I have been critical about aspects of LMSs in the past. I’ve been critical of Blackboard in particular–primarily because of my complaints about the functionality of the Vista LMS, the “must use standard LMS for everything” attitude of some university CIOs, and Blackboard’s past behavior with respect to patent claims. And while one professor encouraged me to wear my “Supporting Innovation, Not Suing It” t-shirt to class, and while I at some point last night woke up saying, “If we tell you all our ideas, will you patent them and sell them to us later?”, I wanted to open my mind to the potentials of the discussion and not be obtuse as a matter of course.

(The following notes identify ideas by speaker, but please note that the words are only verbatim if I use quotes.)

Dr. Wiley began by directing us to consider the history of the LMS, it’s purpose as manifest through functionality and initial usage experiences. A common conclusion was the LMS attempted to replicate what happens in the classroom online: requiring little faculty tech expertise, providing quizzes, assigns, grades, content delivery (paper reduct), discussions [JMS: yes and no. online discussions are both similar and dramatically dissimilar], admin and teaching functions, and integration with campus academic and student information systems.

In response to our growing list, Russ responded, “This is just a collection of things… but there is new capability, and by tying the corporation together we enable new processes. Technology enabled a transformation.”

(JMS: Agreed as a potential. Technology is nothing without appropriate training and inspiration on proper educational application. Through the LMS we quickly accomplished teaching with technology, but not technology-enhanced teaching. But if we ask, how can we leverage technology to make teaching and learning better and easier? We must examine our educational goals, audience, and environment. We must problem-solve, creatively using applications of the available tools.

(Also, there are some ways in which the technology itself has changed the way we teach, albeit slowly:)

1. Quizzes become more reasonable as self-assessments and formative learning activities when done online
2. Discussions become fully participatory, time-liberated dialogs that allow participants to branch and focus on strands that are personally relevant.
3. Digital content is searchable – discussions, texts, etc. This provides different, easier, faster access to materials and ideas that support a participant’s focused interest

We began speaking of the cultural shift associated with (or accompanied by) Web 2.0, and how that may impact education.

Justin makes the good point, if LMs is adaptation of teaching, it also seems this idea of PLE/PLN is just a 2nd generation adaptation of the LMS, i.e., teachers consider, How can I do X, Y, Z — which I did in the LMS easily — without the LMS?

JMS: Some who look at the PLE see it as something constructed by new media, connectivism, not as a substitute for the LMS. Those folks admit they don’t know what a PLE looks like and are uncertain if learning outcomes are similarly measurable. Those most comfortable with the idea of a PLE have some confidence in the organic conditions of it as a learning environment, despite it’s fuzziness.

Granted, some do see the PLE simply as an escape from the LMS, and even though they might be trying to simply recreate what they did in the LMS, they can gain some advantages just by being open: Openness, adaptable, personalized, ownership, persistence, authenticity.

I caught something of Justin saying that the open source (OSS) community is ignoring hard problems… OSS technology fails to provide sophisticated learning features like adaptive release, adaptive testing… The OSS community not taking it on…

(JMS: I accept that specific example as an inadequacy of available open PLE/PLN or Web 2.0 tools. There aren’t currently automatic gatekeeping (pre-programmed or “smart”) tools for PLE/PLN tools and media. Siemens and others might say teachers are naturally the gatekeepers. Users are the gatekeepers (though perhaps this is inadequate). Or maybe we don’t need those gatekeepers at all, that is, we can encourage the fundamentals of information fluency by directing students to assess and re-direct themselves.)

JMS: OS community is not taking on education in general. Why would they? Education is still a niche. Adaptive release is a very education-centered feature. OSS e-learning, like Moodle, include or plan to include it.

David Wiley: “Data. Through the LMS I can capture and use data in a way I never could before.” Also, liberty of users to control consumption of content. E.g. playing course media at 2x speed.

Justin Johansen: Teachers can teach to a style, users can adapt to their preferences (disruptive).

Sara Joy challenges, suggested/asked if LMS can be a “disruptive technology”.

David: At USU an instructor with no budget for “clickers” went to the dollar store and bought $1 laser pointers to accomplish the same thing. Throw up a slide, students with laser pointers indicate choices anonymously on screen. It’s personalized (and probably more fun).

Russ: “Isn’t one of the fundamental issues also location independence?”

Justin: “Definitely, esp. when gas prices were $4/gallon.”

Dr. Wiley whips out slides of 6 changes:

• analog –> digital
• tethered –> mobile
• consume –> create
• generic –> personalized
• isolated –> connected
• closed –> open

Jon Mott: There’s a book about organizations being like spiders, which can regrow a leg, or starfish, which have legs that, if severed, can grow into a new starfish. Are we like spiders or starfish? Best organizations are hybrids. Starfish-like activities. eBay features of a spider.

JMS: Some in education want that severed starfish leg to turn into a bird. But education’s history doesn’t show that we’re evolutionary–there’s no dramatic mutation between generations that changes the species. Education is certainly not, historically, subject to revolution either! It’s adaptation at best. It’s incremental change.

Aaron Johnson: Web 2.0 can be transformative in, for instance, using a blog publishes homework online, for the world to see–maximal exposure.

Dr. Wiley points out that several class blog posts have been picked up by Stephen Downes, which impacts the community, impacts the class, impacts the writer.

Justin: In the old system publishing homework was your mom putting your assignment on the fridge with a magnet.

Aaron: It’s also transformative in a way that democratizes access. But how are things changing in how people behave and interact? Do I get more out of that?

(JMS: We’ve seen that young people’s sense of privacy may be changing, and also that online exposure can bite us in the rear.)

Justin: I haven’t had a transformative e-learning experience in the classroom discussion forum. It’s usually, “do this boring thing for class or else”.

JMS: I have. (That’s what put me in e-learning over a decade ago, and I have them with some regularity now)

Jon: I learn something everyday on Twitter. I follow about 150 people, all of the ed tech related. My network has expanded, and for the better.

JMS: And learn to filter junk out, hopefully!

Russ: Yes, adding people, one by one… “adding diversity, accumulating collected knowledge… but at some point you reach a threshold.”

JMS: At first there’s a lot of noise, but you learn to filter that out, or cut it out. I follow around 60 people, but that changes from week to week. I’ll follow a lot of people who I will later un-follow, not because I don’t like them, but because their use of Twitter may not contribute to or match my own personal way of valuing Twitter. (JMS: I’ve talked too much. Time to listen more.)

Aaron: A lot of us still use the web for adaptations of normal life. Despite my tech-savvy nature, I hear about Web 2.0 stuff and I think do I really need that? Is the real transformation in the things that we do, or in helping people understand what they can do now, with this ability to use technoloy?

Jon: Novelty of technology is not enough. You have to be evaluative. How is using this going to help me? I user twitter not to be social, but to be professional.

JMS: The beauty of these tools is the personalization. The beauty of the PLE is the personalization.

Jon: I’ve used delicious for my own purposes, but have finally found a use for it in collaborative environment.

Justin: (To his group) Why aren’t we using delicious on our OER project?

(JMS: Note to self, we might put our group’s open ed project links list on a wiki instead of a Google Spreadsheet. Then reach out to community and get additional links for free.)

We somehow manage to move the conversation back to the future of the LMS.

JMS: I see the future of the LMS being not a replication of these open, existing tools, but a way to structure, organize, and adaptively control or smart-sequence these. As Justin pointed it, adaptive releasing, setting and resetting paths, etc.

Justin: Would we, by using the LMS as a place to integrate Web 2.0, personalized tools, push folks away from using those tools?

(JMS: Is Justin talking about the creepy treehouse-ness? I don’t get a chance to ask…)

Russ: “Is it not a false choice to give proprietary vs open source? … Is it not a distinction without a difference?”

(JMS: There are potential advantages in both that we should not lightly dismiss, e.g. proprietary may have quality advances, resource advantages, corporate attention, collaborative integration and first-choice with publishers; openness may have adaptability, customization, lower cost, ownership. [To me the subscription model is so painful, I personally want the ability to keep and maintain code perpetually, for example, stay at WebCT CE 4.1 for a decade if we wished.])

Russ: For a while technology was pulling the practice, but now (as we talk about web 2.0 tools) but now it seems we’ve flipped that.

Wiley: “Forget open code source for a minute. Forget APIs. Look at YouTube, Flickr, GoogleMaps. They all have a common language: RSS. APIs are great if you like that. But these tools are bleeding syndication, and they don’t punish you for mashing it up.”

John Hilton: Free access vs. open source vs. paid license.

Jon: “Once upon a time there was a Blackboard.com where you could create your own course for free.”

Russ: “It’s back.”

So we are talking about interoperability of the learning object (LTI)?

Wiley: “But LTI is so complex. RSS is sooo easy. Some clever folks, like Tony Hirst, will use Pipes or APIs. There’s technical accessibility, then there’s an expertise-less accessibility.

Jon: Having APIs and web services is critical. Maybe we need more than single sign-on.

Russ: “To Dave’s point about the data, if you want to use the data you have to have that captured in an environment.”

(JMS: Data can be made accessible through APIs, no?)

Jon: Livetext does program assessment and portfolios. You can build and expose your portfolio. Creators can easily export.

Dave: Yes, let’s just get data out of the end. Because even with standards everyone speaks their own dialect.

Aaron: Searchable.

John: By Google?

Aaron: Internally? Or… What do we mean by LMS for open ed?

Wiley: “Simplest example–and OCW is 1.0 simple–I built my course in Bb. How do I publish as OER? I probably need 30hrs to do it.” (JMS: Push-button public publishing?) Content publishing, content importing.

Justin: A lot of our Bb courses are full of PDFs, PPTs, DOCs, maybe HTML…

Aaron: What does Bb add in terms of content ability? It sounds like you’re talking about the same thing, replicating a course structure. Or how do you get the content out without having it trapped in the LMS’s structure?

JMS: You could do it both ways:

JMS: You have a “repository”, though I dislike that word. It’s a plain web server, or a wiki, or WP, or even an LMS repository. It contains the content–PDFs, PPTs, DOCs, HTML. You can share those straight off of the repository as disagreggated pieces. OR you can link to them directly from your individual LMS course structure. This eliminates course-to-course redundancy. OR you can link to them directly from your opencourseware platform. AND/OR your LMS has a way to select which pieces of the individual course to “open”, and then publishes an open version of your course with some parts hidden.

Wiley mentions OpenShare mod.

JMS: OpenShare does part of this for Moodle: lets you incrementally tag license metadata for resources and activities, and then mark those resources and activities as open or closed. Public can view those open items; registered students can view all the items.

1. The whole-day experience, while fatiguing (at least for me), was the only way to go about a workshop as ambitious as this.
2. In fact, it could have easily gone two or three days (and would have been a stronger, more memorable experience for it).
3. The participants were both energetic and patient–the latter was important as we dealt with technical issues and the fact that teaching this territory was completely new to us.
4. Though I’d felt we’d been pretty thorough in mapping out the sessions, we could have spent several more hours planning and organizing the workshop for better results.
5. My instinct was to run a pilot segment as an on-campus workshop at UVU as a means of preparing. I didn’t do this, however, and in reflection am sure doing so would have eliminated the few problems I did experience.
6. My concept of “a PLE” has changed. I still think it’s definable, but recognize it to be more like an ever-adjusting, tool-assisted network of individualized processes than an “environment”.
7. “Environment” is easier to say, though perhaps it too strongly implies a monolithic managed system.
8. A well-considered and refined PLE is, so far, the best way for individuals to manage the indomitable mass of information and interactions that are now available.
9. D’Arcy Norman said, “‘PLE’ is a verb, not a noun … an action, not a thing.” I think it’s both: a PLE is a conglomeration of things constantly acted upon. (Someone remind me where I’ve heard this before).
10. Though initially informal, a modular, conglomerated PLE eventually becomes more formal as the individual builds habits and reinforces processes along branches as s/he moves towards “learning/achievement” goals.
11. As Chris spoke in the introduction, I sketched out the following as one concept of how the “interactions” part of my PLE work to send out signals while receiving new signals or feedback:

We are planning the workshop along two tracts: one for Web 2.0 “beginners” and one for “veterans”, though that may change depending on audience needs. We’ll be covering topics such as blogging, researching online, productivity anywhere, and mashing up your learning environment.

You can take a look at our early drafts of these tracts on Scott’s wiki, and you can register for WCET and the pre-conference workshop right now, at an extended Early-Bird rate.

Certainly if you plan or want to participate in this workshop, send us feedback on what will be most valuable to you.

PLE Mapping, Draft 1
Originally uploaded by Mr_Stein

You’ll note that I did not limit myself to technologies, let alone Web-based tools as some have been inclined to do. I’ve used all tools, utilities, and resources that make up my actual environment for teaching, learning and professional/creative production.

I know much of the discussion of PLE’s centered on the idea of using technology as an all-containing hub, and while I see significant usefulness in hubs (my own primary hubs are Google Reader, Twitter, and my own blogs) I am beginning to believe that a single hub is not the answer, and PLEs should not be encompassed by a single product or service. For instance, Ron Lubensky defines the primary goal for a PLE as follows:

The primary goal of a PLE for an individual is to bring all the disparate artefacts of interest for learning under a single operating roof. … PLEs are meant to simplify managing these artefacts…

I have two problems with this goal as stated:

1. It is akin to the goals of monolithic learning management systems, and seems to vie for a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Scott Wilson with the Personal Learning Environment blog says, “It’s an unfortunate tendency especially in our sector to take a concept (PLE, e-Portfolio) and attempt to reify it as a product.”
2. Because individuals with several generally distinct interests likely have multiple origination/entry points for learning, one all-encompassing, multitudinous hub may not be optimum for effectiveness (it may in fact be distracting; I’ve found this to be the case with a fully-loaded iGoogle home page)

Speaking of my several generally distinct interests, I was initially inclined to separate my teaching and creation activities from this map. Arguably not “learning” by some strict definitions, but certainly from a “learning by doing” perspective. At any rate, teaching, creating, and learning seem to me to be inextricably intertwined.

I ask this question without facetiousness, because if we’re talking about a holistic look at individuals learning environment, we certainly don’t want to restrict it to Web, and I even think just brainstorming the variety and interconnectedness of utilities and tools in our non-digital learning environment(s) may validly inform our digital ones, and can provide anecdotes through which we can better adapt (ourselves and others) to the online tools.

As far as my PLE, though I outlined a laundry list in your wiki, I’m now trying to think about it more organically. I’m currently toying with conceptualizing my digital PLE through a metaphor of physical space, with interconnected rooms and even “wormholes” that take me in and out of the “real” world. While at first I imagined this as a house with multi-doored, hexagonal rooms and intermediary halls (plus windows one can jump out of and back into the “real world”),

Walter R. Tschinkel’s cast of an ant colony, The nest architecture of the Florida harvester ant

it might end up being more simply sketched as the architecture of an ant colony. This latter metaphor is probably seems particularly apt to anyone who knows me, as my “train of thought” is more akin to a state of ants scurrying from one point to another as they forage with semi-obscured motivations and objectives, constantly adjusting based on new and immediate information.

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.

This shirt is based on a workshop title suggestion Scott Leslie made (half?) jokingly over a Skype meeting.

I’m considering ordering up a batch of these from UberPrints.com for my crew at DE. PLE is People! That’s all you need to know.