Great response to my rhetoric about management from new edublogger, Cleve Miller (who, BTW, looks like a very valuable contributor to this area only three posts in, here’s his atom feed), in particular Cleve objects to my saying:

“We’re obsessed with management, I reckon. Managing our finances, managing our workplaces, managing our kids schooling, managing our expectations, managing our knowledge, managing things to such a degree that we have squashed personality, differences, argument and life.”

[here]

And goes on to argue, quite rightly, that in fact making sure our kids go to the school that best suits them and so on actually makes for a happier & better life, not a squashing of it. What we should be talking about is ‘bad’ management rather than just canning management in favour of the open, decentralised, power-to-the-people, independent, empowered (cue that delirious applause again) approaches.

So, ahem, let me rephrase a little… it’s not actually management per se that is the problem, I figure that it’s too much management… to go back to my original cluetrain-influenced rant we can (and certainly often do) over-manage our kids, feel that we have some sort of capacity to manage and structure our lives exactly as we want and often see knowledge as something we can grasp hold of, classify and store (I’m certainly guilty of this but now, the more I read about folksonomies, tagging and alike feel like the ‘exploration of chaos’ approach favoured by Google et al is a preferable and more feasible route… more on that soon).

I guess that was what my subconscious was trying to say to me when it put in the phrase “to such an extent”… see I can’t even manage my own posts :D

But I do think that, along the lines of my comments about LMSs, that if we look closely, philosophically perhaps, at our practice (if not our theory) of online learning then too-much-management is what stands out as an underlying belief framing and crippling the directions in which we’ve gone. There are lots of other things which have contributed such as the transference of traditional pedagogies, choice and use of communications technologies, administration driven strategies and policy and so on and so on but the more I examine it, the more I feel like the driving force is more to do with the simple fact of who we are as people and what we want out of our too-much-managed lives.

[Thanks to Aaron for picking this out and rolling over it first]

Many thanks to Renée Fountain who is an incsub supporter :o)

There’s an outstanding discussion going on in the Drupal forums regarding the development of a Quiz module for Drupal.

Contributing are some real pioneers in the Drupal and education area and if I had enough time / mental energy I’d be in there too… maybe this will transpire, we shall see…

What’s particularly fascinating is the tension between recreating, say, a WebCT quiz tool and developing one based around alternative principles.

Quizzes are interesting things too, I reckon they come before pretty much everything in making a CMS sale (and you can use equations, and add audio etc. etc.) and yet in actual practice always end up very very very low down the list of use (unless they are used extensively within very particular information for learners to self-assess understanding in very small chunks… but that’s such a complex production task that it rarely happens without much time & expertise invested).

I’d encourage people with thoughts in this area to go along and help out the Drupal guys, it’s potentially a edu-development key moment for them and with the input of more experts than any previous edu tool development chiming in something very special could come out the other end!

Here’s something really rough data-wise so you can roughly estimate the number of live Blogliners… the old incorporated subversion site ceased to be published to in October 2004 at which point it had 128 Bloglines subscribers, since then I’ve been posting ‘no longer at this RSS feed / address’ messages monthly until my Radio subscription runs out (next month I think) . Now the site still has 79 subscribers… I’m guessing that a fair % of those are people who haven’t bothered to unsubscribe to the old feed so, perhaps somewhere in the region of 20 – 40% of bloglines subscriptees in this case are no longer operating. Just a rough guess.

Derek’s link and commentary on Scott Wilson’s inaugural post The VLE of the Future has spurred me into illustrator action to try and explain why I think that the Online Learning Environment (OLE – I prefer that to Virtual, it’s very real I think) is indeed going to be an aggregator integrated with other aggregators.

So what’s with the the title of this post, well, as much as we might quibble about if it’s a VLE or an OLE more often than not I hear the WebCTs and Blackboards of the world referred to and Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and after so much pushing of alternative vocabulary / acronyms, this doesn’t just seem to be sticking but in fact growing (I swore I’d never do this but google searches for LMS – 2.2m and for VLE – 493k). Why? Well, I think that’ s fairly obvious… because that’s what they are.

We’re obsessed with management, I reckon. Managing our finances, managing our workplaces, managing our kids schooling, managing our expectations, managing our knowledge, managing things to such a degree that we have squashed personality, differences, argument and life. Needless to say we’ve been scared out of any possibility of incorporating subversion into our design and development… from a business perspective. As David Weinberger put it in cluetrain, we live in “a profoundly managed age” where “we manage our households, our children, our wildlife, our ecological environment. And that which is unmanaged strikes us as bad: weeds, riots, cancer.”

And so our LMSs cater to this very well indeed. They provide the most stunning potential for auditing teaching and learning ever seen, they force their users to (on the whole) adopt uniform presentation strategies, they almost entirely do away with individual ownership of material, communication and personal space and they impose upon teachers pedagogies and strategies which those managing the process find to be acceptable… and if you do dare to mess with anything then you’re accountable to policy and procedure in this area which, quite probably includes the kind of IT restrictions that are necessary to maintain the ‘managed’ environment and hence prevent any sort of deviation, subversion or individual expression.

So, if I was a betting man I’d say that the future of the OLE is, probably, unfortunately, the LMS. But, it doesn’t have to be that way…

I reckon that through weblogs and aggregation we can un-manage OLEs, we can, dare I say, incorporate subversion into our learning technologies and we can stop the rot of terrible student evaluations, frustrated and alienated teachers and encroaching managerialism into teaching and learning and what I’d like to do, briefly, is examine two possible models.

The first of these is, unfortunately, the one that I think will take off quicker. What we have is a CMS acting as an OLE which facilitates the development of blogs within it, this is similar to the weblogs at upei initiative (which isn’t an OLE) and you can experience it for yourself if you set up a blog (by writing some blog posts) at the incsub association. This is do-able within a traditional OLE as you provide each learner with the capacity to develop a blog, aggregate these through the course homepage and so on.

That is not to say that this hasn’t been very successful however, obviously the weblogs@upei project has done extremely well, as have other communities founded around similar principles such as Kairos News and Urban Vancouver. BUT this is opt-in management, individuals who are using this are joining in the same spirit as one joins a listserv and are keen to participate in the community and hence work within it’s constraints. I don’t feel that this is the same in a class environment.

Take, for example, a typical tertiary student. In any one semester they may well be enrolled in four units each with an online presence each lasting effectively 13-14 weeks… now if each unit has a community and you ask that student to join these communities and keep a blog in each one… the question arises as to whether they would or not… and I’m betting that they wouldn’t (I certainly couldn’t be bothered). Factor into this the matter that they don’t ‘own’ their blogs (the community owns them), they most likely will just get archived / put away somewhere after the term has finished and the fact that probably (certainly presently) their ability to format / develop their bog individually is limited to, if their lucky, a new banner… and I think you’ll get some pretty unmotivated learners.

However, if that learner has their own blog ‘outside’ of the central, managed environment then things can start to look a bit different. Let’s say that in this case they are studying four units and they can simply create categories for each one (so postings relevant to that unit can go there and to their main blog if appropriate), that that category is then aggregated into the ‘central’ area (where unit guides, copyrighted study materials, core materials etc. can also be found) and that this blog also serves as a portfolio cum social tool for the student in question (as each learner has also been furnished with their own aggregator). The student in question owns the content, they are able to develop their blog as they choose and do with their content as they please, they are able to develop an online presence over an extended period of time and become parts of communities through their blog (communities that will form as naturally as communities form in f2f college) and they are able to subvert the technology in many wonderful ways (podcasting, photoblogging, vogging etc. etc.). It’s also their responsibility… and that is a great teacher in itself.

And that is what WordPress Multi User allows us to facilitate. Previously the only feasible option has been Manila which I find a bit too clumsy, proprietary and which costs (anything that costs never gets done around yer average institution without first going through enough red tape to kill off anything that was good about it in the first place) and I guess MT to a degree, but now, with development there is the potential for a fully fledged open source un-managed OLE based around blogs and aggregation.

What it needs is some bright spark who can do the code to figure out how to build it in with an aggregation / administration (like Schooltool)/ Content Management System and we’ll be away… any takers give me a shout!

Hmmm, so appears that I can’t use Skype at work, even with SOCKS. I’m going to ask if this can get changed, if only so that I can say that I have (I don’t hold out that much hope)… maybe conference calling with Japan & Brazil might change their mind.

Eric responds to my little, ahem, tirade concerning the ‘bloggers blog about blogging too much’ topic that he and Rick knocked about last week.

He tries to move on too but I’m not that easy to shake ;o)

I admit that I was a bit full-on (comes from other sources of frustration, nothing to do with Eric & Rick, believe me) but I do think that I had a point. What is particularly interesting about Eric’s follow-up though (and which got me writing this) are his predictions about where blogging is / isn’t going… and I know that me blogging about blogging related to a blogger posting a post in response to a blog post about too much blogging about blogging in blogs is a bit silly, but hey…

In summary (from here)I think Eric is trying to say that we shouldn’t concern ourselves too much with blogs because:

-Blogs are a niche application and “it’s actually quite likely that the explosive growth in blogging will soon see a contraction” (it’s been over-hyped by the media)

-“Blogs have a voracious appetite for one of an academic’s most precious commodities–time”

-Project-based blogging is OK but not transformational

Which in part reminds me of some of Stephen’s predictions but also rings true, to a degree, in my own experience and in what I hear people around me saying.

Briefly, I agree that on a wider-scale blogging will not take over the world and it may well be the case that only 0.01% of people regularly maintain a weblog for a longish period of time. That makes sense, but I think that us in education and academia are coming at this from a very different angle, that of writers, critics and reflective practices.

Which is why we’ve spent so much time, over the years, writing, reading and generally using our time up in exactly the kind of pursuits that blogging (and more importantly RSS) lends itself to most.

And I would certainly agree that there are yet (apart from some particular incidences) to be any amazing and transformational practices within the academy / teaching and learning process. But I’d argue that this is largely because blogging and RSS has been approached in many cases in totally the wrong way (I know all about this, I’m seriously guilty!) and that the technology is and has been nowhere near mature enough or user-friendly enough for the possibilities this offers to be truly tested.

More on this soon, together with some funky diagrams :o).

Am certainly not after a fight but it does make a change to have a bit of a debate once in a while… that’s one of the main reasons I miss Greg Ritter so much!

As part of my whole playing with the design I figured that I wanted to add a ‘what’s this’ thing next to my RSS / Atom feeds and mentioned it briefly here.

Well, have given that a bit of a re-write and it now lives next to the ‘subscribe’ tag on the sidebar as a rather odd looking linked question mark (am not sure whether this is clear enough for those new to RSS but hope so). It links to this page which I’m hoping I can refine and play around with until it’s the simplest, most straightforward guide to what RSS is and how you can subscribe to stuff through it, ever.

So, here’s the complete text, what do you think? If anyone has a parent or a some colleagues they could try it out on I’d be hugely appreciative! I just want something that’s short, sweet and straightforward… do you think a diagram would help?

“RSS and Atom allow you to simply subscribe to this weblog to receive new postings in what’s called a ‘news aggregator’.

To do this first you need an aggregator, I’d recommend setting up an account with Bloglines (it’s free and works a treat!) – here are some others.

Then copy and paste the URL of my RSS feed (in this case: “https://incsub.org/wp-rss2.php”) into the appropriate box and click on ‘Subscribe’ (or ‘add’ or whatever looks best).

Now you can check your aggregator the same way you can check email. Each time a new item is posted to this weblog you’ll be able to read it there.

What’s even better is that you can now use the aggregator to subscribe to as many weblogs and news sources as you like… for example if you like this site you will probably like some of the sites I’m currently reading (listed down the right of this blog), they all have RSS or Atom too.

In fact the Guardian has RSS feeds, so does the NY Times and so does the BBC. (these links will tell you more about their feeds)

So when you turn on your aggregator it’s like you’re surfing hundreds of sites to check for new content, all by visiting one place.

So what are ya waiting for, get going… get a bloglines account (1 minute), subscribe to my RSS feed, check out the sites I’m reading, your favourite news sites, subscribe to them and I guarantee you’ll never look back!”

Most excellent news, the (well, my) blogfather himself Lindon Parker has started up a new blog using the WPMU service (as have about 30 other people which is very cool! Roll on over and have a go if you like, stuff like this means I have to look after the databases etc. too so you won’t get deleted either now!)

“James Farmer made me do it honestly……! So here we go again, counting even the dev blogs I set up for RMIT once a lifetime ago this is the fourth full-time blog I’ve built. History says I’ll get bored soon enough and quit, but hey I’ve got a differnt agenda for this..

I’m just gonna put stuff here I care about and only when i feel like it…”

Go visit In the Bungalow (here’s the RSS feed), welcome back Nodnil :o)

Phew, as good as there, just need to tweak the ‘posted on’ bit but that can wait…

Come and have a look at the all new incorporated subversion design, it’s a (small) play around WordPress 1.5 theme from the incredible Vinnie Garcia called the simple life and it makes having a light design that works well with multiple mediums an absolute pleasure!

Now to figure out how to put different themes into WPMU… hmmmm…