Category: Online learning

Participatory pedagogy

3rd June 2009


Image source: www.justskins.com

Just came across a reference in my Twitter-Using Educators LinkedIn group to an article published in the Huffington Post a couple of weeks ago entitled: Embracing the Twitter Classroom. Authored by Jessica Gross, it includes some interesting references, among them a story about a Penn State University professor, Cole Camplese, who maintains a screen full of his students’ Twitter streams throughout each class. According to Camplese, once students warm to the idea that their professor actually wants them to chat during class, they begin floating ideas or posting links to related materials. In addition, where a shy student might type an observation or question on Twitter, others in the class would respond with notes encouraging the student to raise the topic out loud. On other occasions, the professor would see a link posted by a student and stop class to discuss it.

This is an excellent example of what Howard Rheingold refers to as participatory pedagogy. Bringing social media into classrooms, says Rheingold, is “challenging the 1000-yr-old paradigm that you have to learn from a master and the only way to do that is to go to lecture and take notes”. Indeed, as the article goes on to point out, “teaching students to learn from and with each other is a wise acknowledgment that more and more, students are relying on their peers for information. Sixty-five percent of Americans aged 12-17 and 67 percent of those aged 18-32 use social networking sites, according to the Pew Research Center. Students’ lives are infused with each other’s viewpoints.”

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Blackborg acquires Dark Angel

1st June 2009


Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikelesombre/

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported last week on Blackboard’s acquisition of Angel. The article’s title: Blackboard Buys Another Rival, to Customers’ Dismay, says it all really. We’re not to worry, however, because Blackboard’s president and chief executive, Michael L. Chasen, said the company had learned from the WebCT acquisition and promised that this time it will be different. Unfortunately, Mr Chasen just doesn’t get it. He and his company continue to misread the zeitgeist, and if ever a business deserves to fall victim to disruptive innovation, it is this one.

Blackboard is widely regarded as the Leviathan of the learning management system (LMS) world, and it is a platform that has come to dominate online delivery of education, particularly in the higher education sphere. Aside from its poor reputation for customer service, this cumbersome monolith does not have the capacity to keep up with the pace of change. The science of online learning continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and as a proprietary, high-cost, and relatively inflexible system, Blackboard can only innovate at the speed of its next service pack. Meanwhile, the open source movement incorporates pedagogical innovation on the run. The end result is that Blackboard is simply ‘uncool’, and it will remain so, long as it continues to tell educators and learners what they can have, rather than give them what they want.

All this will be welcome news for the likes of Moodle, Sakai and Ning, and the smaller proprietary systems that are nimble and versatile enough to ride the social networking wave, and provide the kind of learning environment for students and faculty where they feel they have creative licence and a sense of ownership.

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