A while back, I noted with some interest Michael Korcuska’s screencast showing off a prototype of some functionality planned for Sakai 3. Some recent related conversation has come up on the Sakai listservs regarding the possibility of including wiki-like capabilities as core functionality of Sakai 3 and how this might overlap with and complement the capabilities in the screencast. I will argue here that, if combined carefully and enhanced with one more idea that has been floating around for Sakai 3, we end up with something quite new and interesting in the world of learning environments. I propose calling this new and interesting something a “Wiki’ed Learning Environment”, or WeLE.
If you viewed the screencast (and you should, if you haven’t), there were a number of salient features to what is probably mistakenly labeled as “content authoring” in Sakai:
- Every course site (or collaboration site) is a collection of pages.
- Every page is editable.
- Most are editable in a rich text editor, while some special page types are editable in a My Yahoo! or iGoogle drag-and-drop portal sort of way.
- Both text and functionality can be added, and mixed, in either page type.
- Functionality added (as gadgets/widgets) can be either Sakai-internal (e.g., a discussion thread or poll) or external (e.g., a Google map or YouTube video).
- Pages of both portal and free-form types can be created and organized in a hierarchical menu by instructors.
- It is easy to link to content or functionality on any existing page from any new page.
- Only people with the appropriate roles and permissions may edit a course page.
- Hypertext pages may be collaboratively authored and edited.
- It’s easy to create a link from one page to another. (This includes finding the page that you’re looking to link to with minimal fuss.)
- Pages are versioned and may be rolled back to previous versions.
- Permissions let some people edit and give others read-only access.
What’s interesting here is that the first list of capablities has every capability from the second list save one—versioning and rollback. (They may also have to tweak permissions to make it easy to add students as editors.) When these two capability sets are combined, you get a collaboratively authored learning environment. Not only the content but the learning space itself is negotiable by the group.
Let’s add one last capability to the mix here and see what happens. One of the Sakai 3 design goals has been more flexible access permissions, including the ability to expose content to the wider world beyond the walled garden of the university login. There are several reasons for this goal, one of which is to foster the development of open education. If we have a learning environment in which the content, functionality, and navigation can all be collectively created and edited by participants, including anonymous participants when appropriate, and which can be collectively managed by the mechanism of versioning with rollback, we have what I believe is a new beast. It’s a WeLE. The course experience is owned by the participants. Naturally, if you have flexible permissions, you can create a spectrum of ownership alternatives ranging from the traditional to the radically open and communal, based on the particular needs and goals of the course. This is very much what I had in mind when I wrote about an education-inflected architecture, argued that learning processes should be wiki’ed, and argued that JotSpot was a good example of habitable software that we should emulate in the educational technology world (going all the way back to October 2004).
In other words, I think we’re finally getting somewhere.
Let me add one last thought on language. If we end up with such radically tinkerable learning spaces, then I think we have to re-orienting our thinking about what *LE terms refer to. I’m thinking of a WeLE as an individual learning space for a single cohort of students in a single class. Similarly, a PLE (MeLE?) is an environment for one individual. Neither of these terms has to carry the architectural baggage of VLE, which is now interchangeable with the LMS/CMS, a monolithic architecture that implies mostly cookie-cutter learning spaces. There could be many WeLE’s (and possibly many MeLE’s) running on top of one Learning Management Operating System (LMOS) or, if you prefer Michael Korcuska’s term, Academic Work Operating System (AWOS).
Update: It wouldn’t be fair of me to post this without tipping my hat to Bodington, that quirky, crazy-clever, and relatively unknown LMS that antipated many elements of the WeLE.
Michael, i like the idea of a wiki’ed learning environment. For a more non-formal approach for some customers i used drupal for this. The content of a wbt was transferred to drupal and the users were able to adapt the wbt pages to there needs.
-Tim
Michael, I found a big discrepancy between what I read in your blog and what I did see in the screencast. The features presented for Sakai 3 like dragging portlets around, an integrated HTML-Editor with the possibility to link to internal tools and to use templates is nothing new at all. HTML-templates have been around since 10 or 15 years. Also I did not see anything about the fine-tuned permission settings you talk about. All I did see was a “normal” HTML-editor separated from the LMS-Tools. What I do agree is that this is probably mistakenly labeled as “content authoring” 🙂
I am biased because I work for the University of Zurich and we use another LMS called OLAT. As Sakai OLAT is also a Java-based open source LMS but celebrating its 10th anniversary this year it is a bit older than Sakai. OLAT does integrated the same open source HTML-Editor (I believe its TinyMC) shown in the screencast and OLAT does also offer the possibility to directly link to internal tools. This has been around for many years in OLAT. The permission settings allow you to open courses only for a subset of students (e.g. Biology students or a defined group), for all students that have an LMS-Account or for the whole world. Nothing revolutionary here in my opinion. But maybe I am missing the point?? The only thing you list that I never did see in an LMS is true versioning with an easy rollback feature but this is not planned for Sakai 3, is it?
Well I am curious to see if you vision of a collaboratively authored learning environment will come true. At least at our University I can see that authors/tutors are sometimes already overstrained with creating a simple course in an LMS. It would be interesting to see what happens if students – who generally know a lot more about an LMS than tutors – would also get the write-access to start manipulating courses and altering them 🙂 Might be a bit confusing but maybe also inspiring?
Joel, the screencast does not show the concept of a “WeLE”. It shows flexible site composition with embeddable tool functionality inside html pages (in the last minute or so), but it’s built as a demo on the 2.x version of Sakai.
What makes the envisaged Sakai 3.0 more like a WeLE is that the content store uses JCR, which has built-in versioning.
Stephen is right. The versioning and roll-back, for which at least the underlying capabilities will exist in Sakai 3, take this to the next level. Also, one feature highlighted in the demo is the ability not only to link to internal tools but to embed them directly into a free-form, WYSIWYG-editable HTML page. That, as far as I know, is also new. And finally, the proposed ability to open up viewing and editing rights to the students and even people not logged into the system, while not critical to what I would call a WeLE, certainly is an important advancement to the idea.
This is about more than just adding an internal linking plugin to TinyMCE.
Thanks for your clarifications. Sounds interesting, I am curious to see how this versioning and roll-back will be implemented in Sakai 3. Implementing Versioning is always a kind of “balancing act” between geeky user-unfriendly software like CVS or SVN that does everything and simple but not very powerful features like Wiki versioning. Good luck for those who are working on this task.