OK, am going to leave the final word on this topic to some guys that I think WebCT and Blackboard should think about consulting:
“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.
Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.
But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.” [The Cluetrain Manifesto]
Am getting a bit bored of this now, think I have made my point though… perhaps :o)
Getting a lot of press this week has been Derek Morrison’s latest article on Moodle as a Bb / WebCT alternative. It’s well worth a read in its entirety but here’s a spoiler:
“Although this is a brief and initial account of a work-in-progress we believe all the participants have created an online course to the design that we want and not one forced on to us by the VLE. We have been able to concentrate on providing a rich and dynamic environment for the students and Moodle sits in the background doing its job.”
[personally I figure the best thing Moodle could do for itself is some re-skinning!]
All over the searchsphere is the announcement that Bb will be ‘accelerating’ (ick!) elearning in China. Basically “more than 40 universities and schools across China have chosen The Blackboard Learning System(TM), provided by CerBibo Corporation, to power their online learning environments” which is probably good for them, but just because these organisations are buying Bb doesn’t mean they’re ‘accelerating’ elearning! Providing funding for research, developing new approaches, working with communities, building in cultural-specific aspects or just doing something NEW is ‘accelerating’ things… selling lots of units is selling lots of units.
Somebody should have a word with the PR manager at the bottom of this article… this is just the kind of farcical rubbish that will turn the market off you once its stopped panicking. Perhaps. We hope.
This is definitely a Bb day, here are a couple of prizes they’re offering. The second one made me chuckle: “the Blackboard Greenhouse Project … “awards grant funding for initiatives that promote the adoption of Internet technology in the educational environment.”” So, that’d be the adoption of Bb, right :o)
Finally, on a positive note, Scott points to a plugin which will allow you to see if your WebCT / Bb course is *really* accessible (i.e. it can actually be used rather than just having the potential to be used).
And maybe I’m all wrong, it looks like some Blackboarders are using blogs!!!
Oh, that’d just be to post bulleted sales points extracted from a letter, nevermind…
Well, having left the searches for a few days there’s a lot of stuff come through, but first up this blog-topic now has a sub-category should you wish to view it separately from incorporated subversion as a whole, here it is.
Also, having subscribed to Bloglines, Feedster and Pubsub feeds for “WebCT” and “Blackboard” my aggregator has been chocka so I’ve decided to let go of one. Over the last few days the results have looked like this:
So it’s fairly apparent that there are a host of different possible results out there! In the end I’m making a non-scientific call based on content rather than numbers / coverage and dropping Feedster, it seems lie there’s just too much ‘personal diary’ stuff coming through there and while Bloglines picks up a lot of repetition and I’m not sure about the comprehensiveness of pubsub just yet their results have yielded more interesting stuff for me.
“This short article summarizes the limitations and drawbacks to using a closed and proprietary content management system like WebCT in conjunction with third-party e-learning tools. Alternative software solutions, as well as the positive social impact of those choices, are considered.”
His weblog is also called “How do you compile?” – not sure if this is linked in to earlier posts but I like it!
-Does anyone want to go to the 4th Annual WebCT European Users conference, it’s in a fantastic location (of course), is offering sessions in Spanish (as they should in bloody Barcelona) and has a heap of uninspiring themes… wonder what interesting papers and ground braking ideas will come out of this one!
“I then tried to email everybody, but all of your emails have been purged from my Blackboard course (which is weird – that’s never happened before. BTW, that’s one reason we did blogs this semester instead of Blackboard discussions, because at the end of the semester, all of the knowledge we’ve accumulated in a Bb discussion is lost and locked away).”
Too hot & windy today so catching up on online-ness, specifically I was wondering whether there are, in fact, any bloggers out there representing Online Learning Environments? One that springs to mind immediately is Mark Roseman of the excellent Courseforum (incidentally if you’ve only just figured out that LMSs, CMSs, VLEs etc. need wiki functionality then Mark had it nailed a loooooong time ago!), however, I tried to see if there was a Moodle blog (don’t think so) and certainly haven’t come across any others that I can remember.
So, if you know of anyone who is, or are keeping an ‘official’ Online Learning Environment blog yourself (i.e. you’re involved with the development of the OLE), then please get in touch, we could have a bit of a hall of fame!
Nonetheless it doesn’t seem like being ‘human’, conversing with the market or anything else really matters, as this recently pointed to article in Online Learning Update points out, it’s the support stupid.
Ah, another day, another raft of Blackboard & WebCT info that the companies themselves don’t seem to want to share with us :o)
On the plagiarism front, looks like Safeassignment is not just a blip either, here’s an interesting post from an “Email automatically forwarded from my Blackboard listserv subscriptions” blog Blackboard Postings which describes how it won them over from Turn It In, who apparently sent them “via post some very damning – you could say libellous – materials about Safe Assignment… which wre highly debatable,but which TII promote even on at least one website”.. crikey, the plagiarism wars are obviously coming along…
It’s not all bad in the world our two favourite LMS/OLE/CMS/VLE etc. etc. providers, the Plagiarism Resource Siteposting some good news about SafeAssignment working well in Blackboard (so there is an alternative to Turn it in!) and from Blackboard in Practice a romantic story about how “two different Blackboard users, hundreds of miles from each other, found themselves looking for something very similar”. This delightful story looks at the successful formation of user groups based around the use of Bb, which is wonderful of course. It is interesting to note, however, that at least one of these communities is, um, based around a Yahoo group… and yet Bb seems to want to catalyse community… not with Bb of course though… I wonder why that is ;o)
On a more serious note there have been a couple of excellent articles coming from Simon Walton over the xmas period who asks “why VLEs cannot be more open and flexible to allow better creativity and construction of learning – the development and features seem to be wedded to a very old-fashioned view” and in some detail examines the VLEs in some detail and finds through evaluations that:
“VLEs by their functionality & tools break down into three areas:
– content and support (e.g. WebCT)
– Collaborative product (e.g. Colloquia)
– MOO/MUD type structures (e.g. Bodington)
This means that most VLEs tend to stick with what they are good at and do not move into the wider requirements for a fulfilled learning environment.” [Simon Walton]
Well, it would seem fairly clear that despite my bestefforts at persuasion ;o), BB and WebCT just don’t wanna go ‘a blogging so welcome to an incorporated subversion sub topic “Not the Blackboard & WebCT Blog”!
For some reason the pubsubs I set up for our two favourite LMSs haven’t seemed to work (which is a shame as pubsub looks better and better and with Steven Cohen now on board are going to go good places!) However, I’ve created some Bloglines & Feedster searches and am sure it won’t be long before the items come flooding in!
However, that’s not to say that we’re out of things to talk about! In particular Scott Leslie raises some very relevant and worthwhile points in response to my thoughts on the WebCT ‘compile’ tool.
First up there might be a bit of a confusion regarding exactly what the ‘compile’ too does, this unfortunately, is compiled (whoops) by the fact that it no longer exists. Yes, as far as I can see in Vista 3.0 ‘compile’ has been replaced by ‘Create Printable View’ – so I hope you haven’t spent too much time training / building awareness / developing materials! This is however a bonus in some ways as it explains essentially what it does: that is it allow you to select a number of items for example discussion board messages or html pages and create a printable version, like so:
…
Which is wonderful for sales – imagine the flexibility, the use, the opportunity, the…
But pointless / terrible in reality, because when it comes to reading discussion board messages, who wants to carefully select the messages they want to print without actually reading them (and if they had read them who wants to go back to compiling them, why not print them then and there?) and why are we trying to encourage printable communication anyway?) – I’d wager that this is used 99% of the time as a tool to simply scroll through discussion board postings without clicking on each bloody one… and guess what, to get there you need to ‘Expand All’ the threads, ‘Select All’ the postings, click on ‘Create Printable View’ and then you get the messages in a pop up without visible threading (unless you read all their metadata).
(do you see, perhaps, why I might complain about the overly complex nature of these tools and the fact that you DO need tutorials / training / support to explain how to use them… when they should be easier than email!)
In terms of content then we’re in a similar boat, how often do you imagine learners would like to print, say, a few sections of the study guide… and if this were the case wouldn’t they simply click on ‘print’ once they’d read that particular section? I really don’t think that anyone is creating their own offline virtual textbooks! This is also based on the assumption that all the content is in html and if, like me, you’ve had plenty of opportunity to check out what individual teachers are doing then you guessed it, it’s in .doc, .ppt, .pdf etc. etc. etc. but not in html.
And the bit about being able to compile discussion board postings and content together is a myth too… or at least I can’t figure out how to do it so I don’t hold out much hope for a newbie educator.
Finally Scott asks “can you demonstrate to me within any of the wiki, blog or community software (Drupal, etc) you use an easy way to combine content from disparate sections into one easy printable/offline version?” to which I say that I don’t think it’s necessary. Simply create the content in html (as it has to be here) and then offer it as a complete document and a separate bits if you so choose. Alternatively the ‘book’ function in Drupal certainly allows you to create content that would work like this, but in the end why bother?
OK, am going to leave the final word on this topic to some guys that I think WebCT and Blackboard should think about consulting:
… 