I didn’t really (fully) articulate my position(s) on in my recent LMS post, either. I kind of ran out of steam at 1600 words. Maybe for the better. (I’m still not fully articulating things yet - more to come later, if I can come up with the energy - but I wanted to respond quickly to Brian)
I am really not a fan of the LMS as an end-state, but it’s a symptom of institutional models, not the illness itself. Unless/until the nature of post-secondary institutions changes pretty radically, the LMS (or something like it) is here to stay. Yeah. I feel it too.
long, rambling post alert. it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, so lots of things have been stewing. bear with me.
It’s fashionable to hate the LMS. It’s the poster child for Enterprise Thinking and lazy (online) pedagogy, so it is easy to rail against the LMS as The Cause of All Educational Evil. The LMS is put into the stocks, and we are expected to stand in the town square and throw rotten fruit at it.
Looks like the Connected Courses open course thing is shaping up to be kind of awesome. This is a placeholder post to let it sniff out the feed for the #connectedcourses tag here on the old blogstead. Here’s hoping my copious free time will be put to good use.
Fall 2014 Block Week kicked off today, meaning we just pushed into the 2014-2015 academic year. Holy. The last one is basically just a blur. But, we did a surprisingly epic number of major things as a team1:
Migrating from Blackboard to D2L in about 8 months, including:
building and testing the integration with Peoplesoft & Elluminate
designing and conducting workshops to support a couple thousand instructors
working to help get the 31,000 FTE student body through the move
John sent a link to our loose group of cycling buddies, and I’ve read the article 3 times now. Each time, it feels like it hits closer to home.
I’ve been riding my bike as the primary way of getting around, and have been communiting by bike almost exclusively since 2006. I’ve always ridden, but never really considered myself a cyclist until then. I was never athletic, never good at sports. But I was happy on a bike. Over the years, I actually got pretty good on a bike. I could make it go fast. I could climb hills. I could ride far. It was awesome.
We think of technological change as the fancy new expensive stuff, but the real change comes from last decade’s stuff getting cheaper and faster. That’s what’s happening to robots now. And because their mechanical minds are capable of decision making they are out-competing humans for jobs in a way no pure mechanical muscle ever could.
It’s one of those things that sound unbelievably geeky - it’s like geocaching (a geeky repurposing of multibillion dollar GPS satellites to play hide and seek) combined with capture the flag, combined with realtime strategy games, bundled up as a mobile game app (kind of geeky as well), with a backstory of a particle collider inadvertently leading to the discovery of a new form of matter and energy (particle physics? a little geeky). It’s the kind of thing where peoples’ faces glaze over on the first description of portals and XM points, and resonators and links and fields.
I’ve been trying to get my head around the reasoning for the corporate rebranding to Brightspace12, and I’m coming up short. I like the name, but it feels like everything they’ve described here at Fusion could have been done under the previous banner of Desire2Learn. I’m more concerned about signs that the company is shifting to a more corporate Big Technology Company stance.
When we adopted D2L, they felt like a teaching-and-learning company. What made them interesting to us is that they did feel like a company that really got teaching and learning. They were in the trenches. They used the language. They weren’t a BigTechCo. But, they were on a trajectory aspiring toward BigTechCo.
Or, how I spent about 15 hours debugging our MediaWiki installation at wiki.ucalgary.ca, trying to figure out why file uploads were mysteriously failing.
We’ve got a fair number of active users on the wiki, and a course in our Werklund School of Education’s grad program is using it now for a collaborative project. Which would be awesome, except they were reporting errors when uploading files. I logged in, tried to upload a file, and BOOM, got this:
Having spent the last 2+ years of my life working on the LMS selection, implementation and replacement here at UCalgary, I can relate to this awesome new article on a pretty profound level. My life in educational technology has been almost entirely redefined in relation to the LMS. That’s a horrifying realization.
This part weighs particularly heavily…
The demands of sustaining infrastructure have continued to dominate institutional priorities, and the recent promise of Web 2.0 has been unevenly integrated into campus strategies: instances of broad, culture-shifting experimentation along these lines in higher education can be counted on one hand. IT organizations have started outsourcing enterprise systems in the hope of leveraging hosted solutions and the cloud more broadly to free up time, energy, and resources. The practice of outsourcing itself seems to have become the pinnacle of innovation for information technology in higher education. Meanwhile, IT organizations are often defined by what’s necessary rather than what’s possible, and the cumulative weight of an increasingly complex communications infrastructure weighs ever heavier.
