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July 5, 2008
November 29, 2007
This is the PLE version review of a previous post.
Below I’ve rewritten Will’s tale using the terminology of some of my design wireframes:
The wireframes draw quite heavily on several application designs, notably Shrook and Colloquia as well as my earlier more web-oriented E-Learning Aggregator design. Note that this design is part of my thoughts for the JISC PLE Reference Model project, so I’m not actually building it, its just part of a specification for what a PLE might be.
Note that the examples in the figures aren’t the same as the story, as I created these wireframes before reading Will’s post, but hopefully most people reading this can figure out what on earth is meant to be going on.
English teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up the computer at his classroom desk. It’s 6:50 a.m., and he’s got about 45 minutes before his sleepy Journalism students will begin filing into his classroom.
He opens his iBook and launches the PLE program. In the Resources view, he does a quick scan of the New York Times headlines that are displayed in the list and clicks on one of the links to read a story about war reporting that he thinks his student journalists might be interested in. Tom right-clicks the item and selects “Share…”, then adds a bit of annotation in the dialog box that comes up, and finally selects the “journalism resources” conduit to post it to his Journalism Resources link blog on the school server. With this step, he archives the page for future reference and automatically has the link and his note appear in the “Journalism Resources” feed his journalism students subscribed to at the beginning of the course, when they joined the “Journalism” activity that Tom created and shared.
Next, he switches to the Activities view and selects the “Journalism” activity, and in the Resources group he scans summaries that link to all the work his students submitted to their Weblogs the night before. Seeing one particularly well done response, he right-clicks the item, selects “Share…”, and posts a positive comment about her submission in his Journalism class blog. (He notices, scanning through the items, that a couple of his students have already left some positive feedback to the author on their blogs as well.) He selects “Share…” again, this time first publishing it to his “Best Practices” conduit (the target of which is also one of the sources in the Journalism activity, for students to read and discuss), and then using a separate conduit he has created for a place he uses to keep track of all of the best examples of student work. It’s 7:00.
After taking a sip of his coffee, Tom flips back to the Resources view, and takes a look at his research feeds (handily grouped under “Research”). He’s been asked to keep abreast of the latest news about technology and teaching writing, and this morning he sees his Google search feed has turned up a new version of “Write Outloud.” He clicks the link, reads about the new version on the site, and then decides to “Share…” it using a link blog set up for all of his department colleagues to share. In the “Share Resource” dialog box, he writes a couple of lines of description about how it might benefit the department, and then tags it “Technology” before posting it (this means the server hosting the department blogs automatically archives it to the tech page of the English Department Weblog). Later that day, all the members of his department will see his link as well as any others his colleagues may have added as a part of their daily scan of their PLEs, aggregators, or however they get their news. He also decides he wants to create another group for the words “journalism” and “weblogs.” From the “Resources” menu he chooses “New > Smart Group”, and enters the criteria. The new Smart Group will select items from the sources in the “Research” group containing those words.
At around 7:05, back in the Activities view, Tom goes to the “American Literature” activity and creates a post about an assignment on symbolism for his major American literature class, attaching the assignment document to the post. He right-clicks the completed post and selects “Publish > American Lit Best Practices”, which publishes the post using the conduit (account settings) for his American Literature Best Practices blog. The rest of the American Lit teachers will be able to see his published artifact so that they can use in their own classes. He selects “Publish > American Lit Class – Homework” from the context menu, which posts the assignment, with a “Homework” tag added to it, to the blog account he uses to communicate with students in the class . The school has a special aggregator service set up that scans all its teacher’s class blogs for entries tagged “Homework”, and automatically sends an email to relevant parents who have requested it, saying that their son or daughter has homework to do that evening. E-mails also get sent to a couple of counselors who are tracking at risk students.
About 7:15 Tom decides to scan the latest feeds from the school Weblogs he is subscribed to, which he can see from the Resources view (he previously put them all in a group called “School – Misc”). He sees that the basketball team won the county tournament, the new edition of the school paper is online, and that the superintendent has posted important information about an upcoming safety drill. He clicks through to read the entire post, and then leaves a comment suggesting a way to alleviate crowding in the hallways during the drill. (He sees a parent also has a suggestion about the timing.) He decides that he doesn’t want to scan the soccer team news any longer, so he selects the “Soccer” feed in the sources list and presses backspace. He does notice, however, the “New Feeds” feed from the school lists a new “Tech Deals” feed that the tech supervisor has created. Since he’s looking for a new home computer, he clicks to subscribe to it.
At 25 after, he notices that two of his students have posted the interview they did with the principal. He clicks the “download and sync” button on the post to add it to his iPod. He lifts it out of his cradle and puts it in his briefcase so he can play it on his car stereo during his ride home after school. If it’s good, he’ll upload it to the school podcast page where the 135-odd subscribers (mostly parents) will automatically receive it so they can hear it and hopefully get most of their questions about the new building project answered.
With just a few minutes left before his first class, Tom goes back to the “American Literature” activity, selects “New > Document” and types in a few notes about an idea he had for the lit project his students are completing next week. Now that his volume of e-mail has been drastically reduced, he scans the few messages in his in box, takes a last gulp of coffee, and opens his classroom door to the sound of happy students.
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Posted in Scott Wilson’s Worklog on 2005/08/31
November 15, 2007
English teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up the computer at his classroom desk. It’s 6:50 a.m., and he’s got about 45 minutes before his sleepy Journalism students will begin filing into his classroom.
He logs in and opens up his personal Weblog on the school intranet. There, he does a quick scan of the New York Times headlines that are displayed on his homepage and clicks on one of the links to read a story about war reporting that he thinks his student journalists might be interested in. With a quick click, Tom uses the “Post to Scuttle” button on his toolbar, adds a bit of annotation to the form that comes up, and adds it to his journalism tagset at the ScuttleEDU intall on his school server. With this one step, he archives the page for future reference and automatically sends the link and his note to display on his journalism class portal for students to read when they log in.
Next, he clicks the link to open his Bloglines aggregator and he scans a compiled list of summaries that link to all the work his students submitted to their Weblogs the night before. Seeing one particularly well done response, he clicks through to the student’s personal site and leaves a positive comment about her submission. He notices that a couple of his students have already left some positive feedback to the author as well. He also “Scuttles” that site, adding it to his “Best Practices” tagset which will send it to the class homepage as well for students to read and discuss, and to a separate Weblog page he has created to keep track of all of the best examples of student work. It’s 7:00.
After taking a sip of his coffee, Tom takes a look at his research RSS feeds in Bloglines. He’s been asked to keep abreast of the latest news about technology and teaching writing, and this morning he sees his Google search feed has turned up a new version of “Write Outloud”. He clicks the link, reads about the new version on the site, and then clicks on a different “Post to Scuttle” button that uses an account set up for all of his department colleagues to share. When the form comes up, he writes a couple of lines of description about how it might benefit the department, and then tags it “technology” which automatically archives it to the tech page of the English Department Weblog. Later that day, all the members of his department will see his link as well as any others his colleagues may have added as a part of their daily e-mail update from Scuttle. He also decides he wants to create another search feed for the words “journalism” and “weblogs”. With a click on the toolbar, a dialog box appears and he enters his terms, then clicks on the Feedster.com radio button (one among four choices.) He hits ok, and a new feed headline box is added to his portal.
At around 7:05, Tom uses his personal Weblog to upload an assignment on symbolism for his major American literature class. When he opens up the document online to check it, he adds that to a different Scuttle tagset under his English login and it gets sent to a separate Web page set up on the English site for American Literature Best Practices. The rest of the American Lit teachers will get an automatic e-mail later in the day notifying them of his published artifact that they can use in their own classes. Then, he creates a post for his Lit class portal that has a link to the assignment, and he publishes the post to the class homepage. Automatically, parents who have requested it get an e-mail that their son or daughter has homework to do that evening. E-mails also get sent to a couple of counselors who are tracking at risk students.
About 7:15 Tom decides to scan the latest school news feed which aggregates all the new posts from the school Weblogs he is subscribed to. He sees that the basketball team won the county tournament, the new edition of the school paper is online, and that the superintendent has posted important information about an upcoming safety drill. He clicks through to read the entire post, and then leaves a comment suggesting a way to alleviate crowding in the hallways during the drill. He sees a parent also has a suggestion about the timing. Back at his page, he decides that he doesn’t want to scan the soccer team news any longer, so he goes to his subscription page and unchecks the feed. He does notice, however, the “New Feeds” section lists a new “Tech Deals” feed that the tech supervisor has created. Since he’s looking for a new home computer, he clicks to subscribe to it.
At 25 after, he checks his audio library and sees that the MP3 interview that two of his students did with the principal has been downloaded to his player. He lifts it out of his cradle and puts it in his briefcase so he can play it on his car stereo during his ride home after school. If it’s good, he’ll upload it to the school podcast page where the 135-odd subscribers (mostly parents) will automatically receive it so they can hear it and hopefully get most of their questions about the new building project answered.
With just a few minutes left before his first class, Tom opens the personal journal part of his portal and types in a few notes about an idea he had for the lit project his students are completing next week. He files them into the “Literature” sub folder so that he can pull up relevant notes all at once if he needs to. Now that his volume of e-mail has been drastically reduced, he scans the few messages in his in box, takes a last gulp of coffee, and opens his classroom door to the sound of happy students.
—–
Posted in Weblogg-ed on 2005/08/21
November 14, 2007
I should be working on content for my presentations at DevLearn in October that look at what’s next in eLearning. However, the “what’s next” question has become more challenging recently as we’ve seen the rapid growth of simple and easy to deploy tools displacing more complex systems.
On Creating Passionate Users they had a great picture that captures how many of us feel about LMS products:
As the number of features increases our satisfaction level begins to go down because of the complexity of getting it to work for us.
What often happens when systems become very complex is that they begin to get replaced by simpler systems. This is exactly what’s happened in the Content Management space. Wiki’s have exploded onto the scene. They only do about 10% of what a typical CMS will do for you. But, they are so dang easy to get going and use. So, they’ve supplanted the low-end of the market. It forces the CMS products to seek ever higher features to continue to differentiate – a vicious cycle.
I believe we are poised to see this happen in the world of the Learning Management Systems (LMS). They are rapidly growing features that are far beyond what anyone needs. If you look at what’s going on any of the major players, they are adding features and major functional areas at an amazing pace. There are definitely some low-end LMS products that are easy to get up and going. But that’s not really what’s going to replace the LMS. They still require you to think and act in terms of “course” and “training” which is slowly becoming the wrong way to think.
Furthermore, if you step back and take the perspective of a learner, an LMS is simply one of many content sources and there is no advantage to me as a learner of having to go through and register for the course.
Of course, this raises the question – well if we don’t really want an LMS, then what’s the replacement?
I think that folks who are in the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) space have a much better idea of what will come next. In fact, many of us have all created our own Personal Learning Environment by cobbling together using a variety of tools (RSS Reader, Bookmarking, Social Networking, Desktop Search, Web Search, Personal Learning Blog, To Do Lists). I’m not 100% sure that we’ve quite got this right, but it’s certainly much more meaningful to me as a learner than an LMS.
Scott Wilson helped by providing a post with more detailed visualization of this:
That’s what makes me think that something more along the lines of a PLE will begin to come together to replace it.
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Posted in eLearning Technology on 26/07/2006
November 13, 2007
The VLE of the future:
- is going to be less like an information portal, and more like an aggregator.
- is going to be more like an editing and publishing tool and less like a browser.
- is going to break out of the browser window and sit on the desktop.
- will look less like a CMS or Intranet, and more like a cross between apps.
- will act like a personal organiser that helps users coordinate tools and services from learning providers.
- will collate recordings of users activity with reflections in an ongoing portfolio that can be shared with others.
- will allow a user to subscribe to sets of services and materials provided by a range of entities, including universities, colleges, companies, and individuals.
- will also have a very strong social networking capability, so that users can discover other people with shared interests and goals, and forge instant connections.
- will not be institutional, it will be personal, and it will have features that support informal as well as formal learning situations, and a whole range of social activities that we would barely recognize as “learning” today.
- will also allow users to create their own contexts and invite others to join in, publishing their activities and materials either through simple hosting services, or perhaps directly. So anyone can use the VLE of the future to become a learning provider.
- will build upon standards-based technologies. Anything supporting the standards can join the fun, and there will be a range of personal VLEs to suit every taste, platform and pocket: there will be funky VLEs for kids, powerful, enterprise-integrated VLEs for business users, incomprehensible but highly scriptable VLEs for geeks, and so on.
- will interact with my webcam, my mobile phone, my iPod, my TV or practically anything else with a socket or a wireless connection. Practically anything can act as a source for something I distribute, stream or collaborate on through my VLE context, and practically anything can be a rendering platform for my VLE.
- won’t offer us many new tools or content types – chat, resource sharing, discussion, blogging, real-time collaborative authoring etc – but it will offer us new connections and opportunities to engage with one another.
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Posted in Scott Wilson’s Worklog on 2005/01/17
