As my online class on teaching online winds down, I’m left pondering the reality of online teaching and the relationship to learning.
The first problem is that every one of these LMS’s is geared toward managing learners, not managing learning. It’s a little thing but I wish we could all acknowledge this “marketing speak” for what it is. Symantics is power — who controls language has the power — and so long as we keep working under the misapprehension that the bBcT world has something to do with learning, the longer it will be before we can deal with the issue of education’s relationship to learning.
The second problem is that I’m struggling with how a real learning management system would look.
- It has to be controlled by the learner, not an institution.
- It’s probably going to be comprised of a variety of tools
- The learner needs to know how to pick the tools for the job
- There are probably different levels of access – public, invited, private as a minimum
I’m thinking that this blackbox is going to be a combination diary, memory, and portfolio. I should be able to store documents, images, sounds, and text. I should be able to pull in a bunch of different objects from external sources and keep them. I want to put works in progress in my system and keep them private, and select items to add to my portfolio that the public can see.
I need to keep my stuff safe — which means backups and platform indepent file types. If I put a graphic out there in the archive, then I need to know I can pull it in again regardless of how many times I’ve changed computers in the mean time. There’s a lot to be said for a laptop for working and server space for backup as well as publication. I can install my toolbox on the laptop and carry it with me as I move around. The server provides network accessible storage — which may or may not include backup service, depending.
