In today's post I'm back to the theme of let's create/exploit really simple learning support solutions instead of endlessly trying to lock ourselves to increasingly complex multifunction 'managed' learning environments whose inevitable bias always ends up more towards the 'managed' than the 'learning'. Regular readers will know that since the inception of Auricle I've tried to do my bit to highlight the role and impact of technologies which perhaps initially lacked a provenance recognized by the major corporates or specifications/standards bodies, but nevertheless gained considerable traction despite this. Members of this former maverick class include Weblogs, Wikis, RSS and RSS aggregators, Podcasting, Videocasting, Social networking and bookmarking (inc Friend-Of-Friend - FOAF) solutions, and mixtures thereof. To this we can now add the new maverick proprietary entrants, like Skype, who are so destablizing the formerly comfortable telecoms interests.
Let's pump up the discomfort level a little by winding the clock back to my ALT-C 2004 paper E-Learning Frameworks and Tools: Is it too late? - The Director's Cut which, as the title suggested, asked a simple question, i.e. is it too late? Too late for what, you may ask?
You'll need to go back to the original paper for the full discourse but, in essence, my argument was that way back in the late 1990s into 2000 we all tended to rush headlong into this e-learning thingy (technical term:) As a result of this mass groupthink, many HEIs and other bodies made some pretty fundamental strategic decisions and investments, and thereafter built computer and human infrastructures to implement them. The result is that, in a remarkably small amount of time, we've built an awful lot of legacy artefacts, processes and, above all, thinking, which can make it very difficult to even consider, never mind comprehend, the new.
And as for starting again, when you've just invested, say, 5-6 years locking yourself into your enterprise level proprietary system? … But your institution did state it had an exit strategy didn't it? … Or did it do have a review and decided that the status quo was, well, … less traumatic?
Or is the dominant thinking now along the lines of “we've got to justify this expensive investment so let's lock ourselves even more firmly into the embrace of our proprietary supplier … after all we've got a good relationship with them and it would be pity to rock the boat. OK it's meant to be a VLE but surely we can use it for more than this? What about supporting research groups? OK people only want to use the discussion forums but we'll give them a xyz (substitute favourite VLE here) account. And I hear the've recently discovered Weblogs so anyone who wants a weblog can have an xyz account as well. In fact everything should go through the VLE and if it isn't VLE compliant then we aren't going to use it. Oh, and I've also heard they've even made it possible to access open source functionality so, there, we don't need to change horses.”
Let's pause for a moment's reflection. Some of these vendors used open source solutions to develop their commercial products and they now generously make it possible for you to access other open source solutions for which your institution is expected to pay generously and recurringly for the privilege? And where are the new ideas for development of these increasingly complex environments coming from? … It's certainly not from within some of these proprietary VLE companies. Instead they take the concepts developed elsewhere and merely bundle them within their own infrastructure. The effect is that their customer's dependency (that's you) increases year by year and so each time that review finds it easier to justify staying just as you are.
But let's try and be honest. Does what we have now really represent the best we can do? Is the brave new world of e-learning envisaged pre-dotcom / UKEU collapse now in danger of degrading into a prosaic reality of wall-to-wall Blackboard and WebCT courses all looking the same as each other, with most, with a few outstanding exceptions, not doing anything more than being expensive vehicles for content delivery with a few token underpopulated, largely unsupported, and unfocused discussions for good measure?
Where then does the new fit into the scenario above? Where then the discrete tool or process which doesn't so easily fit with the architecture of chosen VLE? Where then the engine of creativity when everything becomes dependent on the 'good' relationship with a supplier and their commercial motivation to implement the enhancements you want/need. A supplier whose primary motivation, let us not forget, is, despite their protestations, not your institution's welfare, but is instead that of their company or corporation. And with each addition that's made, the base product grows ever fatter with of course the ongoing requirement for the user to navigate the interface to access the process or functionality they want.
The rhetoric is we are breaking away from monoliths. Yet, we seem to be trapped in a reality of constantly reinforcing the monolith's walls. Our learning technologist talk may be of eLearning Frameworks, components, Learning Objects, Web Services, Distributed architectures, Service Oriented Architectures, Portals, Reusability, Learning Object Repositories, and eTools, but this is far from the mundane e-learning reality of what's on offer, or even worse what's being 'allowed'.
For example, what's your institution's policy on students and staff's use of Skype? Managed to get institutional support for standalone weblogs and wikis yet? Have you got a podcast and videocast policy and delivery infrastructure yet? … Or are you still thinking some simple streaming from within xyz (substitute preferred proprietary VLE here) should be all they need? And what's the policy and delivery infrastructure for distributed resources? … What do you mean the students are using RSS aggregators and free services like Flickr, Blogdigger and Bloglines to access resources we haven't approved of from outside of the VLE? And what are we going to do with that guy whose developed or exploited an e-tool which doesn't work with our VLE but yet the student's love it? Shall we get his Head of Department to send a stiff letter warning him to stop it because it contravenes our institution's policy?
Readers of Aurcle and other weblogs in this space will know the questions I raise above are very much grounded in the actual experience of some of our global e-learning community; there's no exaggeration here.
So why do we march ever onwards into this monolithic world? Put simply, centralized organisations like to try and create tidyness, stability, predictability, or sameness. As Neil Pollock and James Cornford have pointed out in their various writings this is a corporate model which technology tends to reinforce but is, at the same time, at variance with the creative, diverse and collegiate nature of many HEIs. The University if meant to be the nursery of diversity and the ideas which emerge from this, at times, hot cauldron but, yet, if the example of e-learning is anything to go by we are beginning to lock ourselves to systems which allow little opportunity for, and show little evidence of, diversity. The rhetoric may be about student-centredness and active learning, but the reality is so often just providing access to content which doesn't actually require a VLE to deliver it. Instead, the VLE so often just provides the increasingly research-focused academic with a mechanism for content delivery which doesn't require face-to-face student contact.
Not that I underestimate the importance of providing the student with an efficient mechanism of aggregating the content that's of importance to them, but let's not pretend that this is any more e-learning than is a pile of handouts distributed at the end of a lecture. And let's not pretend that we actually need a VLE with a recurring license expenditure to do this … the VLE is actually a pretty poor aggregator.
I've argued on many occasions that we need to be developing a more flexible technical infrastructure to support e-learning than the current bland proprietary VLE-oriented diet. Such a diet was perhaps useful as an initial starting point for e-learning but, for many, has rapidly becoming the end-point, i.e. “we've got e-learning because we've got a VLE”. Go on, ask a random member of faculty about e-learning and count the seconds before the VLE dominates the discussion.
If we pause for a moment, however, and look outside of the institutional lens there's a world of tools, services, examples and ideas which we should be utilizing (undoubtedly some 'street aware' staff and students are already doing so).
For example, I've already asserted that VLEs are pretty poor content aggregators but yet, in the absence of alternatives, they've taken on that role in education by default. But yet, in the non-education world, I can set up my RSS aggregator and Podcast download application to either bring to my attention what's current or even to download automatically the content I've identified as valuable to me to my preferred player/reader device; that's an example of a discrete and very efficient tool which doesn't require a complex interface or an expensive recurring license to allow me to use it, but yet it does some pretty powerful things.
My mind often backtracks to the bygone era when VLEs first came on the scene. There was the big boys on the block and the 'others'. Among the 'others' was the little Colloquia which had the temerity to be practically invisible to central services (it used the user's email inbox for asynchronous input and output). Nowadays we would call Colloquia a Personal Learning Environment, a concept given a new respectability via the distributed E-Learning strand of the JISC's E-Learning Programme. There is perhaps still a lot to learn from at least the concept of Colloquia because it is easier to view this as a tool which is trying to do a limited number of jobs well rather than conquering the world (well at least the market). Perhaps the Colloquia team have the mindset to develop my non-VLE dependent content aggregator … Are you listening Oleg? 🙂
I'll give further thought to the nature of such an aggregator in a future posting.
But let's begin to wrap this up with a few final bursts of polemic. Is it that the single one stop solution in the form of the VLE has just beem so seductive that few have stopped to think what the implications are of allowing them to be embedded in the information arteries of the institutions before we know enough and before the technologies have matured enough? Have we really now acquired so much knowledge about the structures and processes of learning that we can now confidently write institution-wide prescriptions that standardize the systems that some may believe will come to determine a significant part of the form future teaching and learning will take in our Universities? Or is the more prosaic reality that far from widespread transformation, all that the considerable investments in enterprise technologies like VLEs has so far achieved in most cases is bags of innovation, pockets of excellence, and some interesting research foci, but otherwise it's back to widespread adoption of the transfer model of learning as usual? … Or worse, we've actually introduced an even more efficient mechanism which magnifies the transfer model?
But have we just gone so far that few have the motivation to try to reverse engines? It may be that we've introduced a mass into the system which like oil tankers are good at travelling in one direction, tend to crush what gets in their way, are the devil to turn, and are impossible to stop over a short distance.
But I could be totally wrong. Maybe the years of enterprise VLE use have transformed and enriched the learning experience of countless students and staff. Maybe Blackboard, WebCT et al have been the Trojan Horses which enable the widespread organizational development which provides the justfication for enterprise wide integration by some. The problem is that we just don't know and, anyway, there's few rewards for asking awkward questions which may produce some pretty unpalatable answers.
But as I have stated in an earlier Auricle post:
“It would be an absolute tragedy if, in 10 years, time all we've got to show for all this effort is still a load of unexciting textual content plus a few quizzes embedded in a proprietary VLE purporting to be e-learning, online learning, enhanced learning or whatever terminology has currency at the time.” (Auricle 8 April 2005)
As expected from one who makes his living from learning technologies, I do believe that technology has the power to transform. But we human beings do have a recurring tendency to opt for such all-or-nothing multifunction big solutions which provide the comforting illusion that we are in control, we are managing the process; which is perhaps why the alternative North American terminology Learning Management System is perhaps a little bit more honest than our preference for the rather weasel-worded Virtual Learning Environment.
But let's never forget that the act of learning is always a unique and deeply personal process which always takes place in the head of the individual learner, although that process may be socially mediated/facilitated. And that unique act can never, ever, be managed no matter how good the systems we put in place under the illusion that somehow we can manage another individual's learning. We can help provide the conditions, we can help optimize the chances, but we can never ever manage learning because that in the end that is down to the individual, and even they only have partial control.
End of polemic 🙂
