Multilitteratus Incognitus

For those in the know, you know that what used to be WebCT (Vista and Campus Edition as far as I know) has been scheduled for product end-of-life sometime in 2013. Because of this our campus, along with many other schools that have WebCT installations, have been looking for other platforms to migrate to. Having spent the last few months testing systems I've come up with a candidate that I'd like to see my campus adopt. I feel like a required disclaimer should be here before I proceed: the views expressed in this blog post are my own and not of my institution, I am only one member of a much larger team that did testing so my views also don't reflect the views of my team and don't constitute any official product endorsement on the part of my employer. OK, now that that's out of the way, here are my views on systems that I have tested. I gave some systems more hands-on time than others since I was informally assigned to those, but I did make an effort to try all of...

I cam across this presentation recently on Moodle and Web 2.0 features Web 2.0 tools and techniques View more presentations from Mark Drechsler . Yes, it is quite interesting, but I think that LMS creators are missing the point. The reason why Web 2.0 is popular is because you are not in a walled garden. The content is open to the greater internet using community, and you've got many, many users creating, posting, remixing, tagging and categorizing this information. In an LMS you've got 30 people - max - and at the end of the semester that work is lost to the student, and it's not accessible to new students. In essence at the end of each semester you have a tabula rasa. Web 2.0 will work for education in some instances if the walled garden approach is taken, however it will really fly if we move beyond the mindset of each semester being a separate island if we want to use Web 2.0 tools effectively.