The Living Schoolbook

A couple of days ago, Barbara Shelly (one of the original "founders" and a former director of the LSB) came in for a visit. She and I spoke for a while about how she noticed that the adoption rate of education tools by teachers and students was rather low. At least, that's what I think we were talking about. :)

At one point she compared it to the explosive adoption of IM, cell phones, MySpace or Facebook. I think that she really pointed out an important difference between those technologies that put the user in the driver seat and allow them to network with whomever they want, whenever they want, for whatever purpose they want. That network effect and personal sense of control is something that isn't being replicated in the courseware space.

In courseware, it isn't easy to create a small collaboration space for you and your peers. Implementations usually manage student access to course spaces by the bang of the semester drum. There isn't much of a point to pouring a lot of your time into creating content that may be archived and put on a shelf or deleted altogether. What is it about these "closed audience" systems that keep users from having the same excitement about the tools as they do for their MySpace account? Steven Gilbert's blog post showed up for me after a quick Google for "myspace personal publishing blackboard". He notes that the social aspect makes a big difference.

Courseware allows teachers to "manage" a class and to provision services to the students. Adaptive release of content; provisioned users; enterprise integration; and integration with content repositories put a lot of power in the hands of an educator. In contrast, MySpace doesn't try to manage much of anything. You can make and break relationships when you want; put up or take down content when you want to express yourself; and what you put on MySpace won't be deleted by anyone but you. You have the control.

Portfolio tools try to do that too. Students should be able to put together a portfolio and show it to whomever they please.

I think that the dream here is that students are going to get really into putting together their portfolio, just like they do when they "dress up" their MySpace page and chat with their academic friends about all the things they learned in class. I can see that happening to some extent, but I can also see peer review "flame wars" happening through that communication too. I wonder how excited the institution would be to have that sort of content out there, with their logo on it, even if the discussions that happened there were the most productive ones that the students had. What forms of controls would make sense for that sort of environment without killing the sense of spontaneity and personal ownership that might make it appealing?

Better yet, can we build two systems that talk to each other? The courseware server where classes are managed and the official records are kept; and the personal "portfolio" platform which talks to the courseware system and to all of the student's (or teacher's) "friends".

A two system approach would make use of messaging of education related content between the different systems. When I login to my student system, I receive content from the classes I am subscribed to. New learning outcomes, activity descriptions (such as assignments, discussion topics, portfolio reviews, etc.) and assessment data are sent to me. I can turn in my assignments, post to discussions and share my portfolios through a content "port" on this channel and I can receive shared content (their discussion posts, and portfolios for example) from others on that channel as well.

The social aspect of the system occurs through alternative channels that users create and allow their friends to subscribe to. The content through these channels doesn't go through the courseware server.