I'm still working on why I'm so concerned about our lemming-like tendency to accept, or even actively promote, what is becoming nearly a monoculture of a few MLE/VLEs within our institutions. But as I suggested in yesterday's article there are glimmers of hope in the form of SAKAI. Today, I went back through some of the JISC Information Environment Development Strategy 2001-2005 pronouncements and again I find a glimmer of hope, but also a source of further concern. This requires a longer rant so select [More] if you have the stamina! Two statements, in the JISCIE document stand out for me:
'… the Information Environment as it is proposed here aims to offer the user a more seamless and less complex journey to relevant information and learning resources'
'… the view that digital resources are inherently distributed and will never be delivered by a single service provider'
I support totally both statements, but how does this mesh with the reality of what most of the mainstream MLEs/VLEs currently assume, i.e that learning material is best placed within the bosom of whatever the favoured system is? Of course you can be reassured you can get it out again and import it into another system because it will be 'standards' compliant … or can you? As my colleague Graham Blacker illustrates in his article, Standards Whose Standards?, the reality is far from this ideal. I would suggest that what is required are e-learning environments with architectures which don't assume learning material, content, resources, objects (whatever is your preference), and even learning services have of necessity to be embedded within a single monolithic system. Learning objects and indeed learning services could be distributed.
There's a paucity of e-learning systems, managed learning environments, and virtual learning environments that exploit such an approach. Why? Well, if I was a MLE/VLE vendor I would want you 'locked-in' my system because, first, you provide a recurring funding stream, and second, I would know that extraction would be so difficult and expensive due to institutional inertia (and retraining needs) that it would be a major disincentive to attempt to do so.
Instead of forcing users down one MLE/VLE road it would better, surely, for vendors (old and new) to offer discrete high quality/robust interoperable components/services which can be unified via say a portal (not necessarily the vendor's portal). In turn such components/services should support a distributed learning object/resources model which can access a variety of repositories/sources. For some this might be a business nightmare; for others a business opportunity.
