Way back in the early days of Auricle I proposed that the humble weblog perhaps offered an alternative, but more appropriate, model for building a VLE. I've revisited this theme several times if for no other reason than to challenge my original thinking. Have I changed my mind? No … if anything, I'm becoming even more convinced that this would have been a far more profitable route than that offered by the mainstream VLE vendors who only very recently seem to have woken up to the potential, e.g. Everybody's Blogging (13 April 2005). Such latecomers will, perhaps inevitably, view this as a useful 'feature' to add to their core product but certainly not at the core of the product itself … so no architectural rethinking here.
In my Shock of the Old post (8 April 2005) I suggested:
“… there are now so many opportunities and services arising 'out there' that it's perfectly feasible that if institutions are found wanting in their future IT/e-learning infrastructure and services provision that the teachers and students will migrate to systems and services about which institutions have no knowledge and over which they certainly will not be able to establish any control.”
At the time I wrote this, I was thinking about the next generation Flickr, Bloglines, Blogdigger, Orkut, etc, but there was an interesting feature in last week's Guardian Online A friend in need (28 April 2005) which caught my attention.
Refering to the social networking site MySpace.com the article states:
“From the initial act of finding friends, it reaches into every part of modern communication, allowing users to blog, send instant messages, join chat rooms and set up school homepages or HTML profiles.”
Now I'm not recommending the MySpace.com site per se, just presenting it as an example of the type of environment (because that's what it is) that's now 'out there' and which is sucking in the users who, let's remember, 'choose' to be there. Users of this type of environment enjoy facilities that are going to set very high expectations. Users of such 'out there' systems can join existing, or set up their own, interest groups and have some control over who joins, can upload and download content relevant to their community, and can use a rich variety of communication tools to 'publish' and communicate with one another.
So, increasingly, users will begin to see these types of systems as the norm and that's going to leave them singularly unimpressed with what the average proprietary VLE has to offer.
That's why in my 3 March 2005 posting The Weblog as the model for a new type of VLE? - Revisited I drew attention to the work of David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller with their ELGG system.
Ok … it's early days for ELGG, but the concepts are right. The community urgently needs the open source equivalents of MySpace.com if there's not going to be a slow bleed away from institutional provision which, currently, appears more focused on how well a product integrates with central information systems than pedagogical flexibility, community building and providing users - yes, even students - with tools and functionality they feel they control.
What MySpace.com, Bloglines et al are showing is that there is another way of doing things. But let's not forget that although these 'free' services will probably (perhaps, maybe, possibly) be there tomorrow, they don't have to be, and that's going to be the key justification for institutions avoiding them and ploughing on down the current VLE furrow. But we should be prepared to learn from MySpace and Bloglines et al and so welcome and support the efforts of those who are striving to provide open source alternatives.
