Daily Archives: June 26, 2008

the cms is a dinosaur …and you know what happened to them…

Posted on by
3

I am using moodle to teach ETAP687 because UAlbany was unable to provide instructor-level BLS course shells for the students in this course to create their own online courses, which is a main project for the course. I created the course in Moodle so that students could see from the student perspective what moodle can look like and how it functions. It didn’t make any sense to have students create courses in Moodle and have etap687 in BLS.

I also wanted students to be able to take what they create here in this course and be able to keep it and possibly teach it sometime in the future. With Moodle, an open source platform, it seemed like a better choice than locking things into one of the commercial course management systems…

That brings me to some of my other choices in the design of this course… as i have mentioned elsewhere in this blog i have incorporated various web2.0 tools into the course such as voicethread, diigo, edublogs, twitter, jing, meebome, audacity, youtube, breeze …. etc.

So….why did i “choose” to do that you may wonder?

Moodle provides a blog utility for students, it also has a news forum by default for each course and blocks that tie into the news forum to post announcements, etc. There is a calendar and ways to create links to shared resources or references within the course… last time i actually used the “glossary” feature to create a way to collect and present a list of categorized/sortable shared references for the course that the students used to build a shared annotated bibliography of resources – they had to provide a link, as description and an evaluation of the resource. I also used the “journal” feature for the “reflections” metacognitive activities of the course…

I chose to incorporate public freely available tools external to the CMS on purpose for several reasons.

  1. i am interested in exploring, testing, and evaluating the instructional potential and use of web2.0 cooltools to enhance online instruction, interaction, and engagement.
  2. I am looking for ways to enhance the fully online primarily text-based asynchronous teaching and learning environment with a little bling for the above stated reasons.
  3. Have i mentioned lately that i hate commercial CMSs? I naturally resist and feel uncomfortably confined by the locked down nature of the CMS… i mean really, is a “blog” that is locked into a CMS really a blog? No!!!!!!!! you can’t just call it a chicken when it is a duck!!!! Part of what makes it a blog is the fact that it is public – anyone can see it and interact with it. It also represents you publicly, belongs to you/you own it/it is yours to have and use, and to keep it beyond the end of the course and term – that is an authentic online learning activity! That is why i also thought it essential that the shared resources for the course be external to the CMS using diigo… i want my students to have access to the resources after the course ends!

There is something about the nature of interaction in a public forum. There is something about ownership….being able to for example, customize a blog visually to yourself by picking a theme and deciding what widgets to display and how you choose to present yourself to the world. There is also something about the responsibility you have regarding the public ownership of your thoughts and interactions, as well as the investment in time and energy to build or contribute to something that is yours and that reflects you. If you know it is just for a course, then you are doing it for me. If it is yours, then you can build it for you… a much more authentic exercise. I think that even the character of your “voice” is different, more authentically you, in a “real” blog, for example, than in one that is locked into a CMS. Plus – again you get to keep it or have access to it beyond the end of the course and term!

  1. i also enjoy playing with technology.
  2. i really like a challenge. : )

i personally love exploring the instructional potential of technology, but i do not advocate the use of technology for anything other than a compelling instructional reason. I would never advocate the use of any technology unless it assisted in meeting an instructional objective better, safer, easier, faster, or cheaper… You don’t need a backhoe to plant a tomato seed .

In my work at SUNY i never “train” the use of tools – even the almighty CMS. I discuss best practices in online pedagogy and plug the effective use of the tools in when and where it serves the pedagogical objective.

So, here is the question… is the cost of “stitching” all these tools together worth the hassle to the students (and to the instructor), the multiple authentications required to access resources housed at various external sites, the lack of technical support, the risks of johnny appleseeding course work and content around the web, the learning curve to be able to use them effectively/productively in an online teaching and learning environment?

For me, the answer is yes. Online social networking, social computing, folksonomy/social/collaborative tagging, data mashups, ubiquitous broadband, wireless, hand held and mobile computing, mobile broadband, and the cultural shift from passive consumers of content to engaged user-generators of content, has brought about a grassroots revolution resulting in a global democratization of access to tools, information, experts, content, professional development, and education as evinced by the open courseware and open source software initiatives that have changed how education is delivered, conducted… and defined. It is my obligation as a responsible netizen and educator in this moment to participate, to evaluate, to document, and to expose and engage my students to and in this process.

The commercial CMS is extinct… they just don’t know it yet.

when is a discussion not a “discussion”? When it is a written assignment…

Posted on by
Reply

Its really funny now that students have experience with other course management systems that all use a common similar basic function-based taxonomy to label categories of types of online course activity – like “discussion” for example – that it has resulted in expectations and consequent confusion when you use the functionality for something other than what is commonly thought of as online “discussion.” And I don’t mean funny – ha ha.

It is yet another irritating example of the software tail wagging the pedagogy dog. I hate that. Or is this due to student experiences with untrained faculty use of CMS features and functionality in an web-enhanced environment? I don’t know. I am having a moment.

“Technically” I have “written assignments” in this course implemented using the discussion tool, because that is the only way i could have students be able to see each other’s work in Moodle easily. Also it was the easiest way I found to be able to attach the file that i used to model my expectations for some of the assignment. And that provides the students with the option to attach their written assignment, so they can share an comment on each other’s work. It is very interesting to me that because i used the “discussion” feature to implement a written assignment a student reported being thrown “off”… i think in terms of functionality. This is very interesting. One of the reasons i HATE course management systems is that they are designed by app developers (not educators) who want everything to fit into tidy little buckets… that they can code easily, discretely…things that can be labeled… like discussion, written assignment, quiz, etc. But in so doing the tech tail then wags the pedagogy/instruction/instructor dog… in the reality of a fully online teaching and learning environment interaction is integrated, NOT in these separate buckets. The almighty CMS imposes an interface and interaction logic that it has no business doing. I don’t walk out of my classroom to go to a discussion room, then to another place to write an essay, then to yet another place to submit an assignment, and then to yet another place to get my grades…etc. It all happens in the classroom… From the app developers perspective there is a lovely logic to a function-based app design. The problem is when that technical logic spills out of the code and into my ability to be effective in the online teaching environment resulting in a confusion that everything created with the “discussion” utility is a “discussion” when the reality it is a tool coded with certain functionality that can be used in a variety of ways that may or may not be considered “discussion.” I HATE that label too btw… better would be “interaction.”

It suppose it also could be that i just don’t know how to use moodle, or that i hate labels, or that i hate app developers, or that i hate CMSs. yes… I think it is the last one.

In my dreams i see a PLE that displays a coursemap, for example, as a moving wordcloud and that is dynamically affected by user (student /faculty ) interaction… still conceptualizing.