Mouthing off. CCBy: borrowed time | demi-brooke
The incredible ability of the education sector to seperate itself from reality is just incredible. I guess we have to accept that it has been common practice in education for a long time. Rather than teach in the real world we taught in the classroom, and with rules and regulations to sustain that very system. So its little wonder that the same embedded cultural drives in the sector will cloud over the development of new practices and absorb innovation and subversion so that no change is possible.
This is another hissy fit about LMS, VLEs, PLEs and now ePortfolios.
I remember when the backlash to the LMS started brewing back in 2004 as the social web star rose.. defendants of the LMS started side stepping and compromising with a new definition to Managed Learning. Definitions that described the LMS/VLE as a process rather than a product. A process described with a variety of tools at hand to do the thing, rather than necessarily a single central tool like say Blackboard or Moodle.. Nice one, that way we all got to keep our jobs and didn’t have to explain the great waste of resources into LMS development and content. The obvious success of social media services compared to the giant failure of educational technologies should have resulted in mass redundancies, but it didn’t. Instead we find people flogging that dead horse with open mimicking within broken toolsets.. MyLearn comes to mind as an attempt to keep those very costly resources somehow relavent…
Next, when the social media affordances starting to dawn on the education sector in 2005, some bright spark programmers in the education sector thought they’d try and “invent” something that would attach them to the giant nipple of the education cash cow.. they brought us the Personal Learning Environment (PLE). It was going to be a solution to the chaos of the social web, it was going to give all those slack education managers something to spend money on so they could say they were on to it, and help with assessment, validation, auditing and mind control.
But then the likes of me and a few others started shouting “snake oil” and thankfully the PLE movement side stepped it again and described it more as a process rather than a product. Another win for freedom, flexibility, personal choice and financial savings.
Now, the “ePortfolio” just won’t go away and we have products like Mahara knocking at our door today, getting big public money grants, and distracting our teachers and students from just jumping into the Net and learning core transferable skills such as managing RSS, editing Wikipedia, loading to Youtube, using Google Docs, Maps, and learning how to manage their online identity across all the platforms they are REALLY going to use (and yes, including that abomination called Facebook!)
I’m still waiting for the side stepping from the ePortfolio crowd, the bit where it becomes more about the process rather than the products.. in the meantime it seems like everyday I am having to explain to colleagues that the word ePortfolio is a sales pitch gimmick for something we already freely have access and do!… since, well.. the Internet.. but more realisticly 2004 when Google bought Blogger etc.
One such colleague who I constantly harass with this gripe (poor thing), is Sarah Stewart. Thankfully, I think she is agreeable to my brain washing now and will be a loan voice over in Brisbane for the Australia ePortfolio Symposium (trade show?)…
Man! When will these distractions and money diverters cease! Probably when the education cow stops waving its teats around and focuses on reality. There is a life time of usefulness and need to know right here on the WWW of information and communication that we need to be showing people how to use well. We have a real world of it to learn in and we don’t need classrooms to put up technical and designed barriers to it, or delete our presence when we stop payingtheir fees, or say something unsavoury. We don’t need, and shouldn’t want some out-of-date-before-its-off-the-shelf product to interface with our use of the Net just so education bean counters can have an easier time assessing, validating and reporting to audits. Just get in there and use the web as it comes, and learn to use it intelligently, and help education managers learn how to save a couple of million dollars on software gimmicks and adjusting job descriptions to suit the “changes”.
____________________
Update: Just found this post from Derek Wenmoth relevent.VLEs slow to take off.
Ah well – I guess we’re still embarking on the journey. What I’d hope we’ll see though is an equivalent amount of energy, effort and expense put into understanding the pedagogical value and opporutnities of a VLE/LMS/MLE as we are seeing go into the development (and sales) of products, systems and applications.
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34 comments
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January 23, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Patrick Malley
Thank you for this post.
January 23, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Breanna Hite
I think that large institutions are very set on closed environments. I know in the business world most large companies are terrified of the internet, or more specifically, having to interact with the scary unpredictable people on it. I imagine it’s the same way for educational bureaucracies.
January 23, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Ray Tolley
Oh, dear, Leigh,
I just wonder what education did to you to make you so bitter about all the good things happening in education (in its broadest sense) just now. Of course schools and VLEs and e-Portfolios are not going to disappear because you say so.
Perhaps you should look more carefully at the reasons for your complaints? Yes, reasonably mature and intelligent adults might be able to strut their stuff in the clouds, but that does not apply to our youngsters (who need legal protections), the less able (who need additional support and understanding) and the elderly (who might not learn as fast as you or have different priorities).
My repeated complaint about HE academics is that they only see as far as their own introspective research and publications allow. What of the other 90% of society?
Forgate ‘large commercial companies’ and educational bureaucracies’, I really want to understand why you apparently have a blistering opposition to what educationists around the world are trying to do. I am personally convinced that over the last 25 years we have made steady progress in the world of e-Portfolios and I am sure that my product will stand the test of time.
For more on my ideas please see:
P: http://www.raytolley1.xfolioworld.com
B: http://www.efoliointheuk.blogspot.com/
W: http://www.maximise-ict.co.uk/eFolio-01.htm
January 24, 2009 at 7:14 am
leighblackall
There was this teacher… she applied to the ministry for 10 thousand dollars to buy some equipment for her classes that will have kids rebuilding old computers and taking them home to keep. The ministry rejected the application.
There was this software developer. He applied for 1.5 million dollars to develop an ePortfolio program. He got it. Then he applied for 500 thousand to take it on a road show around the schools and pressure the teachers to use it with words like “21st C learning”, “digital literacy” etc. Once he gets 20 or so teachers on board, he will apply each year for more funding just to tweak the bugs and keep it up to date. Meanwhile the teachers and the kids update their Facebook profiles (et al) with complaints about having to use the State built ePortfolio system and all its bland-ness.
But I work in the tertiary sector, and this blog is from that experience. From time to time I might include some of my secondary school teaching experience here, but primarily it relates to my work now.
January 24, 2009 at 8:21 am
Graham Wegner
Leigh, I remember a few years back when you, Alex Hayes and I participated in a spirited exchange in your blog comments. I was trying to convince you (and Alex) that your scepticism was misplaced , that e-portfolios were a concept, not a product. Now I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly – it’s all just the means to a product based sales pitch. The open web is the reality and the future for learning and yes, some of it is about committing your content into the hands of third party providers on a bit of a blind trust basis. But what assurance do we have that our institutions or their preferred vendors won’t misuse (or lose) our content there either? Ironically just before reading this post, I was checking a reply on an Australian teachers mailing list that essentially bragging about their totally secure student blogging environment that allowed blogs to be shared across an entire school (gasp!) and how dangerous and potentially litigious using third party Web 2.0 sites were (hinting about edublogs, I think). It’s a bit like building your road within the school grounds and holding the bike ed program because actually taking the kids out on the streets would be too risky. So educational institutions want to be safe, product developers capitalise on these fears and the students only get a vague simulation of the power of social media.
January 24, 2009 at 9:03 am
Sean FitzGerald
Ray Tolley: I wonder if some of Leigh’s bitterness about education comes from the same place as mine – as a student having to put up with teachers with arrogant and patronising attitudes like yours.
What “educationists around the world are trying to do” is to retain the control, authority and power differential they have over their students that has been arbitrarily conferred upon them purely by their position and role as educator.
“I am sure that my product will stand the test of time.” Of course it will… vendors like you will continue to make a killing peddling “solutions” to educators terrified of relinquishing control over their students under the guise of “support”, “safety” and “security”.
January 24, 2009 at 9:53 am
Ray Tolley
Sean: I’m surprised by your reaction to me as “teachers with arrogant and patronising attitudes like yours”. I’m sincerely not of that ilk but perhaps a bit too enthusiastic.
I strongly refute the suggestion that I support “the control, authority and power differential they have over their students that has been arbitrarily conferred upon them purely by their position and role as educator.” You, too, must have had some bad experiences in your school.
I started teaching in 1963 and have enjoyed every moment of it, teaching problem solving for most of that time, heavily involved in staff training and totally committed to ICT development in schools since 1981. In all that time no one has ever accused me of being arrogant or patronising but usually the opposite. In fact I doubt that I could have ever succeeded in attaining some of the high positions of responsibility if that were the case.
Breanna: Agreed! I have been fighting bureaucrats all my life… ‘You can’t do that…’ etc. The problem with institutional e-Portfolios at the moment is that, from my research and my own experience they are not truly transitional and therefore fail my first criterion of being ‘portable’.
Leigh: I trust that your comments about software developers applying for grants was not slanted at me. Much the reverse, I have applied for no development grants and have spent many thousands of dollars promoting my own UK brand at trade shows and conferences.
I apologies if I reacted too strongly to your first entry. Perhaps we could develop a more constructive and reasoned debate about the purpose and benefits, however transitional, of the e-Portfolio? – or even a response to my blog:
www. efoliointheuk.blogspot.com
Kindest Regards,
Ray Tolley
January 24, 2009 at 10:38 am
Sean FitzGerald
Ray Tolley: “You, too, must have had some bad experiences in your school.” I thought I’d said as much in my comment. At least, despite it’s faults, I did learn to read at school.
And to simply dismiss my opinion as a result of bad experiences is intellectually lazy. Yes, let’s dismiss the criticisms of the inherent oppressiveness of the school system from Noam Chomsky, Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire, John Holt, John Taylor Gatto and others as the result of bad experiences too, shall we? And Sir Ken Robinson’s claim that schools kill creativity? Obviously only thinks that because he had a terrible art teacher.
Even if insights do come from bad experiences it doesn’t make them any less valuable as insights.
“I started teaching in 1963 and have enjoyed every moment of it” I wonder if the same thing can be said by your students.
“In all that time no one has ever accused me of being arrogant or patronising but usually the opposite.” Certainly not your students, as they’d be out on their ear or up to the principal’s office. And your peers? Your supervisors? Who knows what goes on behind closed doors in that private domain of a yours called the classroom?
“In fact I doubt that I could have ever succeeded in attaining some of the high positions of responsibility if that were the case.” The system rewards those who toe the line and perpetuate the system.
The fact that you are blind to your complicity in the oppression endemic within the school system, and defend yourself simply through mocking, is typical of those who have no reason or incentive to question their power base.
January 24, 2009 at 12:06 pm
leighblackall
Thanks for the comments guys.. though it is heated and personal, I’m sure we’re all big enough not to take things personally and see the points of debate for what they are. Naturally I agree with you Sean – we have a long record of saying as much, so Ray – I hope you are feeling OK and willing to stand up for what you think. If anything it makes for interesting weekend reading – and who knows what we might find we agree on 🙂
G – thanks for the supportive story. I remember the debate well and knew you’d come around, lol. Most people who actually use social media to the extent we do tend to agree with each other on this issue.. but there in may be the problem. But I’m open and still waiting for someone to talk me around… still waiting 6 years on…
Maybe someday I’ll be able to say, “I’ve been deschooling for 45 years and can say I have enjoyed every minute of it” 🙂
Respects to you Ray – you’ve been around lots longer than I have – and it could well be (quite likely) that I am just naive. But it is hard to ignore the thought that you are here because you have a vested interest in protecting the brand name ePortfolio wouldn’t you agree?
January 24, 2009 at 11:48 pm
Ray Tolley
Hi, Leigh,
Thanks for your measured response. My whole mission in life, at the moment, is in trying to get educationists to understand the real benefits of e-Portolios and get some real collaborative work going in schools, rather than accepting the limited understanding that most VLE suppliers promulgate concerning e-Portfolios. On presentations to teachers I have regularly said, “I’m not here to sell a product, I’m here to make people think!”
At the moment, in schools, there are many who are fearful of stepping outside of bureaucratic dictats. If my simple, easy to use and e-safe solution will help them to get moving on the use of social media and yet at the same time pacify the dragons, then I will be satisfied.
SEAN: I was amused by your references to some of the great thinkers of our time. Noam Chomsky was one of my real heros. When studying for a diploma in psycholinguistics, I once scrawled on the blackboard before the lecture began, “Structures is dead! Long live Aspects!”. My professor was absolutely livid. Nuf said?
I have always been a bit of a rebel. In the secondary school (established 1543) that I attended as a pupil, I was the first pupil ever to pass ‘A’-level Woodwork, also studying for extra ‘O’-levels at the same time during lunchtimes and evening-classes.
Anyway, whilst schools as we know them exist, I will continue to fight for an intelligent and future-facing workforce that looks beyond their own local experience. Two items that might provoke some discussion:
http://www.slideshare.net/maximise/schools-and-change
http://www.maximise-ict.co.uk/Understanding Innovation.pdf
Best Wishes,
Ray T
January 27, 2009 at 1:02 pm
brent
Hype indeed … funding madness driven by internal politics and devious economics. Mahara wins the Open Source Use in Education award at the NZ Open Source awards which is Platinum sponsored by Catalyst (the company that got the contract to build Mahara) and which is Silver sponsored by NZ Open Source Society (NZOSS) of which the current president is also a Director at Catalyst. Talk about patting yourself on the back.
February 3, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Don Christie
Oh boy. this debate about technology in education is healthy but name
calling is not.
Brent, you are able to anonymously call into question the integrity of
myself, a publicly known panel of judges, my company, the New Zealand
Open Source Society and the NZOSA all in one short sentence. To what
end?
If you would like to meet up and discuss the NZOSA judging process or my role as president of the NZOSS I am happy to buy you a coffee.
This is another hissy fit about LMS, VLEs, PLEs and now
ePortfolios.
Leigh – this could be a valid opinion. Technology moves fast and in
unexpected directions. However, my experience in the US, UK, and Europe
is that Mahara has been evaluated very favourably and already been put
into practice in many many places. As it is an open source project we
often don’t hear of these but currently the project is seeing nearly
2000 downloads per month. It could all be a flash in the pan, wait long
enough and you will certainly be able to tell everyone that you were
right. Of that I am certain.
Finally I should point out that neither I or Catalyst lead the Mahara
project. This is a collaborative effort between a number of other parties with Massey and Flexible Learning Network (especially Richard Wyles) giving particularly strong leadership and direction.
February 6, 2009 at 2:07 am
Richard Wyles
Hi all,
This post and thread has been forwarded to me – I’ve met Leigh and Brent and know Don well, hi to the others. Normally I’d stay out of it – this is in the main an educationalist argument and I don’t pretend to work as one.
I do like Leigh’s ability to challenge – it’s fundamental to the academic process. Response is also part of that process plus it’s pretty important not to let hypothetic hyperbole become a truth because it’s not challenged.
I don’t know yet about the outcome of the LMS debate – that’s been raging for a little while but wasn’t when NZOSVLE was conceptualised to allow NZ to plat catch-up. What I do know is that Moodle is the most flexible LMS that I know of, not just because it is open source but because of its system architecture – flexibility won the day and in general I see Moodle as an incredibly uselful tool but it’s not a one size fits all type of solution. It is best placed to evolve as digital based learning changes. The reference to MyLearn relates to a software solution and concept called Moodle Networks – that is networked LMSs. The rationale behind that is that a country like NZ has a small population base and we should be collaborating on sharing our education provision. Networked LMSs are an available vehicle to achieving that. LMSs are an organisational construct and networked LMSs is one way how organisations may collaborate. Breaking down the organisational walls is something I would think Leigh is positive about as MyLearn is quite subversive and very positive from the learner’s perspective.
Some software is more open than others and we selected Moodle in 2004 due to its promise in a pedagocial (https://eduforge.org/docman/view.php/7/17/Evaluation%20of%20LMS%20-%20Part%20II.pdf) sense and its technical advantages (https://eduforge.org/docman/view.php/7/18/LMS%20Technical%20Evaluation%20-%20May04.pdf). This stuff dates back to 2004 and we knew less obviously then about future trends. What I did know though was that NZ had haves and have-nots with LMSs – they were inflexible – BB Basic in the main. There was an import cost as well as an educational sovereignty issue in my mind. The result (a large part of the tertiarty sector has adopted Moodle) has been well beyond my original expectations and it has been enjoyable work to have been a part of it. TEC has enjoyed a very significant return on investment that builds every year – e/g Massy and Canterbur University’s moving to Moodle. In contrast to snake-oil merchants, NZ’s move to open source solutions has enabled local innovation, a levelling of the playing field and an acceleration of adopting open solutions beyond the confines of formal education.
Leigh uses a hyperthetical analogy whereby a software developer “applies for 1.5 million dollars to develop an ePortfolio program. He got it. Then he applied for 500 thousand to take it on a road show around the schools and pressure the teachers to use it with words like “21st C learning”, “digital literacy” etc. Once he gets 20 or so teachers on board, he will apply each year for more funding just to tweak the bugs and keep it up to date. Meanwhile the teachers and the kids update their Facebook profiles (et al) with complaints about having to use the State built ePortfolio system and all its bland-ness.”
Well, in my experience I’ve never met such a cynical fella as this software developer would be, nor one so lucky to get such funding. In the case of Mahara, the funding was sought by Massey University. The strength of the software is that it is embedded with pedagogical values guided by its original academic steering group, which has since been validated by its worldwide educational uptake and usage. It is open source and freely downloadable, so the snake oil sales comment is a hard one to grasp. Yes it was publically funded by TEC in 2006/2007 with just over NZ$200,000 in development budget. (what we could do for $1.5M!!) TEC did not award round two funding. Since July 2007 Catalyst IT and Flexible Learning Network collectively support the evolution of Mahara and have had small contributions from a variety of sources. Mahara has not yet been profitable for either company – one day we hope there might be a sustainable return but not yet, we’re taking a risk on an open source project we believe has merit so it’s very very far from snouts in the trough! There’s got to be an easier way to make a buck than innovating in educational software. So, with so much hard work going in, and the opportunity cost we all choose to make in our lives, it’s personally rather disappointing to read the thread.
My work with Moodle started in 2004 – there were a mere 350 sites worldwide and my gut feel was that we’d pick Atutor. Moodle won out and It is great that NZ has contributed to Moodle now having 50,000 sites worldwide. There’s reasons for its sucess and partly it’s because it is a next generation/ far more flexible tool than the proprietary alternatives.
That all said, Leigh or whoever else is most welcome to challenge the basic constructs behind LMSs or developing a web 2.0, pluggable, open source eportfolio or PLE. That is the strength of academia and leads to the robust pluralism of education. That some in academia find Mahara and/or LMSs/Moodle useful and promising is indisputable. No-one is knocking on their door with Mahara though. Open Source relies on a bit of self-help and participation not snake-oil merchandising. Fundamentally, the product evolves according to the participation of the academic community afterall – otherwise it withers and dies.
Finally I also have to comment on Brent Simpson’s rather cynical comment. Yes Catalyst has organised and puts their own resources into celebrating the growth of open source in NZ. I’ve been to both events and it’s been a revelation (I think for everyone there) the extent of open source usage, the wide number of companies and projects involved, and the impact being delivered globally by NZers. Good on them for a very positive initiative for NZ as a whole.
In the NZ market for open source services the big guys are Catalyst IT – they have 100 staff devoted to open source – that’s rare indeed, certainly unique in NZ and globally. To be successful in an area that many equate with total gratis is an achievement indeed, and an achievement to be celebrated and emulated by other companies. On that basis it surely can’t be surprising that they get awarded contracts that are subsequently awarded acolades by a completely independent panel of peers. In any event, awards are simply awards, success makes its own way in life, and they have a track record of delivering quality outcomes.
“Funding madness driven by internal politics and devious economics” – pretty weird comment for someone who was so heavily involved in eXe. Actually very hard to fathom, the economics of the Moodle and Mahara uptake in NZ is clear-cut and obviously successful, and even more impressive given the risks in software. No-one is selling snake-oil though, the ethos of open source is that the user-base (in this case the education community) determines what they want and they then have free access to it. It’s vital to develop an architecure that is open enough for a developer community to build from.
Anyway, lovely as it is, I always get the uneasy feeling that within the education community there’s more time to debate these matters that I can devote – I’ll always lose by attrition! That’s not a veiled criticism of the role of academia though – fundmental it is, and back to Socrates at least but just not one I can always put effort into, got to get out there treading the pavements with my snake-old bag. 😉 I think we’re achieving a lot from these wee isles though and I’ll continue to work closely with a wide variety of educational partners to progress open solutions in eduction.
cheers
Richard Wyles
Project Leader Mahara (also lots of input into Moodle 😉
richard@flexible.co.nz
027 255 2299
February 6, 2009 at 9:23 am
leighblackall
Hi Don, and Richard – thanks for taking the time to offer such extended and informative responses. I can understand your disappointment, and you rightly point to other big picture successes such as what you point out about Catalyst: “…To be successful in an area that many equate with total gratis is an achievement indeed…” yes it is – and I realise now that in that respect I should acknowledge that success in finding ways to do business in open source economic models. The details of Catalysts operations I don’t have much insight on, businesses mixed with public budgets and politics must be a handful – such is life in the public service..
But I just want to clarify something. The “snake oil” remark was in the 5th paragraph of this post, where I refer to Personal Learning Environments (PLE) – you seem to carry this remark across everything. I reread my post and can’t see the word, or even much of the meaning carried in the other areas.
My comments are intended to be aimed at educational practices, management, and culture, and the technology services and authors that reinforce that.
It would be simple and straight forward to be able to say that a business like Catalyst provides a service to education, and that the relationship and exchange ends there. But what I think Brent’s comment suggests is that the relationship and exchanges are never as cut and dry as that. If there is not lobbying, policy influence and sponsorship marketing efforts made by the service businesses (Apple and Microsoft come to mind most of all), then there are workers inside the education system with position and power enough to make decisions and investments, form service contracts and embed or even force practices that result in overwhelming and frustrating other “academic” interests such as educational development and change. All too often, those workers are never in dialog with those “academic” discussions, and never have/make the time to consider the proposals, criticisms or research.
So, if we accept that the relationship and exchange between an educational organisation and the service provider is multi dimensional yet exclusive, then we might be able to accept that the successes in that exchange are self fulfilling.
“Anyway, lovely as it is, I always get the uneasy feeling that within the education community there’s more time to debate these matters that I can devote – I’ll always lose by attrition!”
By that I suppose you mean you won’t be monitoring or engaging further in this discussion with “your market”, and that we in the education community devote too much time to thinking about the ethics of our work instead of simply doing it. That would be a shame, because I have quite a few ideas on how services like Catalyst could develop new models and help facilitate a more productive relationship between the education sector, National Libraries and Archives, and major communications providers like Telecom. Its a shame we didn’t get a chance to talk about that at HeyWire8.. I had it on the agenda with the right people in the room, but it was somehow skipped.
February 7, 2009 at 10:12 am
Richard Wyles
Sorry Leigh, I simply haven’t the spare time to engage to much on these types of debates but I will add a couple more thoughts now and let’s catch up next time we meet. In your post about ePortfolios, you suggest that Web 2.0 type tools (which I relate to the ease of user generated content) have been around forever and always will be. That’s not the case, blogs and wikis are only about 4-5 years old and took some time to catch on. YouTube et al are even more recent and the speed of web innovation is accelerating. I totally accept your point that there is a lot out there and you can easily create a digital presence without ever touching a LMS or ePortfolio system. To my mind though, you are making value judgements on software that are more to do with their perceived position within the power hierarchies of education systems rather than feature-sets and how they might be used. Afterall, software is just software – it’s how we evolve it, what contexts they are used that matter.
In my experience the anti-LMS position is more concerned about not re-inventing offline educational hierachies online and creating learning silos, rather than a deep-seated issue with some of the tools involved. Afterall a LMS like Moodle can be used in a highly interactive way with the rest of the web and it is more likely to be organisational policies, or lack of teacher expertise that prevent such activity. Similarly ePortfolios are simply a tool. Mahara is designed as a pluggable system that is open and welcoming of all manner of outside content and interactions – it is definately NOT designed as a silo content holder – it would be really stupid to enter a storage space race with the free offerings of Google for instance.
So it’s OK to use the open source tool WordPress or the arcane and flat content of the open source tool Mediawiki or the proprietary tool Skype etc. etc. but it’s not OK to use the open source tool Mahara nor the open source tool Moodle. I just don’t get your thinking. For a start the rise of Moodle has forced really rigid systems such as Blackboard to at least listen to their constituency a bit more, and even make their offering a bit more open. There’s no silver bullet yet wrt digital identity and I expect there never will be – all software has its lifecycle. I applaud pushing the envelope in our thinking and questioning why we do things. But that it should also be recognised that a lot of innovative thinking is going on within the LMS and yes, the ePortfolio space. We are not blind to the fact there’s Facebook, GoogleDocs, wikis, blogs yada yada – far from it. But I suggest to you that these systems are also software and need the same level of critical analysis that you are applying to the free and open source systems like Mahara. You are of course enabled to take Mahara and modify it to your heart’s content. Can you do that with some of the web software you are so enamoured with? Also the web might not always be as open as it currently is – e.g. the recent NZ Copyright act giving all sorts of powers to ISPs.
If you have thoughts on how Catalyst might operate I suggest you contact them directly. I have worked with them quite a bit but I am not an employee, shareholder or anything and do not represent their interests.
cheers for now
Richard
February 7, 2009 at 9:14 pm
leighblackall
Hi again Richard, thanks for coming back.
In short, software is not just software – in it contains a whole host of assumptions and relationships we generalise as ideology. My comment in this context is that the LMS, ePortfolios, PLEs and the like, carry forward certain assumptions and power relationships in the educational mindset that I think we need to escape.
This does not mean I am enamored with web2. Web2 has a whole other level of ideology that I call “real world”. It wreaks of individualism, consumerism, tittytainment and many other things – but that is the world we need to critically engage with, because it was-to/will/is dominating our lives and shaping our values.
As you rightly say, free and creative people can use tools like Moodle and Mahara to achieve that engagement, but always through an educational lens, and many of us think that that ideology generally prevents genuine critical engagement and holistic learning. It certainly prevents the great majority of teachers I work with ever knowing what a blog or an RSS feed really is.
When I say something along the lines of web2 has been around forever, I mean it the same way as many web2 critics mean it – that the freedom of self expression and social interaction online has always been there, that web2 is the same as web1 and that the CMS and LMS is a product of the dotcom – a mere distraction – but education as always is slow to consider, because it is disengaged. Instead, managers grabbed for learning management systems and set up IT support units because they liked the template designs that reinforced group think and were enamored with dot com economics. The geeky protests of independent teachers already using the Internet in their work were dismissed and their early work described as “a dogs breakfast”. There was no true critical engagement with the Internet, everyone was pressured into using the LMS under false pretenses. By extension, I think the ePortfolio repeats this cycle.
If the LMS was never invented, I honestly don’t think we would have missed anything. We would have saved millions of dollars in content production and staff training, we could have pooled that investment into the Internet like everyone else did, and we would have had time to think about the Internet as it truly was to people. Maybe Wikipedia would be 10 times better by now! Oh, and the IT support units would not be so large and entrenched, and so obsessed with intranets.
Maybe if education was more engaged with the Internet, things like the NZ Copyright Act wouldn’t be so backward and out of touch.
February 8, 2009 at 9:04 am
Richard Wyles
Hi Leigh,
I still fail to see how or why a WordPress blog inherently has more merit than a Mahara, Moodle, Eduforge, Edublog based blog and ditto for a RSS feed. If it as educational lens that you are trying to deconstruct then the physical constructs of lecture theatres etc. are as good a place to start as they reinforce the instructuctional teaching model. Moodle is centred around a constructivist model while Mahara is built to be as flexible as possible to accommodate various contexts. In the real world organisations, say a health board, want to have some practitioners, say midwives, stay up to speed with current practice to demonstrate this by way of maintaining a portfolio. It is so true that the midwife may have evidence all over the web. What Mahara is designed to do is pull that together by way of a ‘View’ – i.e. not repeat the content but a place to pull it all together and sometimes yes, to use a template as the organisation may want a standard transcript. It is also true that the midwives will have a range of expertise and experience with the web. It is easier for many of them to have a starting point and a standard approach to fulfil this requirement and get back to their job of delivering babies. This is an organisational lens here, not an educational one but similar organisational requirements and the need to reduce organisational overhead both for the learner and credentialler still hold true in education.
The dotcom boom and bust is littered with a few successes and many failures. “pooled that investment into the Internet like everyone else did” – I don’t see how this premise would have been more successful. I tend to agree that LMSs survived for some of the reasons you’ve outlined but I also think that Moodle is a vanguard of change here rather than reinforcing the status quo. The real world gravitates towards organisation – for a corporation, a government department, a school, a university, a home-schooler then a LMS is deemed useful by many. Even better if they are open, flexible architectures and keeping abreast of the latest technologies e.g. web services and this is why Moodle is knocking over the more rigid or slow moving competition.
The education community is an innovation engine for wider society. For example, the Google story is intertwined with Stanford and the open source movement itself has the education community as a major foundation for its growing successes. Are systems like Moodle and Mahara part of that process? In my view, most definitely yes. Their success or failure will be determined by either their broad or narrow utility, but their utility nonetheless. Such is the brutal meritocracy that is ICT and the Internet. Perhaps they will be redundant soon, perhaps more years left, software has its lifecycle. Open, flexible architectures are the best placed to adapt and evolve to the changing needs of society – the real world users.
February 8, 2009 at 10:30 am
leighblackall
There is a term we coined back in 2004 when this debate began for me at least: free ranger. It is the ability to use and manage your content on what ever is freely available, and to make judgments on what to use, and by able to pick up and relocate at anytime. So, using Blogger to “bring it all together” and always on the lookout for lock in. For example, when Google started requiring a single sign-in over its services and started making Blogger a little less reliable, it was 5 clicks and 3 years of blogging was now on WordPress.com
Relying on an institution to install and manage an ePortfolio platform is (I think) more precarious than relying on Google to keep Blogger running, or WordPress to keep WordPress.com going etc. Blogger and WordPress are less affected by brain drain, public holidays, educational policy etc. True they have their own issues, just not as perocial and subject to educational policy making.
I’d certainly concede that supporting open source software development capacities in NZ is a good thing, and that education should be playing a key role in that.. but when I see a lecturer who refuses to even look at Blogger, or Wikipedia, but then becomes the lead champion for Mahara because it is an “ePortfolio” system rather than a “blog”, or Moodle because it has a “wiki” feature in it.. then I get to asking what is going on here? Why are these teachers so reticent to not engage with collective knowledge systems and popular media, but ready as ever for something that will help them retain what they know. If Moodle and Mahara weren’t there – would we have better engagement and participation in collective knowledge, would NZ culture be stronger and self confident?
Its like radio and TV. Imagine there is a national radio station that is giving teachers unlimited air time for anything they want, but instead the teachers set up their own radio station employing experts to keep it running, paying publishers for content, and rolling out staff training for their unfamiliar and uncommon user interface. Then, after they iron out all the bugs, they perplex themselves with low student engagement, retention and subject relavence. Sure, that teacher, IT staff and publisher developed skills in running a radio station… they may have even found jobs in the national radio station in the end, but really? Meanwhile their students still have very little idea how to use the national radio beyond entertainment and socialising. They have no clue about the opportunities for professional development through the national radio network and its international connections…
But sure! If we can rely on an institution’s install of Mahara, allowing people to use it in anyway they want to (that is not some blind adherance to educational expectations), keeping it running for people beyond their time as an enroled student, and for the teachers to mix it up with the outside world, then there really would be no difference. But why? Mahara is more or less the same as WordPress.com etc and those outside systems are freely available now and are already socially networked on a massive scale. Blogger even more. If the differences between Mahara and Blogger are technically slim, but the social connection incomparible.. why would I use Mahara unless I hadn’t a clue about the Internet? And that’s who it services – those teachers who for what ever reason just wont engage with the Internet.
But if Mahara was networked in with the National Library, Archive, professional databases, mirrored and compatible with international setups like Archive.org and WikiMedia projects, gave me something beyond what I can already get, then it might be something..
February 8, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Richard Wyles
Mahara has a very distinct feature-set in contrast to WordPress – perhaps you need a closer look there Leigh. Think about it – both are open source. Why on earth would Mahara be just a clone of an existing system? In open source we can rip the code from systems and improve upon it but WordPress wasn’t an option on what we wanted to do. But here we go, it ends up being a fruitless discussion really – it’s not that we should end up on the same song-sheet but the logic doesn’t flow for me and I withdraw as work beckons tomorrow. All the best, you have a vision, I have a vision, cool, let’s work hard at it, good things will come!
cheers
Rich
February 8, 2009 at 8:51 pm
leighblackall
Fair enough Richard, thanks for stopping by. Its a shame I’ve talked specifically about Mahara. Like Moodle is to LMS, Mahara is to ePortfolios, and that’s a great thing in another way. But my issue is with LMS and ePortfolios generally.
For the benefit of other readers:
Mahara features: In order to facilitate this access control, all Artefacts you wish to show to other users need to be bundled up and placed into one area. Within Mahara this compilation of selected Artefacts is called a View.
WordPress.com features (not to be confused with WordPress.org where like Mahara you download and install it on your own server): Takes seconds, costs nada… Not just a blog… WordPress.com has a feature called “pages” which allows you to easily create web pages. For example, you could add an “about me” page with your biography, and a link to that page would be automatically added to your sidebar. You can even create an entire web site using pages on WordPress.com, with a custom home page and your blog as one of the sub-pages.
Blogger features: We created Blogger to give you an easy way to share your thoughts — about current events, what’s going on in your life, or anything else you’d care to discuss — with the world. We’ve developed a host of features to make blogging as simple and effective as possible.
February 9, 2009 at 1:05 am
Ray Tolley
Hi, Leigh,
Surely you are not beguiled by the sales pitch of Mahara? I quote:
“What makes Mahara different from other ePortfolio systems is that you control which items and what information (Artefacts) within your portfolio other users see. “
The eFolio system has been specifically designed for various Audiences to see different views, all at the same time.
Again, I quote:
“In order to facilitate this access control, all Artefacts you wish to show to other users need to be bundled up and placed into one area. Within Mahara this compilation of selected Artefacts is called a View.”
Does this mean that different ‘Views’ need different bundles? In eFolio we have just one store of artefacts which may be accessed by differning audineces seeing different ‘Views’. Which I call SOSM (Save Once, See Many). This has a singular benefit on file-space.
However, most importantly, I must disagree with your perception of the above blogging tools as providing anywhere near the service that a well-designed e-Portfolio system can offer. Minnesota’s well-established (7 yrs) eFolio has over 95,000 registered users and is now being piloted/adopted by both the whole of California and Pensylvania. My UK version is also gathering attention from around the world, including NZ and Aus.
See my demo at: http://www.raytolley1.xfolioworld.com
February 9, 2009 at 7:51 am
leighblackall
Hi Ray, thanks for showing the example. Actually it reinforces my resolve to say that blogging (and other popular webservices) can be used to establish and manage such a site. Is there an ePortfolio platform being offered in a free web based service yet? The closest I can think of is LinkedIn. That is a key difference here I think too. What is ready Admittedly LinkedIn doesn’t give you the designed look your demo has, but it is free and web based and increasingly networked.
How about my “ePortfolio” on Wikieducator? Again, it doesn’t have the design of yours, but a very similar array of information is there. If I spent more time on it, I could have it looking colourful etc.. but I keep it plain so I can easily cut and paste it through to other MediaWiki sites. Or how about this course blog? Notice the tabs across the top? They can be any number, and set in such a way to be like your folio menu. WordPress is better for achieving this website pages look, and gives you the ability to make some pages private and others public – like Maharas Views?
But I must repeat myself. It isn’t about what software is better! Its great that there are more options available for services that want to offer these things.. my beef has always been that in education we go for these things, often at the exclusion of popular platforms, and thereby doing people a great disfavour. Personally I would rather learn how to set up my portfolio in Linkedin, Blogger, WordPress, Facebook or the next popular service that comes along before taking on an ePortfolio. Same for LMS. The popular services are easy, freely available and web based. It makes sense to start with them and if need be work our way up to specialised software. But in education we have this strange drive to spend the little resources we have setting up our own little systems that doesn’t even come close to what can be achieved “out there” and costs us a fortune to administer. Teachers spend all their time trying to master a Moodle or a Blackboard, but won’t have the foggiest idea how to communicate online and manage online identities…
February 9, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Ray Tolley
Hi, Leigh,
I liked your ePortfolio Wikie but my one question is, is it possible to make certain sections totally invisible including removal of hyperlinked menu items? ie available to different audiences, concurrently?
The design you saw of my demo is only one of many templates and colour schemes. You also said, “If I spent more time on it, I could have it looking colourful etc.. The whole beauty of the eFolio product is that all templates and colour schemes are instantly and effortlessly available, and, as I attempt to explain on my website, http://www.maximise-ict.co.uk/eFolio-01.htm, colour schemes, for instance can be changed as often as one likes according, if you like, to which ever pop-group is now in vogue, and certainly according to the intended audience. Again, tabs at the top can automatically appear according to which template one selects.
The bottom line, for me, is that any system should be capable of being used not only by the ‘Digitally Elite’ but by all sections of the community, ‘from cradle to grave’. It is one of my chief complaints that the HE community often appear to ignore the fact that the e-Portfolio MUST be a lifelong and lifewide tool, catering for ALL interests and work-life balances.
However, there is no such thing as ‘FREE’. You spend much time in developing the tools that interest you, finding their particular strengths and weaknesses as you go. If this was not your main interest, if you had totally different work-pressures, would you still spend so much time developing your Nirvana? You, as with others around the world, are spending many hours of the tax-payers’ money in exploring and developing systems which those in other walks of life would not have the time nor inclination to emulate. Compared to your time and effort, what is ‘FREE’ if alternatively faced with an anual bill of $2-$3 per year for a ready-made, easy to use tool with free online support, upgrades etc etc?
My whole mission in life is to promote and develop a simple tool that does everything you want, avoids your rightly identified frustration of “Teachers [who] spend all their time trying to master a Moodle or a Blackboard, but won’t have the foggiest idea how to communicate online and manage online identities… and, most importantly is readily available to all sections of the community, not just teachers.
Kindest Regards – from the frozen North of England)
February 9, 2009 at 9:17 pm
leighblackall
Jeez Ray, you didn’t look too hard… sure the wiki is complicated for quite a few people (not complicated enough to stop Wikipedia developing though), but the Blogger example I showed you – you had nothing to say to that. It is so easy to use even my mother has one. I showed a woman today who barely uses computers, how to start a blog on blogger. She wanted one for her bike trip across Europe. She now has 2. One private, one public. She could have many more in seconds. On Tuesday nights I work at a Community Learning Centre showing “tax payers” how to use the Internet freely and easily in this way. At the moment I wouldn’t know where to go to freely and easy get an ePortfolio.. is there even one web-based yet? I tell you what.. when I see 60 million eportfolios out there, I might pay more attention. Good luck with your mission. I’ll continue in my cushy HE job of nirvana. Sheesh!
February 11, 2009 at 9:50 am
Richard Wyles
Hi again,
I just thought I’d paste this extract in from a piece of recent writing to illustrate that I don’t disagree with some of the points you are making, although not in the same back & white fashion.
“Prior to the dot.com crash of 2001, there was a lot of hyperbole about how eLearning would completely transform education. Like many concepts during the dot.com bubble, that initial excitement dissipated as the over-promises generally failed to deliver. eLearning practitioners had to critically re-assess what worked and what didn’t. What emerged was a period of standardisation. Course structures were standardised and designed for scalability. The Learning Management System (LMS) became the dominant ‘one size fits all’ delivery environment for e-learning and remains as a major component of the eLearning landscape today.
In New Zealand during the early 2000s, the distribution of LMSs was uneven, reflecting the different budget levels available, know-how and enthusiasm. In 2004, the New Zealand Government established contestable funding grants, to be administered by the Tertiary Education Commission. Several projects were infrastructure focused and this period saw the rise of Moodle initially in the ITP sector, and then across the education sector in general.
But technology moves ever faster and the caution rightly exercised by the education community back in the early 2000s is now confronted by more and more technology choices e.g. a plethora of free web-based content systems such as wikis and blogs, social networking sites, open source applications, 3-D virtual worlds, e-portfolios, video conferencing, iTunes U, mobile technology, the list goes on. Our students today are networked like never before. While LMSs remain an integral component, the e-learning landscape is now richer and therefore more complex.”
I still see Moodle as being far from redundant, in fact a long way to go within workplace learning environments plus there’s a definite role for some of the specific feature-sets we’re designing within Mahara. Also, I see the education system as being an integral part of the political economy and a major driver of innovation (software + all sorts of research obviously) that benefits benefits broader society and how bad would the world be if that weren’t the case?
Sure, at a micro level not all initiatives are cost-effective, well managed or even conceptually worthwhile but that is equally as true within the business world. I used Google further up as an example of how education systems supported software development. I work within the open source space and the history of OSS is intertwined with higher education. I have no doubt that the growth of OSS has broad benefit to society. It is also my view that the funds going into this area are absolutely tiny compared to the broader budgetary requirements or research and development going on in education settings.
February 12, 2009 at 9:42 pm
alexanderhayes
To be fair, and with reference to Graham Wegner, I have eased up a little on the “complaint” driven retorts and have given the e-portfolio side of things a little more thought and time……in fact an awful lot.
Of late I’m contracted to work with a huge energy provider in Australia who are struggling to come to grips with any unification of data that spans 35 years of training and a zillion differing methodologies with lives literally in the balance…..20,000 volts is hard to argue with and I tend to agree with some of the senior staff that some standards need application status.
As does the consideration for the size of the compactus building to house the hundreds of thousands of RPL and accreditation paperwork for the tens of thousands of employees who flow through the system each with their own agenda’s , years of vendor training from literally hundreds of different providers world-wide.
So…….do we let them all claim open status and trawl their wikis, blogs, Facebook profiles, Yahoo groups and every other identity driven presence on the web or do we find some other manner of gathering “evidence” ( god knows who coined such a forensic term for educational re-purpose ) in a product or thing that allows the user some sense of autonomy…at least pointing to where they have achieved things and providing room for those who have the faintest and can at least scan and upload something.
Or do we do as I do and claim that my VLE / PLE / VTE / Eport is the web.
As my Google records still show my eportfolio is me – alexanderhayes.
One word, lower case, attached to most things I publish to the web engine since 1998.
Leigh, what do you suggest I say to these senior managers who have no web presence, who have served our country in military roles, who hold huge sums of money and power in the tips of their fingers as they seek a solution to providing incumbents with a means to build a flexible, role-to-role, energy provider-to-energy provider business solution that records thei every training schedule, offer of training, record of training, documentation of training , IP address, time of access, statistics of participation and meal they had last night type of record ?
To stand at the podium and ask them to go copyleft, to bookmark instead of favourite, to Flickr instead of polaroid, to Mahara instead of Peoplesoft, to de-school instead of train is quite laughable.
But possible.
In fact , bugger it all…..I’m going to try.
🙂
February 12, 2009 at 9:52 pm
leighblackall
Yes, that is what you should say. And if they can’t deal with that, then they should do NOTHING. Don’t go and buy an LMS and start demanding everyone use it. Don’t go and employ a network admin team to censor and control the greatest training aid ever made. Don’t go dreaming up some utopian ePortfolio system to add to your staff’s already full workload. Just do NOTHING and let your people surf instead. If they haven’t heard of the Web yet, then their not ready to start thinking about using it. They’ll save a lot of money if they just did nothing.
February 12, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Ray Tolley
Alex,
There is a middle way! As I often say “Leave the VLE to do what it does best and use the e-Portfolio for what it does best!”
I feel for your work scenario and, despite Leigh’s comments about “some utopian ePortfolio”, I could easily set up a template for a secure and practical e-Portfolio system that your workforce could use immediately, with only a shallow learning curve to begin with but still has the potential for Web2 applications as and when they are ready. And very low-cost, too!
If your situation is even slightly more than hypothetical please contact me at:
rjt@maximise-ict.co.uk
Talk/consultancy is for free!
March 2, 2009 at 11:37 am
Richard Wyles
Another consideration for whn no SLAs are in place…I’ve taken this from Seb Schmooler’s newsletter
“Ma.gnolia – when a service “up in the cloud” goes wrong
Last year I was involved in project that used, to good effect, the social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia. The nice thing about Magnolia was its support for OpenID and the way that small groups could form around narrowly focused bookmarking endeavours, without the clutter of “mass” services like Delicious. Thankfully the project is long finished. Otherwise the data-loss described in this rueful message from the founder on the Magnolia web site (http://ma.gnolia.com/) would now be causing problems…..
March 2, 2009 at 11:56 am
leighblackall
Thanks Richard, this highlights what I’m trying to say. We should operate in these environments so that we can develop skills for mitigating these ever present risks – whether it be on web services like this, or on your locally hosted service.
In the context of social bookmarking web services like this Magnolia, You chose not to use Yahoo’s Del.icio.us for valid reasons, but Del.icio.us provides back up tools in its browser extension that automatically synchronised with the browser bookmarks, as well as RSS feeds that can be used to generate backups.
Using these services highlight the risks you point out and make us all more aware of the need to be skillful in their use. Local hosting does not offer any more security against these risks. I have lost more data in locally hosted, or independently administered services then I have in the social media scape to date.. and being mindful of ways to operate in the social media scape so that your media is distributed and not centralised will ensure you are not afflicted by losses like what you point to.
You know all this, but by posting the story here I take it to mean that you think “controlling” our data locally is a way to manage these risks?
March 2, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Richard Wyles
No, the purpose of posting it was to highlight another consideration, not everyone will understand. With SaaS models you have service level agreements that stipulate the disaster recovery mechanisms in place. On the “free” web you might just have a disclaimer – I’m not advocating that the free social networking services are bad, far from it, but I also don’t share the black and white view that managed services with specific missions – e.g. an eportfolio application, is necessarily bad just because it is built to fulfil a perceived need.
March 2, 2009 at 12:36 pm
leighblackall
And I don’t think you can reduce this argument to something that simple either. The issue to me has always been that the education system has in it a range of traditions and mind sets that certain technologies help to reinforce. Some of those technologies mimic other technologies that promise to bring change in the education sector. But instead, we watch the changes going on around us in the wider society and market, and never really engage. I think ePortfolios help to prevent that engagement. Of course they service a need. Its the the thing that expresses the need that I’m trying to challenge.
You seem to see the ePortfolio as a nice middle ground today. Obviously we disagree. I think it gives education a way to avoid engaging. At least that has been how I have witnessed the uptake.
See the opening paragraph of this post again, as well as the links in it back to my earlier posts.
This reminds me of Early Film, Early Internet, Early Days, Network Learning and Teaching has nothing to do with technology
March 2, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Richard Wyles
it’s not a middle ground, nor is it an either/or it’s an ‘and’ for those who find value in it. Plus, as per my earlier comment, I see the education sector as an innovation driver and integral part of the political economy that drives benefits throughout broader society. Research, including software is clearly a part of that reality.
November 14, 2009 at 10:57 am
Jennifer Villarreal
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Editor
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jen@worldwidelearn.com