e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Scott-Wilson

  • Moodle, Wave, and Widgets (Oh my!)

    Scott Wilson , Paul Sharples, Dai Griffiths and Kris Popat have an article up on their work embedding Wave-enabled widgets into Moodle using Wookie. (Try saying that ten times fast.) What they envision is very similar in a lot of ways to what my former SUNY colleagues and I were thinking about when we proposed a Learning Management Operating System. Of course, that was 2005, so we were thinking about portlets rather than widgets. The lower barrier to entry and client-side nature of widgets are game changers.

    Anyway, it’s a very good piece, well worth reading. A couple of points jumped out at me. First:

    Rather than just being a like-for-like replacement, the Widgets update in real-time without any page refresh, and this affects user behavior. Rather than clicking links to launch tools or to view content, the Widgets encourage more of a “monitoring” mode of operation, with users navigating to a course page, then leaving it open in the background, occasionally bringing it into focus to see if any new conversations were happening in the chat widget, or the voting results had changed.

    If this finding bears out with further research, it could be a fairly big deal. For one thing, it has the potential of making the learning environment a lot stickier and more Facebook-like (in a good way). At the same time, it should force some pretty substantial refactoring of core LMS tools, which simply aren’t designed for monitoring. The two models are likely to clash.

    Here’s another interesting—and problematic—bit:

    Another consequence of Widgets is that far less tracking information is available at a micro-level, as interactions with Widgets are not made available to the VLE. This implies that a new model for tracking will need to be developed for such systems; this may be a useful opportunity to reconsider tracking in more sophisticated terms than page views and hits. For example, it may be useful to separate out measures of attention, using something like APML[12], and measures of user effort, using something like User Labor Markup Language (ULML[13]).

    The thing is, we’re  just now beginning to develop models where we can identify at-risk students and, more importantly, help them self-identify and self-remediate based on the data from the learning environment. The fact that this trend is in direct tension with the whole Web-2.0-in-the-learning-environment trend is underappreciated. We need to solve this problem.

  • Does Google Wave Mean the End of the LMS?

    Does Google Wave Mean the End of the LMS?

    I suppose it was inevitable. At a time when even The Chronicle is asking whether Blackboard can be replaced by WordPress, a slick demo of a super-cool product like Wave was bound to trigger breathless speculation about the demise of the LMS. Equally predictably, the most enthusiastic predictions that the LMS will be replaced are being made by people who have already replaced their LMS. It is not terribly shocking to read Jim Groom predicting that this time the LMS is REALLY doomed!!!! (I mean that to be taken affectionately.) If you are comfortable teaching a class using WordPress or PBWiki or [insert hip and free Web 2.0 technology du jour], then there is a good chance that you will be comfortable teaching a class with Wave.

    Me, I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy. I think people who are comfortable using these flexible tools and who don’t want the traditional trappings of an LMS (e.g., grade book, assignments tool, test engine, etc.) should be able to have what they want,  while the people who want the full LMS toolset should also have what they want. That’s one reason why I think we need a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS) upon which flexible and individualized virtual learning environments can be instantiated. If you want a grade book and a test engine, great. We got those. If you don’t want ’em, that’s fine too. Let pedagogical needs and university policies drive these decisions rather than the technology.

    So the question I’m interested in is more nuanced than the one of whether the LMS is “dead.” What I want to know is where Wave could fit with the range of capabilities that somebody might want in a virtual learning environment. What is it not good for? What else does it need?

    (more…)

  • What Intrigues Me About Google Wave

    Now that I’ve had a little while to think about it, I’m ready to distill my initial enthusiastic reaction to Google Wave down to a manageably short (and hopefully non-fanboi) post. Let me say at the outset that I have no idea whether Wave will succeed. I am convinced, however, that something like Wave will succeed, in part because much about it is not new. My initial thought was was, “Hey, somebody finally got Apple’s OpenDoc to work.” Scott Wilson twittered that Google had reinvented ActiveX. In some ways, Wave is, like many great inventions, an old idea with some new twists. This is not to minimize the value of those twists. To the contrary, they are astonishing. My point is simply that the essence of Wave will survive whether ore not Wave itself is a success because many of the core ideas have been proven to be compelling in the past.

    At any rate, there are a number of elements to Wave that are particularly attractive and likely to change practice in the field of e-learning:

    (more…)

  • How to Grow Standards

    Scott Wilson has a terrific response to my recent post calling for “more standards.” To begin with, he articulates one of the underlying issues that I think was bugging Scott Leslie as well. In the abstract, it’s hard to argue against standards. In practice, however, the particular Standards that are Issued from the Official Bodies that Bless Them sometimes seem like they add a whole lot of complexity to relatively little benefit.

    So how do you solve this problem? How do you increase the probability that a given standard is going to have significant practical value? Scott W. offers solid formula which I will paraphrase and expand just a bit as follows:

    1. Identify a user problem that you need to solve.
    2. Check to be sure that you can’t solve it using an existing standard.
    3. If possible, find a few other organizations that have the same problem and talk it through.
    4. Build a pilot solution implementation with standardization in mind.
    5. Test the solution and encourage your peer organizations to test it as well.
    6. Refine based on testing.
    7. When you believe you have a stable, workable solution, then select an appropriate Standards Body to have it live with. In general, avoid having education-specific standards bodies (e.g., the IMS) Bless the Standard unless you are solving an education-specific problem.
    8. Have the appropriate Standards Body examine the proposal, suggest changes when appropriate, and Issue a Blessing.

    In this scenario, the Standards Bodies really act as a quality assurance and dissemination mechanism. While they certainly could assist member organizations in the early stages of preparing a standards proposal, it would be healthiest to cast a broad net and encourage grassroots solution development as broadly as possible. Scott W. holds up JISC’s eLearning Framework (eLF) as good example of that approach, and while the jury is still out on how productive eLF will ultimately be, I agree that it’s a good example of the right approach.

    Here’s an example of how this sort of approach could work, drawing on a discussion that’s happening right now in the Moodle community: (more…)

  • All Hail the Mighty B-Rex

    Yes, yes, we’ve all heard the news by now. BlackCT Wednesday has hit. Will it be remembered as The Day the Music Died? I don’t think so. Unfortunately, it could be remembered as The Day the Music Was So Badly Wounded That It Became Barely Listenable for a Really Long Time.

    You know. Kinda like the ’80’s. Except with software. (more…)