A comment by David Elliot on my last post yielded a train of thought that I think is worth discussing. Initially I had posted the following thoughts as a reply to his comment, but the thought occurred that this is tangential enough from the original post that it warrants a dedicated one in its own right.
David raises the topic of Personal Learning Networks versus Virtual Learning Environments, and asks “How can we bring institutions back into the Connectivism picture as foci of collaboration within the larger PLN?”
[This is perhaps not as well worded as it could be because I was in a rush at the time, but hopefully it will serve to get some discussion going.]
Personally speaking I much prefer PLN’s/PLE’s to VLE’s because of the notions of personal empowerment of learning and continuity. As useful as many centralised platforms are, the key issue for me is they retain user contributions, so learner contributed content isn’t necessarily portable.
By contrast, the opportunity to use the same blog for CCK08 that I had been using previous is tremendously valuable in that respect and goes a long way towards mapping my personal and professional development over time. I don’t think VLE’s – especially LMS’s – have nearly the same capacity.
Then again the reality regarding the best choice of framework needs to consider other factors as well. Just off the top of my head, institutions like the Australian Defense Force Academy have very pronounced issues of privacy and security to consider and might not view high levels of public transparency in subject matter as a desirable thing. Local context, as always, is an essential consideration.
Continuing on the notion of institutional perspectives, there are also legal obligations of preservation of student data to consider; and this isn’t necessarily something that cloud services (e.g. freely available tools) devote much consideration to. There may be compromises or innovative approaches that will support distributed frameworks, while ensuring legal obligations are met – such as a central Moodle instance that aggregates and stores all student posts from a course. The point is the reality needs to be considered.
Moreover, it seems clear from the usage of the CCK08 Moodle Forums that centralised spaces for discussion remain a critical aspect of learning; and this seems to be a key area of importance for the VLE. And for that matter, the notions of how to best convey or disseminate the initial subject matter for student discussion. In the case of the latter a blog could arguably be used – even an email digest; but are they the best options? I’m not sure at this stage. What do you think?
Given some VLE’s like Moodle enable learners and/or administrators to plugin or aggregate 3rd party sites, at least on the surface it seems like they might play a valuable role as portal and source of at least some of the information students are exposed to. This might also go a long way to addressing the notion of establishing “informed nodes”, “gateways” or “pathways” that Lisa Lane and I spoke of as being needed convey key concepts.
This seems to be a good segue into this weeks topic on the role of the educator come to think of it. Your point on the role of the institution is quite significant in that respect. I’ll ponder that further and see what I come up with.
