Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management officially launched it’s .LRN open source e-learning platform.
Bizarrely, it has apparently absolutely nothing to do with either Microsoft LRN or Microsoft .NET. Microsoft lawsuit in the making?
First, a note: If you’re just catching up on this conversation via the blurb in Online Learning Daily, you might want to start with George Siemens’ post, then my response, then back and forth. I’m putting out one more attempt at clarity, then dropping out of this thread. :-)
George wants to point to complexity as the enemy of standards. Stephen Downes said “Complicated standards result in complicated and inflexible software, exactly what people don’t want and don’t choose.” I agree with Stephen’s point, and I want to make it clear that I don’t think complexity should necessarily be the ultimate goal, in and of itself. However, neither do I think complexity is the enemy.
The “pain of multiplicity” I referred to comes about when we wind up with with either multiple, heterogenous standards or multiple, heterogenous versions of the same standard. The “pain of multiplicity” could also be expressed as the “pain of heterogeneity.” Come to think of it, heterogeneity is really the term I should have used, instead of multiplicity.
James Farmer proposes weblog learning management system. I think he’s using the term “learning management” loosely. His architecture appears to be a series of interlinked logs [note: link to a PDF file].
He says this is “more functional than the current crop of LMSs I’ve encountered,” but I don’t see any assessment tools, any learner tracking, any synchronous communication options, any back-office integration capabilities, any support for content packaging formats, any integration points for third-party tools, any mechanisms for securing copyrighted content to adhere to fair use requirements, etc etc etc.
Having worked in this field from both “sides” (i.e., managing a university’s academic technology department and working for a commercial instructional technology vendor), I am respectful of people who bootstrap their own solutions. I fondly remember cobbling together a toolkit for online learning in ‘96 consisting of HTML templates, good ol’ HyperNews, and CGI scripts for web chat and multiple-choice quizzes.
And I’m a proponent of weblogs in education. However, no matter how wonderful weblogs are, I don’t expect they will become a panacea to meet all needs, any more than any other technology would be.
In “High Score Education”, from the current issue of Wired, James Paul Gee comments on the inherent learning that takes place in the playing of videogames:
The secret of a videogame as a teaching machine isn’t its immersive 3-D graphics, but its underlying architecture. Each level dances around the outer limits of the player’s abilities, seeking at every point to be hard enough to be just doable. In cognitive science, this is referred to as the regime of competence principle, which results in a feeling of simultaneous pleasure and frustration – a sensation as familiar to gamers as sore thumbs.
Interesting idea worth exploring. However, Gee doesn’t comment (much) on what the practical ramifications of this observation are.
George Siemens responds to my comments. He writes:
the standards are being built ahead of use….”we build it…you move in”.
Standards should be created to allow for the injection of experience. The open source community has something to offer in this area: build functionality and features as users define them to be important…release early, release often – let the users needs speak to the standards development. It doesn’t matter how simple you make the end user process…if the standards haven’t reflected their wants and needs – you may have a simple process…but one that’s not useful.
I don’t believe you can create standards like you build software. “Release early, release often” doesn’t work for standards. Standards, by definition have to be . . . well, standard! If you release often, you have something that changes frequently, the antithesis of “standard.” (Although many would say that’s where we are with SCORM today!)
Nore are these standards being developed in a vacuum absent any experience with users. SCORM is building on, as David Carter-Tod said yesterday, “the military’s long involvement in training and instructional design in the U.S. (basically, the second world war: ‘Quick, train several million civilians to be soldiers’).” AICC, which forms at least part of the core of most of the other standards (SCORM, IMS, ARIADNE, IEEE LTSC, etc.) comes out of decades of real-world experience with computer-based training. Of course, as David went on to note, these might not be the users people in higher ed want the models based on. I think that’s a valid concern that I hope IMS is addressing.
Everyone in the instructional technology community is feeling frustration over this standards stuff. But I don’t think the issue is the complexity of the standards, nor do I think the issue is a disconnect between the standards and the functional needs/desires of users.
We are at — and have been for a decade or more — the “Beta/VHS” stage of instructional technology standards. There are multiple standards that don’t mesh together well. That’s nothing new. The difference now is this stuff we call e-learning is becoming widespread. There is an increasing need for stuff to work well together, and it just doesn’t yet. The education community is feeling the pain of multiplicity.
George said “the greatest enemy is complexity.” I disagree. Complexity in standards is fine; multiplicity is the enemy of standardization.
The good news is, the pain of multiplicity forces standardization to move forward, whether it’s Beta losing out to VHS, or all the instructional technology standards coming together under the SCORM umbrella. As George recently noted himself, progress was made at bringing all the various standard closer together at last month’s IEEE LTSC meeting.
Keep your fingers crossed. :-)
I’m not sure how “ideal” this model, suggested by Rob Reynolds at Xplana, is, but it’s certainly not anything new or unique. [link via Ed Tech Post]
There are some good suggestions and food for thought in this “white paper,” but it strikes me as a either under-researched or just naive. OKI has been working on a modular architecture for almost two years, and one of the targets of critique, Blackboard, (which, in the interest of full disclosure, you should know I work for) exposes APIs to allow for modules to be built on top of it.
Now, I’m not a technology guy by training; I tripped backwards into this career, falling over several of my English degrees in the process. ;-) For years I was one of those end users who huffed that “They’re not doing it the right way.”
What I’ve learned by working for a software company, is that building a good tool for online education is not even remotely as simple as people on the outside think it is. The average end user way underestimates the amount of effort that goes into creating and supporting software.
Of course, since the Xplana “about” page indicates they’ll be releasing their own coursware product, Xplana CW, I expect they’ll find that out the hard way. :-)
Bloggerize the tools!
George Siemens posts thoughts on complexity at his elearnspace weblog:
We need a simple standard…something that people can actually understand. If instructional technologists have trouble grasping the complexity of standards…the average instructor will NEVER adopt or use them.
The current gap between those setting standards and those who are supposed to be using them seems to be growing. There is a simple solution. We need to “Bloggerize” elearning. The act of using and posting a learning object should be as simple as setting up an account with Blogger (5 minutes). Make it easy to start…and add complexity as the users request it. Right now, we have the architects building a house…assuming that people will move in once it’s complete. Unless they (architects) start exploring the needs of the “tenant”…the tenants will end up building their own.
I don’t believe this is correct, particularly the part about the need for a “simple standard.” Here’s the reason why: users don’t use standards; they use software. Think about it: when was the last time you hand-coded an HTTP request? I don’t mean typed “http://etc” into the browser’s address field, but actually had to go check the HTTP 1.1 spec, to code the request headers, that stuff the browser usually takes care of? Or, raise your hand if you code the XML for your weblog’s RSS feed by hand — or is it automagically generated for you by Movable Type or some other weblog tool? Uh-huh. Thought so.
Unless you’re a programmer, you probably never have to understand standards like TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, XML, or RSS to make use of them. But, if you’re like me, you might make hundreds or even thousands of HTTP requests each day, send dozens of emails via SMTP, syndicate your weblog posts via XML formatted to the RSS spec, etc. . . . but you have never actually read any of the specifications for those standards. Why? Because the software — the browser in the case of HTTP, a weblogging tool in the case of RSS feeds, etc. — provides you with an interface that abstracts the standard, allowing you, the end user, to work with it without understanding it.
David Carter-Tod, proprietor of the Serious Instructional Technology (SiT) weblog, went on a tear this afternoon, adding 15 posts to his blogs in just under two hours. Almost all of them have to do with syndication, discovery, and repository of re-usable learning objects. (RLOs). Go David — get that blog on!
I snagged the CSS layout for this weblog from BlogStyles, but it’s been a little hinky to work with. Mamamusings has another set of CSS templates for Movable Type that I’ve been experimenting with. (I have MT installed under Apache 2 on my Windows XP laptop as a staging/experimentation site.)
However, I came across this little diddy today, via Anil Dash’s left-column links: a 3-column CSS layout “automagicizer”. Plug in your column order, column widths, etc., and it spits back the CSS for you.
I might just have to actually learn CSS so I can figure out all this stuff. ;-)
I’ve known Evan K. online for almost 10 years, and actually had a face-to-face meal with him once at a Veselka’s, a Ukranian diner in Manhattan’s East Village. I know him primarily through participation in the long-running Future Culture mailing list, but Evan has just recently launched a weblog titled 101-280 (a reference to Bay area highways).
Ever since I’ve known him, Evan has always been one of the most lucid and entertaining commentators on . . . well, everything from film to politics to philosophy to technology.
Go read his weblog. Put it on your blogrolls.
This announcement not paid for by the Evan K. Committee for Re-Election.