on flat lecture. I see no point in discarding the old if the new hasn’t proven itself better.

There you have it. Now that that exposition’s off my chest I feel much more comfortable tackling some of the hot ed tech topics that make my mind swirl. Every day I walk into the office and find myself echoing Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey who finally enters the mysterious black monolith and gasps, “…Oh my God, it’s full of stars!”