From there, I could input a number of features for each day (customizing the activities for the day) along with links to all the resources needed for that day.

There were a number of “views” then that could be used by the student or teacher. With one click, a student could see what was due on any given day, a schedule of assignments, a bibliography of resources, even the linked activities (i.e. discussions by day or semester).

I have never seen an LMS that matches this. I think of LMS’s now as the apartment houses of learning. I have my own little place which uses the same basic structure as other users, but I can customize it somewhat. But I’ll be penalized if I change too much.

Then there are the condominiums. You can pay to have the LMS customized to better fit your needs, but it still fits the same format and you need to pay for upgrades and make changes whenever there is a new upgrade.

I want my own house that is going to meet my own needs. I might want and need a lawn mower, or might decide to pave over the lawn. MY choice. These are the apps and tools that most people use now. Not only that, but when something new comes out that meets my needs better, it is not a hassle to change tools. Just move on. Or go to a different neighborhood without any commitments to pay for a broken contract.

Go figure.

It’s indeed true what you say about institutions’ choices – but if they were really that concerned about educator- (and education) friendly environments and learnercentricity, summative and end-of-semester
exams would have been superseded years ago, as this mode of assessment has been demonstrated time and again to be a less than optimal method of evaluating students’ knowledge; exams are a good way to process large numbers of individuals in a standardised manner though, so they’ll be with us for a while yet.

In retrospect, I think I must have misunderstood Jane’s survey about my top ten tools – I interpreted it to mean the tools that I find most useful in enabling me to perform effectively, rather than my favourite app or utility (an adjective J used in one of her comments). For example, there is one tool on my list – Delicious – that I find essential to do my job, but which I find is a nightmare to use – its categorisation functions are dreadful, its metatagging is very poor, and its UI affordance is questionable. Yet, in the past it met my requirement to capture and track links, hence its presence on my 2008-2009 lists.

It might be worth differentiating between ‘favourite’ and ‘effective’ tools in future versions of “Top 10 Tools” because the two categories can be quite different.

Anyhoo Lisa, thanks for taking the time to comment. One of the best things about the C4LPT list is that it provides a great context for debate: I still think that microblogging is of limited – but some – use, and I have deep reservations about free-to-use (as opposed to open source) software, and I’m sure I haven;t convinced you to change your views, but wouldn’t it be a boring world if we all thought the same way!

Michael
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Institutions make decisions that often revolve around institutional control – control of students, control of access, management of systems and data, etc. For these issues, LMSs may provide administrators with some handy tools – but this list was about tools for learning – not for management,security and control…

One other thought – those who often make the final decision on adoption of LMSs are rarely, if ever, the faculty who have to use them. Perhaps if everyone who purchased site licenses had to teach a course using the LMS, much more institutional research would go into finding educator-friendly, student-centered course systems.

With over a decade’s e-learning experience I’m no starry-eyed ingenue, and I’ve learned the hard was about organisational politics, close-mindedness, short-termism and the other less appealing aspects of business life, but having written and submitted many BCs for LMS-type solutions for commercial organisations, I have found that most commercial institutions not really motivated to buy and maintain software solutions if the TCO is going to exceed performance benefits – they’re not really interested in maintaining inefficient solutions beyond a certain point; government institutions are different – they will hold 20-year-old mainframes in place with Sellotape if they can keep legacy systems going, but they don’t really do much e-learning on these old stovepiped systems: educational institutions seem to fall somewhere in-between, though I’ve found that they can be the most locked-down of all.

Here’s what I find curious: if organisations do over-ride the experience of their in-house learning expert – for whatever reason – and implement, say a SharePoint CMS, why would they allow the implementation of Moodle, or facilitate the use of free-to-use tools on their network? To do so costs organisations and institutions time (to maintain), resources, and money, so why support these as well as “officially sanctioned” solutions? We all know cases where the intractable head of whatever department thinks they’re king or queen of their own little hill and refuses to budge from a certain pet tool or solution, but is such a person going to allow a well-meaning and enthusiastic learning pro to unilaterally roll out a social media tool?

If I’m stuck with a particular platform (as I was in one case about seven years ago), I found ways to work around it – even using the LMS in question to suit my learners’ needs, though it wasn’t the way that it was intended to be used. Nobody could say I wasn’t using the system though!

As you know if you read my blog, I’m an ardent advocate of OSS software, and I have a lot of time for client-based free-to-use tools; web-based, not so much. I
always recommend to people to steer well clear of web-based free-to-use systems, because of the potential for personal, proprietary and commercially sensitive information to be publicly distributed. Would Intel distribute their quarterly corporate update on YouTube? Or would you create your tax returns on GoogleDocs?

I wouldn’t.

Even if the data is safe from the public (no guarantee), the organisations that host these services – Twitter, FaceBook, Google, Microsoft etc have access to your info. For example, Google automatically scans Gmails to add context-sensitive advertisements to them. Google is technically able to cross-reference cookies across its information-rich product line to make dossiers on individuals. Would they do this? I don’t know. I do know that they adhere to China’s censorship laws. Just because they say they’re not “evil,” it doesn’t follow that they are not. Similarly, if you sign up to the hosted version of Adobe’s Connect solution, you lose all your data as soon as you end your subscription – potentially thousands of hours of knowledge, content, and expertise, stored on Adobe’s servers.

Anyway, I’m interested to know what you think about microblogging being superseded by wave-type solutions – which interestingly, Google plans to make open source.
M
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Of course, I will happily admit that there is author bias in my blog. One of the reasons I write is because I have strong (and I hope informed) views on technology in education. I would suggest that most bloggers write because they care about their subject. That said, I do adhere to the Scientific Method, and draw conclusions based on the evidence of the data, rather than on unfounded preconceptions.

While researching today’s post, I had a look at my 2009 Top 10 list: seven out of ten of my tools were directly associated with the “Three D’s” of e-learning I mentioned above. This definitely indicates my personal tendency to view learning as a creative/generative activity: I know for many others that the act of sharing knowledge & learning – in a sense, the conversation and connectedness in e-learning is how they best perform in the medium.

Actually, I’ll tell you the other thing that really surprised me about the list (and it only occurred to me as I was actually writing the post) – it was how many of the tools could be categorised as free-to-use. In an off-hand comment I said that

I would hope that this is just a reflection on the times we live in, and not because learning and training organizations are so poorly funded that they have to rely on free tools to undertake their work.

But now that I think about it, it may be a subject to be explored again.

Anyway, as you say, people use microblogging as part of their PLE / discovery learning / information acquisition strategy, so here’s a prediction: I would assert that a much more effective way to manage personal learning, communication, collaboration, and KM is via tools like Google Wave. If and when GW goes public I suggest that people will quickly migrate to this type of platform, leaving ineffecient, linear, difficult to manage microblogging behind. What do you think? Google Wave for “Number One, with a bullet” in 2010?
Best regards,
Michael
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