Techfoot

History of virtual learning environments – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Word that I have stopped blogging because I’ve been curled up in the fetal position in response to Ted Stevens tubes speech and the moronic decision by the US Patent office to give BlackBoard a patent on virtual learning environments is not quite true. I’ve been working on a number of other projects that are nearing completion and that will be making up a little space for playing around in the blogosphere. (I seldom spend more than a couple of hours a day in the fetal position regardless of any particular day’s insanity.)

One bright spot in the BlackBoard fiasco has been watching the growth of the this Wikipedia site on the “prior art” of the LMS’s and other virtual learning tools. In just a couple of weeks the site has gone from this to a fully blown chronicle of the history of virtual learning tools. Hard too imagine collecting this much data using Microsoft Word’s track changes feature!

Link To: Weblogg-ed – The Read/Write Web in the Classroom

One of the themes I’ve been returning to often is that the K-12 teachers in the trenches are shaping the future for those of us in higher education to a far greater extent than most of us in the college and university arena realize. Here’s a partial program lineup from the Illinois Technology Conference, courtesy of Will Richardson.

* “No more excuses, it’s time to start blogging” full day workshop by Steve. (No seats left)
* “iPods in the Classroom” full day workshop with Karen Percak. (Full)
* “Read, Write and Blog” full day workshop with Susim Munshi. (Full)
* “Wikis and Weblogs as School Communication Tools” full day workshop with Tim Lauer. (No seats left.)
* “The New Read/Write Web: Transforming the Classroom” and “What’s Up with Wikis?” by, um…that would be me.
* “Blogging– Revolutionize Education” by Susim Munshi and Susan Switzer
* “Got Wikis?” by David Jakes
* “Web Based Communication Tools for Schools” by Tim Lauer
*Flickr in the Classroom” by David Jakes
* “Using iPods for Student Learning” by Karen Percak
* “Podcasting 101″ by Steve Dembo
* “Telling the New Story” by David Warlick
* “Radio For Kids, By Kids” by Tony Vincent”

Interesting implications….

Link to: Inside Higher Ed :: Serious Bloggers

This piece by Wayne State assistant professor Jeff Rice, who blogs as Yellow Dog, highlights the chilling effect that articles like the Chronicle’s Bloggers Need Not Apply and the Business Week cover story Attack of the Blogs have had on academic bloggers. Even academics who are attracted to this new medium generally respond by either writing anonymously or by adopting a super-serious tone that robs the writing of the very energy that should be fueling it.

Writing a blog under a pseudonym is usually an argument that the only safe way for an academic to write publicly is to write anonymously. Our thoughts about students, grades, internal policy and even our private lives and interests can never be revealed to our colleagues or future colleagues or we risk losing all we have worked so hard for!

Students and colleagues lose out when we block this exchange. Our positions on issues of grading and curriculum and our feelings about our students are as central to our teaching as issues of what content to teach or what grants to apply for. Our community is enhanced when on-line tools can be used to give us additional insights about and access to the authentic understandings of those that meet with in classes, studios, labs or faculty meetings. Blogging offers an extremely rich set of tools help share those understandings..

Lost in this seriousness are a number of quite amazing things blogging has provided writers: ability to create discourse in widely accessed, public venues, ease of online publishing, ability to write daily to a networked space, ability to archive one’s writing, ability to interlink writing spaces, ability to respond to other writers quickly, etc.

One more voice to the chorus of those calling for those of us in higher education to use these new tools to connect, communicate and unfreeze our practice.