e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Bodington

  • Dammit, the LMS

    Count De Monet: I have come on the most urgent of business. It is said that the people are revolting!

    King Louis: You said it; they stink on ice.

    – History of the World, Part I

    Jonathan Rees discovered a post I wrote about the LMS in 2006 and, in doing so, discovered that I was writing about LMSs in 2006. I used to write about the future of the LMS quite a bit. I hardly ever do anymore, mostly because I find the topic to be equal parts boring and depressing. My views on the LMS haven’t really changed in the last decade. And sadly, LMSs themselves haven’t changed all that much either. At least not in the ways that I care about most. At first I thought the problem was that the technology wasn’t there to do what I wanted to do gracefully and cost-effectively. That excuse doesn’t exist anymore. Then, once the technology arrived as Web 2.0 blossomed—remember that term?—I thought the problem was that there was little competition in the LMS market and therefore little reason for LMS providers to change their platforms. That’s not true anymore either. And yet the pace of change is still glacial. I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the LMS is the way it is because a critical mass of faculty want it to be that way.

    Jonathan seems to think that the LMS will go away soon because faculty can find everything they need on the naked internet. I don’t see that happening any time soon. But the reasons why seem to get lost in the perennial conversations about how the LMS is going to die any day now. As near as I can remember, the LMS has been about to die any day now since at least 2004, which was roughly when I started paying attention to such things.

    And so it comes to pass that, with great reluctance, I take up my pen once more to write about the most dismal of topics: the future of the LMS.

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  • Imagining a WeLE

    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.

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  • Permissions and Openness

    I’ve been reading Opening Up Education. So far, I’m impressed. It’s hard to get all the articles in a collection like this to be consistent, coherent, and equally interesting, but the editors seem to have managed to do just that. 

    I want to comment today on the piece about Bodington by Stuart Lee. Long-time readers know that I have been a fan of this system. In the first part of a multi-part review of the system, I wrote:

    I have long complained that LMS permissions systems are usually too rigid and narrowly defined. Bodington’s permissions are more flexible than just about any other LMS I’ve ever seen. (It’s possible that dotLRN’s OpenACS-based permisions are as flexible, but if so, then they are hidden deep under the hood–typically out of the reach of most faculty members.) In most systems, you have a few pre-defined roles–teacher, student, administrator, TA, etc. These roles generally have pre-defined permissions. You can create groups that are essentially nested containers, e.g., a student group will always be a strict subset of the class that contains it. Likewise, these groups are often (though not always) mutually exclusive, i.e., a student can’t be a member of both Group A and Group B at the same time.

    Bodington works completely differently. Every object–a content bit, a discussion forum, etc.–can have an arbitrary number of groups attached to it, each group can have an arbitrary number of overlapping members, and each group can also have arbitrary fine-grained permissions for the object.

    At the time, I caught some flack for focusing on what some viewed as trivial aspects of the system. But Stuart’s essay, along with some recent comments to the Sakai discussion boards about the version 3 vision document, show that this stuff really matters.

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  • Web Analytics, Gaming Technology, and the LMOS

    A while back, a blog conversation between Mark Oehlert and Lee Kraus regarding how to knit together lots of embedded, widget/gadget like learning applications into a coherent picture of what and how learners are doing. To begin with, the idea they’re toying with is very similar to the LMOS but focused on a corporate market and workflow learning. What really got me thinking, though, was when they started talking about a dashboard somewhat like Google Analytics to track learner progress. (Those corporate folks sure do love their dashboards.) Something about this really clicked with me, but I couldn’t quite articulate how I would want to see this work in an academic environment.

    That is, until Raph Koster’s post put me onto VisitorVille–“Web Stats in Video Game Format!”

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  • Bodington at the Sakai Conference

    This is the first installment of my promised non-patent (and non-patented) coverage of the Sakai Atlanta conference. I’m going to start with Bodington, in part because I continue to be really impressed with these guys. In my opinion, they are doing some of the most interesting work in the LMS/VLE space today. They are also the furthest along of anyone in terms of realizing the kind of system design that my colleagues and I have been calling an LMOS.

    As you may know, Bodington is going to be using Sakai as the framework for the next generation of their platform. I wrote a few posts about Bodington a while back, shortly after the announcement. The conference gave me several opportunities to hear more from the Bod team about their thinking, their project, and their progress.

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  • Bodington Review, Postscript

    Now that there are a number of LMOS/framework-like projects in active development (the Bodington Tetra/Sakai collaboration, Oracle’s AEI, LAMS’ service contract work and, of course, the venerable eFramework and all of its children), I thought it might be interesting to pause for a moment consider how what I’ve learned about Bodington reflects on the challenges of an LMOS-like approach. When we think of frameworks, conversations tend in the direction plugging in tools, as if everything else in the framework itself is fairly straightforward. But the Bodington/Sakai unification project shows that picture to be simplistic. Simply taking Bod’s tooks and plugging them into Sakai’s environment would basically remove everything Bodingtonish about Bodington. Permissions, page layout control (which is related to how tools present themselves in the environment), and UI metaphors all really matter.

    So how do we define the territory that needs to be considered in order to make a framework approach work? How do we figure out what’s important? I don’t know that I have answers to those questions, but I think the solution may well start with use cases. What we need is a library of relatively granular descriptions of what teachers and students do in Bodington (for example) so that we can think about the affordances required to support those activities. The use cases might eventually be built into a pattern language. This approach combined with a catalog of tools, tool capabilities, and tool interoperability contracts, would probably give us enough to have meaningful conversations about building common frameworks.

  • Bodington Review, Part II

    In my last post, I discussed Bodington’s unique access control system and how this affects teaching affordances. I started there deliberately and at the suggestion of my Bodington expert and guide, Oxford University’s Paul Trafford. Today, Stephen Downes comments sarcastically, “Yes, that’s what we all look for first when trying to decide whether an LMS is worth the effort.” And that’s exactly the point. Bodington’s most compelling strengths as a learning environment are precisely not what we tend to look at first when “trying to decide whether an LMS is worth the effort.” (Not that assessing whether Bodington was “worth the effort” was my goal in any case.) As we all know, seemingly subtle implementation details can have disproportionate impact on the quality of the learning environment. Permissions is one of those unfortunately obscure areas that LMS developers often get wrong and, as Paul had suggested would be the case, I immediately saw that Bod’s system opened up pedagogical possibilities that are not practical on other systems. For example, Bodington appears to support very sophisticated multi-role groupwork, including but not limited to simulations, that would be much harder to do in learning environments with less flexible permissions systems. Is this difference important enough to look at first? I guess that depends on what you are looking for.

    Be warned: I’m going to continue my review by looking at other aspects of Bodington that are also not the kinds of things people typically look at first when trying to decide “whether an LMS is worth the effort”. If what you’re looking for is a generic LMS review, then don’t bother reading further and consider starting at the Edutools page for it instead. (more…)