Absolutely nothing! Say it again!
James Farmer responds to my previous comments about weblog hype:
"[T]he reason I'm interested in Weblogs as VLEs actually comes out of a frustration with other tools and a weblog is a KM tool already, no? Also, and I'm probably quoting out of cotext here... 'every professor wants to be (and, granted, sometimes has to be) the duke of their own little fiefdom.' So... cool! In educational terms ego's as important as it is anywhere else, isn't that what weblogs are good for. OK, you get lots of reinventing the wheel going on... but that's the same as everywhere else.
A weblog is a personal publishing tool, not a knowledge management tool. And, as D'Arcy Norman pointed out last week, knowledge management is "unpossible" anyway.
By definition, re-invention isn't innovation. Instead, it's usually wasted energy. That re-invention happens frequently doesn't make it valuable.
I certainly don't object to people cobbling their own solutions, particularly if they feel that existing solutions don't meet their needs . . . or can't be made to meet their own needs. However, I believe there are many existing commercial or open source solutions that are designed to meet (or could be used to meet) any of the needs people are attempting to force weblogs into solving.
Over the last several months, I consistently see people attempting to use weblogs to solve problems that have already been solved by other means or attributing wondrous innovation to weblogs that, had they researched the landscape a bit more, they would have found are neither that wondrous nor that innovative.
As a former professor of rhetoric and composition, and someone committed to the value of writing across the curriculum, I see tremendous educational potential for weblogs. I've always believed that writing is one of the best paths to learning. I think some of the faux innovation is coming from people, particularly technologists, who never thought of using writing in their classes starting to see the potential. And, of course, that's only a Good Thing™.
However, I believe the urge to turn personal publishing systems -- weblogs -- into something they're not inflates the value of the technology and damages its credibility. I would rather see people focusing on the ways personal publishing makes a real difference in pedagogy rather than trying to use weblogs as a platform to re-invent every tool, but the kitchen sink . . . particularly since weblogs are a pretty lousy platform for doing that.
OK, so that's enough tyre kicking, what are the better tools for KM? for VLE? for educational content management? I'm interested to take a look. If we are all about to re-invent the wheel please point at the pre-existing wheel....
Posted by: Lindon at May 19, 2003 12:01 AMLindon,
I'm working under the assumption that most people focused on instructional technology have done their own research -- or are capable of doing so if they take their "everything is a weblog and weblogs are everything" blinders off for a moment.
I'm also extremely uninterested in getting into a feature-by-feature comparison of specific products. I don't find that productive use of my weblog, particularly since it's what I do for a living. I welcome a conversation about what weblogs, as a class of product, offer that other classes of products don't or can't, though.
That said, here are a few starting points for you:
For commercial course management systems (which is what we call a VLE in the US...where we also kick tires, not tyres), the leading commercial solutions are Blackboard, WebCT, and eCollege, with a few smaller solutions (ANGEL, Desire2Learn, etc) having a tiny market presence. Those are institutional solutions, although Blackboard does offer a course hosting service for individual faculty. Those interested in rolling their own, instead of a commercial system, could look at this compendium of open source course systems.
As regards content management, there are even more commercial enterprise content management solutions (Stellent, Vignette, Documentum, Day, Fatwire, etc.) and just as many -- if not more -- learning content management system providers (TopClass, Centra, HarvestRoad, Docent, Saba, Avaltus, Click2Learn, IntraLearn, Pathlore, etc.). You might look at CMS Watch for more general info on content management or at OpenSourceCMS for info about open source solutions, some of which are very webloggy. Many of the LCMS vendors also typically offer LMS (learning management systems) solutions.
(Don't know how you guys think about it in the UK, but in the US a course management system and a learning management system aren't the same thing. I think it all gets grouped under virtual learning environment in the UK, in my experience.)
Regarding knowledge management, in general I think that's a bogus term. It's simply a re-branding of other technologies (typically some combination of content management, groupware, and indexing/search). As such I don't really address it as a separate field, personally. That said, I would direct you to KM Network, particularly their tools page for a list of hundreds and hundreds of "KM tools" (if such a thing exists), some commercial and some open source. Caution: there's lots of info, but, man, is their interface horrible.
Hope that stuff floats your boat for a while, Lindon.
--g
Posted by: Greg at May 19, 2003 07:58 AM