Education mashup of the "tool set du jour" - a strategy to pursue
Last week I had the privilege of attending a brown bag lunch seminar given by Professor Emeritus Donald Ely on the subject of distance learning.
The discussion began with Dr. Ely putting an emphasis on assessment but seemed to diverge quickly to participant discussions about how it is difficult to create the virtual environment necessary to teach tacit skills like public speaking and medicine. Questions like, "How do I assess active listening skills over distance" were typical of the initial discussion.
It was noted that some LMS's seemed to have certain features that filled certain functional gaps and some of the participants made suggestions/observations that many tools that are widely used today (AIM, Skype, Google Docs) may help fill some perceived gaps in learning mangement tools such as Blackboard and WebCT.
It was a good discussion that was accompanied by the excited enthusiasm that is typical of sharing sessions about the new tools. Markedly absent from the entire discussion, however, was the realization that there is going to be a huge gap left as faculty and students move from a provisioned set of tools (their centrally managed, institutional courseware systems) to a distributed set of tools. Keep in mind that the accountability movement almost demands a centralized system from which we query about student, class and program performance.
It strikes me that next generation LMS's may be more like a mashup view of the "tool set du jour". Faculty and students will continue to find and use new tools that better suit their pedagogical/learning needs. The institution will want to gather and analyze data created in those tools for a variety of reasons (program evaluation, best practice identification, etc.) What is missing is the common language that these new tools will need to speak before we can use them. Sure Google Docs is great as a place for students to work collaboratively, but the institution needs a means to harvest that document for its own purposes. Student portfolios can be created on Facebook, but how does the college compare the student's portfolio over time? Someone may build a killer 3rd party assignment tool, but can we realistically consider it if the institutiuonal system can't interface with it?
I think that this is a strategic direction where a community like Sakai could weigh in heavily. Rather than emulating what we already see out there in the courseware market, let's distinguish ourselves and anticipate where the market is going.