Brisk sunny day on the east coast, cold enough to freeze the ground around here today. Had a lovely night with an international group last night, all the international students from UPEI put on a cultural evening for all the people that work with them. (I try to teach them academic writing) The food was fantastic alot of smiles and laughs, and hundreds of pictures taken, A real sense of community, where people get a sense of what other people are like. I found myself moving from table to table, trying to mix some of the groups, strangely trying to set an example of cross cultural belonging and friendship… strange to have finally moved to that role…
Which bring me to Leigh Blackall’s
polemic against the LMS/VLE/PLE. I’m a big fan of Leigh’s writing, but i have to say that this time, i have a few problems with his position, and i’d like to start a little healthy debate on the subject. I have two main subjects that i’d like to cover, one concerning relative computer literacy and the other about what the school and learning is all about.
Who needs ALL of the internet
Why do we need a PLE when we already have the Internet? The Internet is my PLE, ePortfolio, VLE what ever. Thanks to blogger, bloglines, flickr, delicious, wikispaces, ourmedia, creative commons, and what ever comes next in this new Internet age, I have a strong online ID and very extensive and personalised learning environment.
I think that Leigh’s logic here is solid insofar as his ‘I’ is concerned. This is true for me as well, and for most of the people that are likely to be reading this blog. The majority of people will NEVER have an internet presence. By definition, there is no room for the ‘presence’ of 6 billion people. Some people, like Leigh, will do enough good work to have room on the internet for Stephen Downes to read their work and post it, most will never. Community environments like elgg allow for them to be noticed, and interacted with, by their peers. It’s a safe, controllable environment, away from the chaos and uncertainty that is that rather long list of tools listed. The PLE and to a lesser extent the VLE/LMS provide some security, some much needed structure and most importantly guaranteed interactivity. Technorati is claiming 21 million blogs or so (i have 4 or 5) where will the interactivity be when there are 200 million or 2 billion. A PLE like elgg allows for focus.
Learning from life
My thinking is that we need to build media literacy in our institutions, and not prevent it by building replicas.
A PLE is not a simulacra. There are many instances in this ‘real world’ that Leigh is refering to where the PLE is being used. I have several friends who have installed moodle and elgg as training and communication platforms for companies, from restaurants to government agencies.
So while I whole heartedly agree with the PLE and Scott’s reasoning for rejecting the LMS/VLE, I can’t say I’m with them on their alternative. In my view, the VLE, LMS and PLE are the same. A suggestion that the Internet, and informal networked learning are not enough. That people still need to come to school to learn. That people need to distinguish learning from life, that people need to download and install an application that will solve their learning needs.
If I understand correctly, ‘informal networked learning’ as it appears in the internet context, is ‘real life’ and the LMS/VLE/PLE are artificial. I’m not sure that i understand how someone would start informal learning in a ‘natural way,’ but i would love to have this further elaborated on.
My real objection to this is the part about ‘coming to school’. I don’t think that people come to school to gather knowledge in the traditional sense. In an ideal world they learn how to learn, they learn to work together, they learn how to kiss behind the water filtration system, they learn how to fight… and eventually how not to… they get the opportunity to know more than their parents do on all the above subjects… school still has this power (if used) to level the social classes. Now weather or not we replace the military classroom with another free, government sponsored place that isn’t called school but still allows them to do the things above and many more, we still need them.
A friend of mine was called by another parent from the community about something her son was doing on the internet. Suffice it to say that he was about ten and he was emailing porn to his buddies… This will happen. Kids will publish porn, just for fun, to push boundaries, to experiment, all part of the natural experience. How do we teach appropriate behaviour on the internet? How do we pass our cultural values on to the wired generation? In these PLE/VLE environments, where we guide by example, where we lead… where we teach.
This entry was posted on Saturday, November 26th, 2005 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
. 3 years later someone showed me Hotmail, and I wondered why I was putting up with the student mail with its 1meg or less limit for so long – or why I even needed to be using student mail in the first place… I think it was a student management thing.
and it’s taken years to get the computers in there. And, for now, the training isn’t even in the BEd programs. The academics are the one’s who need the push… at the end of the day, they are the only one’s who influence both the teachers and policy. It can be changed, but it’s gonna take a long time.
January 9th, 2006 at 11:09 am Dave,
Looks like a pretty good list. You’ve been up to some pretty amazing stuff over the last several months, so I’m sure no one will be disappointed if you don’t get everything done. (Except your nephew, of course. Make that your top priority.)