Moodle and Web 2.0

I cam across this presentation recently on Moodle and Web 2.0 features

Web 2.0 tools and techniques



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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Academic Facepalm (evaluation edition)

Image
Back in December, I was searching for the #tenure hashtag on twitter.   There was some discussion (probably stated by Jesse Stommel 😜) which prompted me to search for this #hashtag out of curiosity to see what was tagged.  Along with heartwarming stories of people who've just earned tenure (a nice perk right before the winter break!), there was this wonderful tweet specimen... I'm not gonna lie.  IT BUGS ME. It bugs me as a learner.   I've always completed course evaluations and I tried to give honest feedback to the professor.  If the course was easy, hard, just right, I wanted them to know.  If I was appreciative, I wanted them to know.  Yes, sometimes I've half-assed it and just completed the Likert scale with a "loved the course" comment at the end, but many times I try to be more concrete about the feedback. It bugs me as a program manager. I am the individual who sets up, collects, and often reminds students, about the course evaluations.  M
Read more

Discussion forums in MOOCs are counter-productive...well, sort of...

Image
The other day I was reading this blog post on why MOOC forums are counter-productive .  I was really thinking hard about this and my initial inclination is to agree. Forums, in MOOCs, are  counter-productive. But, as with most things in life, there is a big asterisk here. If we look at how MOOCs are setup, and by MOOC here I mean xMOOC since that's what most people think of, the discussion board is one big crazy mess. Coursera has done something interesting in crowdsourcing thread relevancy by allowing people to up-vote or down-vote threads, but at their core these discussions are setup like every other discussion forum out there in traditional education: There usually is a prompt that people will answer, and answers can be repetitive as well, so when you are the 1000th poster to a question prompt and you see that others have answered something similar to your answers, what is the motivation to wade through many, many, many similar answers in order to find the subtle contextual
Read more

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil
Read more