Blackboard as part of the Military-Industrial Complex

05. December 2008 · 1 comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

I’ve been working on various things that have to do with taking advantage of social software to create active, collaborative learning environments for students. When I talk about using social software, I’m talking about using blogs or wikis or Facebook or Twitter or other freely available web applications and leveraging them for educational purposes. Anyone can do this without having access to an educational institution. I could set up a whole class using Blogger, Facebook and pbwiki.

Blackboard was originally created as a simple way for faculty to put course material online back in the day when putting up a web site meant knowing how to code html and navigate the pathways on a server to get your files in the right place. Most faculty didn’t know how to do this. And so Blackboard and a couple of other companies sprung up as solutions to this problem. Ten years ago, this was great! The web was very interactive anyway and this made it easier for people to post syllabi and course documents. Blackboard was not, however, any kind of innovative technology. It certainly didn’t change the teaching and learning game. It was, and is, still built primarily as a one-way communication medium. Faculty post information and students read it.

Social-software oriented education allows students to create a more personalized learning environment and create a many-to-many communication channel. They no longer have to (nor can they, if done right!) sit and wait for information to flow from the professor to them. They can post their own information, ask questions of each other, see out new information and share it, comment on it, all without needing the professor to intervene. Social-software oriented classes that are open and public also benefit from interacting people not in the class, creating a broader audience for their work and learning from broader perspectives beyond the confined walls of school.

The factory-model of education treats, as the video below explains, students as widgets, as one size fits all. Blackboard perpetuates this model by not allowing for much customization, few communication tools, especially those that allow many-to-many communication, by keeping everything behind a password and not allowing for interconnection even within a single institution. Faculty cannot share course materials. Students cannot interact with students from other classes, much less with people outside of the class. Blackboard is built on the concepts of education from the industrial age, even though it was built in the information age.

As I say all the time, the software matters when it comes to using it for teaching and learning. The layout, its flexibility and interface, its ease of use all will affect the teaching and learning experience. Blackboard creates a really unfriendly learning environment. It’s contained and closed off, which gives the message that education only happens within the confines of a “course” and not in the interstices of courses. One can learn, it says, only the information I give you. It pretends, as Michael Wesch is fond of saying, that information is scarce, when it’s not. It makes education and learning narrow and defined when learning is huge and broad and takes place all the time over a lifetime and that is the message we need to be sending.

I used to think Blackboard was okay as a stepping stone to other things, but now I think it’s not. I think it’s okay to use it to keep your copyrighted materials and maybe your grades, but I don’t think it’s okay to use if for learning.

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Course Management and Social Software

29. October 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,
Later this week, I’m facilitating a discussion about the relationship between course management systems and social software. In my world, where course management means Blackboard, the two don’t relate together very well at all, imho. We have a third-party plugin for blogs and wikis in Blackboard, which quite a few people are using. I’d like to gather or poll these people to see if they’re finding the tool useful or not. My impression is that they feel it does what it does and they don’t expect much out of it. I don’t know of anyone using an external blog or wiki for their courses, though I have had people do that in the past.

My thoughts are, right now, that social software is the antithesis of a CMS. It’s open. It’s about sharing and collaborating with a wide group of people. Social software, to me, also involves personalization to some degree. People personalize their profiles, their blogs, etc. with their own look and feel. It’s a way of saying, “I’m part of a group, but I’m still unique.” A CMS, even in the social software arena, is about uniformity. Everything and everyone looks the same. This is my own bias, of course. But my own bias is also that education is not about developing students to all look the same, so I think the underlying technology should enable differentiation instead of uniformity. Too often, in CMS’s and other software, we force people to do the same thing, to look the same. I think it’s okay if we use the same software to simplify support, but I think that software needs to allow flexibility.

I’d love to hear my reader’s thoughts about this. Do any of you use social software in conjunction with a CMS? Successfully? Do any of you use social software within a CMS? Just social software? Why? If you haven’t used social software (blogs, wikis, facebook, etc.) in your teaching, why not? I’ll post notes or maybe even the whole presentation after it’s done.
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Practicality vs Socal Responsibility

05. March 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

A while back, I wrote something about whether it really mattered if I recycled or took public transportation or voted a certain way. My question was, does it really make a difference? And if it seems like it doesn’t make a difference, and if, from a practical standpoint, it’s onerous for me to recycle/ride the bus/whatever, then maybe I shouldn’t do said thing (or at least I shouldn’t worry about it). Readers said (and I wish I could find the post) that small things can make a big difference and that I should keep recycling/walking/doing small good things because I do have an effect and besides, it’s the right thing to do.

In a meeting today, this very tension between the practicality (or more correctly, perhaps, the easiness) of doing something and the social responsibility of doing something different came into play. One might think that in my line of work, this doesn’t happen very often. Education is an admirable pursuit, after all. But, there are still people involved and it’s still in some ways a business and so, conflicts arise. The question at hand was whether students and faculty would consider using a different tool if they found out that the company that makes the tool were doing something they found to be socially or morally irresponsible. Interestingly, most of the students and faculty said they’d rather not change, that changing depended on what the company was doing. Semi-unethical business practices were okay, but using child labor was not. For them, there was a pretty high threshold before they’d be convinced that change was necessary. Change for them was more problematic than a company’s business practices.

In my mind, they were being practical. Changing their practices would be time-consuming. They might have to learn how to use something new, and it might not be easy to learn. They may, in fact, lose some functionality (even if they gain new functionality). They were used to this tool, even if it wasn’t perfect. This is the tension that occurs all the time in lots of ways for many people. For me, it’s the reliance on a car and having a car that doesn’t get the greatest gas mileage. It would be really difficult for me to change that. I’d have to move or buy a hybrid car or extend my commute to triple the time by taking the bus. All of those options are difficult from a practical standpoint, for financial or other reasons. But . . . if using less gas became a huge important issue for me, then I’d probably find a way to make one of those options work. For the faculty and students, it’s the reliance on software that they are comfortable with and that “everyone else uses.”

In my ideal educational software environment, we’d use only open source software. (And let’s forget for the moment that I’m not using open source software right this second. I could. I just didn’t.) Why? Because I think education is too important a venture to leave up to corporations who don’t understand anything about education. Let’s use Microsoft products for a moment. They were created for an office environment. Yeah, we use Word and Excel in the education environment, too. But do you think developers are sitting around thinking about how to make those products better for their educational users? Um, no. Not that Open Office is either, but someone could make something. Maybe someone could develop a tool that helps students learn how to do citations correctly as they’re typing papers. The thing is, it’s open! You could do it if you wanted to.

I think of an academic environment as a place where ideas are shared, not where they’re sequestered away. I think of it as a place where people work together in order to learn. A college or university provides opportunities for those both physically and virtually. The software we use should espouse those principles and should make it easier (not harder) for students to collaborate, for faculty to work with each other and their students, for everyone to share resources, to communicate, and to learn. I don’t want to see education as yet another market to be leveraged. Surely, we rise above capitalism a little even if we can’t escape it entirely.

In the 80s, when I was in college, we protested in order to get the college to divest from South Africa. Shouldn’t we consider all our purchases as carefully as we might consider our investments? Maybe this isn’t a big enough issue to protest over, but certainly, it’s worth having a debate. For myself, I know I could be convinced that I should make the gas issue more important, important enough for me to change. And changing software is a lot easier than moving.

Bonus points if you have any idea what software I might be talking about here (and then I’ll put it in the label).

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