One small step for man

This is the collaboration site for the Beyond LMS white paper. We now have posted a 3rd draft (in PDF) of the document in the pre-press process nearly ready for publication.

Also of note are comments posted by the son of one of the authors, who is a student and provides some perspective on these ideas.

Three of Isaac’s comments caught my attention:

• another thing, and i’m not sure if this was already addressed, is that you should make sure that students are able to post non-schoolwork content on the service
• privacy concerns, ip control probably
• would this site try to incorporate the aspects of facebook, or would it restrict itself to academic stuff?

There seems to be a theme here where Isaac is not sure that we really mean to expand beyond school to the whole learner, or that it is not the business of the institution to tell the owner of the space what should be used to best present themselves. I think this goes hand in hand with the IP and control/privacy concerns. That IP idea is a big one and one that really needs to get into both student and faculty heads — how can faculty think to submit student work to turnitin.com and transfer the IP? Both of these themes connect to “playing school”

In a conference call this AM, I recognized that the next step of this work is not technical, but winning more hearts and minds. WSU has some interesting examples to illustrate these points, we need to get them out into public forums.

I spent an hour today working on our Beyond LMS white paper. This link is to a site where you can look at our collaboration in progress.

The challenge I was working on is taking Gary’s outline and beginning to turn it into 4 pages (max) of engaging prose, that ideally can have pictures and other formatting to make an attractive handout for Educause. I used “track changes” It turns out that anonymous readers can NOT also see the version history (you can hover over the link to the document and see the drop down menu, but then you get challenged. (Arrrg! Microsoft, fix this. In a site with anonymous read access, that should mean all versions too!)

The specific issue I found myself wrestling with was how to turn elements of our thinking about education-futures into thinking that would impact an IT planner. The challenge was, we can do all the pie-in-the-sky educational rationalization we want about Personal Learning Environments and ePortfolios, if faculty are not moving away from the traditional LMS, what is the IT reality?

One IT planning issue would be to respond when faculty begin to change direction. Another would be to think through how IT should go directly to students (or how IT would prefer to cede student-student collaboration to Google).

Since the link above does not provide a means for public comment, use this post to address our collaboration.

Writing a synthesis on Personal Learning Environments (PLE) David Delgado says:

The course-oriented, teacher-centered approach of the LMS was not enough to cope with this new ideas in e-learning, and a new concept was used: the Personal Learning Environment (PLE). Personal Learning Environments are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning, they are distributed, social and learner-centric. They are composed of a suite of tools that the learner uses to learn whatever they want. So, the learner chooses their own personal learning environment, taking whatever tools that help them to achieve their own goals. Different people have different ideas to build their own PLE.

He goes on to say “I still use my old LMS to build formal courses, workshops and communities.”

Which points to what I am coming to think is the rub that we are trying to address in a white paper we are working on for Educause on LMS futures. The issue we are looking at is institutional planning around adoption, retention, retirement of learning management systems (LMS) and the question might be how should the institutional IT plan for PLEs (or can it at all)?

As PLEs are becoming better described and understood, and because they represent a different model space for learning than the LMS, it leads me to these questions:

• How should institutional IT plan over the next 2- or 5-years relative to LMS/PLE? Might LMSes be retired? Might LMSes be used differently to interact with PLE thinking? Should the institution host PLEs, or portions of them, or is this an oxymoron?
• What is the relation of PLE to course design? In the spectrum of pedagogic approaches (Teacher-Centered, Learner-Centered, Learning-Centered) where do current faculty fall? Where do LMS uses typically fall? Are LMSes destined to that niche by their design? PLEs are learning-centered in current use, would faculty adoption of PLEs move them (either PLEs or faculty) toward another point on the spectrum? If faculty fall at one point on the pedagogy spectrum and PLEs on another, what are the implications?
• What implications are there for PLEs and university courses? Does the university have any role guaranteeing student course-related data will not be lost? How are things archived from a PLE-based course? Who owns the IP? How does the learner establish their identity within the PLE to the satisfaction of the university (issues of plagiarism, cheating, etc). What about other management and logistical issues that LMS solve now (enrollments, single identity, gradebook)?
• What are the PLE implications for certifying students’ learning? Can the PLE be used to create a portfolio to document learning? Is there a role for standardized testing? Since an increasing number of students are “swirling” (taking courses from more than one institution at a time), does the PLE facilitate making learning visible and coherent?