e-Literate

Present is Prologue

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.

  • Guess What? Teachers Still Count.

    Here’s a little gem of a study from the latest issue of Usability News. Basically, it demonstrates that student-centered teaching approaches can go too far, negatively impacting learning outcomes:

    In this study two different class formats, each with differing instructor roles, were compared. Our hypothesis was that the more student-centered the class format, the more performance and collaboration amongst students would be enhanced. Our findings contrast this idea. This study supports the notion that, in order for technological integration in the classroom to be effective, the instructor must take a prominent role in the class structure. Technology and computer-mediated instruction cannot replace what is contributed by the presence and formal guidance of the lecturer. Technology is a powerful tool for enhancing educational settings, but the instructor must guide the students when using these tools.

    The short lecture and list of objectives offered at the beginning of each “hybrid” class not only changed the teacher-student interaction and the way the technology in the class was used, but also altered the student-student interaction. The experience of all students receiving the same lecture every class period may have fostered a more cohesive group than a setting wherein a group of individuals sat in a classroom and worked at their own pace.

    Now, this study happened to focus on a live classroom with some online enhancements, but I strongly suspect that the same applies (perhaps even more than in the live class) in distance learning as well. While I am often an advocate for a more student-centered approach in distance learning, the fact is that the “guide on the side” metaphor isn’t quite right. Students need a balance; they need some guidance. I’d say “guide leading the way” is a more balanced goal.

  • Sakai's Okay?

    Sam Ottenhoff of the Longsight Group sent me this valuable clarification via email:

    Your criticism of the way most CLEs/LMSs do threaded discussion is absolutely valid and dead-on. But the title you use, What’s Wrong with the Sakai User Interface, is misleading. As I understand it, the work that has been happening with Sakai has almost completely revolved around architecture (Hibernate, Spring, Java Server Faces), authentication, and APIs. Because it’s an “open-open” project, they want to be public and release early and often.

    The services embedded in this release of Sakai are legacy CHEF services, developed by UMich (UMich is the only school going campus-wide live for fall). I agree completely with your criticism of the threaded discussion, but you are criticizing a legacy UMich tool and not the “Sakai User Interface” or the future of the project.

    So, while I don’t yet know whether Sakai has specific plans to revamp the discussion board interface, it’s certainly only fair to point out that the developers haven’t focused on revamping specific tools yet and, further, that one of Sakai’s widely-publicized strengths is its modularity. I guess we’ll have to wait a while longer to see whether they keep the legacy interface or blaze new trails in the default installation.

  • Course Management Systems and Pedagogical Models

    By way of edTechPost, we find this article at Dublin City University. Beyond the fact that this is a fairly large program adopting Moodle and bringing it into the big leagues, there’s this noteworthy observation embedded in DCU’s white paper:

    Another problem in adopting a commercial VLE was that it might constrain us to its inherent pedagogical model. Like many commercial products, WebCT is driven by an American/Canadian pedagogical paradigm; there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this model, but it is not entirely compatible with UK and Irish teaching and learning methodologies.

    Open source software is usually developed as a public collaboration and the source code is freely available for users to modify. Adopting an open source VLE would enable DCU to contribute to the development of the software and hence to take a leadership position in the academic development and understanding of e-learning, opportunities which would be significantly weaker if we simply deployed a closed source, proprietary, VLE.

    First, their point that interface is not instructional design-neutral is vital. These systems provide more than just URLs for locating content; they provide containers that shape both content and experience. Whether you use Blackboard, Moodle, or MovableType to host your class, you are making choices about the affordances that you can or cannot leverage as part of your pedagogy. And, of course, no system has all plusses and no minuses. This is about engineering. It’s about trade-offs and best fit between course environment and the instructional philosophies of the teachers and the institution as a whole.

    Furthermore, the DCU folks clearly realize that contributing to an Open Source platform means contributing best pedagogical practices to the educational community in form of source code. Being able to see and duplicate how other teachers set up their classrooms (whether virtual or not) is valuable to teachers.

    Good stuff.

  • What's Wrong with the Sakai User Interface

    Like many, I have been eagerly awaiting the public unveiling of Sakai, the Open Source course management system being created by an alliance of MIT, IU, University of Michigan, Stanford, and uPortal. At last the long wait is over; the first public release is available, and with it a demo portal. So I went in and kicked the tires. The first place I like to go when checking out a CMS is the discussion boards, since (a) they are typically one of the most critical and heavily used components in the system, and (b) they are often very poorly designed. Would Sakai do it right?

    Sadly, no. (more…)

  • Blogo-Eroticism: You'll go blind!!!

    So, here’s a puzzling bit of argumentation from Steven Strubel:

    However, my hunch is that Apple will continue to prevent its employees from blogging for the foreseeable future so that it can maintain its mystique. This approach may work for awhile, but the employees in Cupertino will eventually revolt, snub their noses at policy and begin blogging in force – even if it is anonymously. Why? Dissatisfaction and low morale.

    As much as I love Apple (I own an iBook laptop and an iPod Mini) the company is entering its next lifecycle. Despite recent huge hits like the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, Apple has struggled to sell its premium, albeit “insanely great,” computers to the majority of users beyond the core evangelists. Desktops and laptops make up the lion share of Apple’s profits. Already many smell the growth slowing and have taken notice, sending the stock downward.

    If Apple’s profits continue to decline or stay flat, investors will find more attractive stocks. While no one is predicting a return to the dark days of Gilbert Amelio, a declining share price will eventually force Apple to make changes (as Microsoft did) to maintain profit targets. This will deflate employee morale, breed dissatisfaction and prompt Apple’s internal mavericks to begin blogging–unless Apple acts first.

    For once, Apple needs to follow Microsoft’s lead by quickly letting their employees blog. Corporate transparency can’t be stopped. Apple, rekindle your revolutionary spirit, loosen your grip and let your employees blog – even if it’s just a preemptive move. If you don’t, this will only harm your brand over the long haul.

    Where to start.

    First of all, his timing is pretty bad, since Apple just announced record profits that shot its stock price through the roof. Second, also in the category of bad timing, his post comes just when Apple employee Dave Hyatt, in his Surfin’ Safari weblog, is engaging in conversation with Internet luminaries including Tim Bray, Ian Hickson, and Eric Meyer regarding nothing less than the future of Internet standards and Apple’s role in it.

    But most puzzling to me is the huge leap from Apple’s (debatable) sales slump and (indesputably non-existent) profitability struggle to official developer blogs as the only thing that can save the company, equating official PR blogs with “corporate transparency.” First, it’s not at all clear that, to the extent that Apple has problems, lack of corporate transparency is the cause. Second, to the extent that corporate transparency is the cause of Apple’s problems, Strubel fails to make the case that blogs in general can bring about a meaningful new transparency that will address Apple’s problems. Third, to the extent that blogs in general can solve Apple’s problems, he fails to make the case that official blogs are the way to make that happen. In fact, I would argue that Hyatt’s weblog, whether or not it appears in some slick Apple blog portal, provides unprecedented transparency and, further, opportunity for two-way dialog between the company’s developers and the larger community.

    Maybe these arguments (and their supporting data) exist. If so, I’d like to hear them. But frankly, I don’t see how it could be possible. Blogs are great, but they can’t cure cancer and they probably can’t single-handedly change the fate of multi-billion-dollar companies.

  • Fingernails on Blackboard

    Here’s a nice informational post on the pitfalls of Blackboard as well as various Open Source and home-grown alternatives (including using blogs as an ad hoc course management system) from Kathleen Gilroy. The analogy I often make with Blackboard is to a classroom where all the seats are bolted to the floor. How the room is arranged matters. If students are going to be having a class discussion, maybe you put the chairs in a circle. If they will be doing groupwork, maybe you put them in groups. If they are doing lab work, you put them around lab tables. A good room set-up can’t make a class succeed by itself, but a bad room set-up can make it fail. If there’s a loud fan drowning out conversation or if the room is so hot that it’s hard to concentrate, you will lose students.

    A good CMS allows for flexibility in classroom set-up. For example, when I used dotLRN for a project (ironically, while working for Kathleen’s company) I was able to meet with stakeholders and try different arrangements of the virtual chairs until we found one that they were comfortable with. The default set-up, which was optimised for on-campus students who took four or five courses at once and needed an aggregation portal, was completely unsuited for my audience, which was a group of full-time bond traders and other financial services people who were taking time out of their twelve-hour work days for one course. It wasn’t worth their time to learn the complex (cluttered?) interface that made sense for a full-time college student. So we streamlined. We turned off functionality that we didn’t need. We renamed pages to fit the students’ expectations. We re-arranged portlet windows on pages and page order on the interface. We did all of this in 15 minutes without any programming.

    In Blackboard, you can’t do that. Sure, you can change the way the buttons look. And you can hide a button. But that’s it. It’s essentially only trivially configurable by the instructor. I strongly believe that this has a significant impact on distance learning drop-out rates.

  • Crossed Wires: The Workflow Intitute Responds and I Apologize

    I have had several really gratifying exchanges with folks at the Workflow Insititute over the last couple of days. To begin with, two days ago, I got an email from Anne Henry at the Workflow Institute responding to this post, thanking me for spreading the use of the term “workflow learning” and sending me a white paper with more details about how they define the term. Delightful! Not only was somebody actually reading my blog; somebody official was reading it and responding to it.

    Later in the day, I get an email from Jay Cross himself. He apparently had just discovered my admittedly harsh critique of an article he wrote in e-Learn. Jay’s tone was pretty cordial and good-natured, especially given that he was responding to a post that called his article “annoying hype.” (And for the record, let me apologize publicly for my somewhat less than collegial tone. While I stand by the substance of my comments, I certainly could have made more of an effort to present my critique in a tone that invited dialogue.) At any rate, Jay let me know that he felt that there was more to his position than I had gleaned from his article, lamented that there was no place on my blog to comment on posts, and suggested that I give him a call. Again, wonderful! That’s what I would call a gracious response.

    Now, Jay did respond in his own blog before we had a chance to talk. All in all, it was a pretty gentle retort. While Jay made it clear that he is not going to apologize for being a visionary, he mostly took a “live and let live” position. Nevertheless, I do feel compelled to quibble with one particular sentence:

    The author goes on to explain that I am blissfully ignorant, misleading people with Panglossian optimism, and that Web Services has nothing to do with the future of IT and learning.

    Well, that’s not exactly what I said. I never suggested that web services has nothing to do with the future of IT and learning; rather, what I said was that web services are not sufficient to achieve the future that he projects. I still believe that. (I suspect that Jay does too; it just didn’t come out in his article.) I also certainly never suggested (or intended to suggest, anyway) that Jay was blissfully ignorant; to the contrary, I tried to make it clear that I generally like what he has to say (which is why his blog is on my blogroll). In fact, the reason his article got under my skin was precisely because I respected his work enough to hold him accountable for his words. I did suggest that that Jay’s optimism in the article was misleading, and that’s where the sound and fury came from.

    At any rate, I really can’t complain about the response, over all (and he gets extra credit in my book for using the word “Panglossian” gracefully in a sentence). Jay and I have since talked on the phone about exploring ways to continue this dialogue in a more direct manner; neither of us thinks that blogging about each other (or toward each other, or whatever it is that you do when you engage in the indirect dialogues that blogs allow) is the most productive way to dig into the issues. I’m not sure where we’ll end up on this, but regardless, Jay and his colleagues at the institute deserve credit for responding with class.