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eLearning
'Socializing' the CMS
7/1/2008
Designing Around Personal Learning Studios
Many of our current Web 2.0 tools, especially blogs and wikis, have flexible structures and multiple media support, plus linking, commenting, and messaging tools to creatively support the new collaborative and constructivist pedagogies.
Let's first consider the blog: Why is it useful? The blog is somewhat unique in that it is grounded in and "owned" by an individual learner while it invites comment, suggestions, additions, and challenges in one consistent "stream" or place. By capturing ideas as they form and shape within a person's mind (along with capturing the influencers of those ideas), a blog can shed light on our thinking and learning processes, making those processes visible and observable.
The blog tool also is interesting in that it shares many of the features of personal social networking sites that give individuals a place to express their life experiences. Learners can share their thinking and experiences, including connections to resources, and connections to (and relationships with) other learners and their ideas. Blog and wiki technologies also support linkings between the blogs and other resources, and notifications of when comments and connections have been made. Thus, a learner's blog within a CMS can be a learner's personal mind space, or a "personal learner's studio," or PLS. Collectively, a set of learners' blogs creates a web of the cognitive growth of a course community.
Wikis share many of these same characteristics, but work as collective rather than individual spaces. So wikis can be mind spaces for groups, teams, and whole cohorts.
Another feature of individual learner blogs and group and team wikis is that collectively they can provide important feedback to the faculty mentor. Blogs generally include contextual information: where learners are working, and what else might be going on in their lives. Blogs often include activities and thoughts that otherwise would not be included, and thus reveal influences that would be missed. The faculty member can add feedback/comments in these areas, as well.
Redesigning and Evolving Learning Apps
All of this brings us back to the question: Given the world of new "social" pedagogies and their accompanying technologies, how can we proceed with the redesign and evolution of our current learning systems?
Best-of-breed tools. A strategy being used by some innovators (both individuals and institutions) is to create their own smaller, focused CMS by selecting tools that are "best-of-breed" applications. One tool being used to explore this shift to more focused systems (or to complement a large CMS system) is Socialtext. Socialtext is an enterprise-wide Web 2.0 application represented as capturing "the best features of wikis and blogs, enabling people to form groups flexibly, and build lightweight structure on the fly."
Recommended Reading
- Get Users on Board
- Greening IT
- It's a Zinch
- Meeting up Virtually
- Online Tutorials to the Rescue
Now's the time to use online tutorials to streamline professional development and help desk management.
- Retention Rx
