Here’s the fourth of five installments from our good friends at the University of North Carolina Sakai Pilot blog—this one on public versus private content:
Category: Ed Tech
The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.
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DIY U: Digital Apprenticeship and the Modern Guild
A while back, I had the pleasure of chatting with Paul Lefrere. Paul is a guy who thinks about large-scale questions like, “How can we create and fill a couple of million green jobs in a country within a couple of years?” One problem he was grappling with regarding higher education was time-to-market for students. He needed to get them working and productive in less than four years—and possibly less than two. One idea he talked about was what he called “digital apprenticeship.” Imagine a solar panel installation trainee wearing a helmet with a wireless webcam on it. You could have an expert watching her work virtually, either coaching her through the steps in a process or testing her by watching her perform the process and then certifying that she’s done it right. She could be both a productive worker and a student on a long-term educational path on day one.
More recently, Jim Groom suggested that apprenticeship might be a good model for networked learning, particularly for those students who are not auto-didactic. ((It’s worth noting that, while we tend to refer to “auto-didacts” as if there is a special class of people who can learn everything on their own, the truth of the matter is that many people can be auto-didactic in some subjects and not in others. For example, I’m pretty good at teaching myself many kinds of book learning but am not good at all when it comes to figuring out how to, say, fix a squeaky floor board or replace the switch in my hallway light, even with detailed instructions. And I have given up all hope of ever teaching myself how to juggle. I could learn to do all of these things, but I would need coaching, because I’m not good at noticing what I’m doing wrong—or sometimes even whether I’m doing wrong—in these areas.)) I think that Jim and Paul are both really onto something. Apprenticeship is a model that is well understood, can work for a variety of topics in less formal settings, can get learners productive on certain tasks quickly, and can get the benefits of scale by using modern communications technologies. At the same time, it’s one thing to have a model that works well in theory and quite another to have a set of practices that are likely to be adopted widely under given social and economic conditions. So in this post, I’m going to consider the question of what it would take to embed apprenticeship into the fabric of our society as a broadly accepted career path across a wide range of career types.
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Come to the Sakai 2010 Conference in Denver
If you are Sakai-curious and want to know more about the platform and the community, you should come to the conference, which is going to be June 15-17 in Denver this year. I am delighted to say that our keynote speaker will be Anya Kamenetz.
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Some Strengths of Sakai 2: Part III
Here’s the third of five installments from our good friends at the University of North Carolina Sakai Pilot blog:
For those who need to adopt an LMS before Sakai 3 will be ready but worry about making the migration, take a look at the progress being made in melding Sakai 2 with Sakai 3:
Depending on how quickly Lance progresses and your own time line, it might be possible to introduce Sakai 2 within the Sakai 3 navigation from the very beginning in order to make the ultimate migration to Sakai 3 easier. We’re not quite there yet, and you’d want to look closely at the pros and cons, but it’s a possibility to consider.
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Moodle 2.0 Versus Blackboard 9.0/9.1
Here’s a video highlighting some of the features in Moodle 2.o, which is expected to be released some time in the next couple of months:
You can see a video of Blackboard 9.1 highlights here. (Sorry, it’s not embeddable.) Note that neither of these videos are “official”; they are both made by adopters.
It’s interesting to note that the highlights list of the Moodle 2.0 release has a fair bit of overlap with the highlights of the Blackboard 9.0 and 9.1 releases:
- Both tout improved usability
- Specific improvements in test creation usability
- Both now support searching for and embedding external media (e.g., YouTube videos, Creative Commons-licensed photographs, etc.) within their UIs.
- Both now support mobile clients
- Wikis (new in Blackboard 9.0, improved in Moodle 2.0)
- Improved support for blogs
Developing a good LMS is hard and I happen to think that both development teams have done some good work on improving their respective platforms. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to feel a little bit of that frustration of the edupunks when looking at these highlights. For example, I have been able to search for and embed videos and images inside of WordPress for years now. There is a balance that needs to be struck between creating a coherent, supportable environment and getting out of the way of the unbelievable pace of innovation on the consumer web. We’re making some progress toward that balance, but we’re clearly not there yet.
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DIY U: Is There a Bubble in the Higher Education Market?
Update: Coincidentally, Anya Kamenetz just posted an interview in which she briefly compares the student loan situation with the real estate bubble here.
When I opened my email the other day, I was greeted by the following blurb from Today’s Campus:
The U.S. college-buying public numbers in the tens of millions. Many of them are first-time purchasers. Most of them are not. Among a marketplace of that size, one ‘buying cluster’ could supply enough students to fill several campuses. One very interesting cluster we’ve identified is husbands purchasing higher education for their wives. Click here to order a free sample report with our compliments.
We don’t often hear higher education talked about in such baldly commercial terms. Most faculty and campus administrators have visceral negative reactions to this kind of language. But that doesn’t mean that colleges—even not-for-profit colleges—aren’t essentially run as businesses. It just means that (a) they’re often run as businesses badly because it is considered distasteful to draw on the lessons and vocabulary of the business world, and (b) educators often fail to identify the tensions between their school’s mission and its operating model, thus making it less likely that they will be able to confront some of the system’s ethical challenges successfully. But since the heart of DIY U is an economic argument, it is worthwhile to try framing issues in the language of economics. As the title of this post suggests, the specific question I want to address is whether there is a bubble in the college education market.
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Some Strengths of Sakai 2: Part II
Here’s the second installment in the great video series from the University of North Carolina’s Sakai Pilot Blog about the strengths of Sakai 2: