Friday 13 June 2008

VLEs and the Corporate Identity Beast

The term “Web 2.0” gets thrown around so much its become a convenient shorthand for “interactive web pages, or ones that allow readers to add their own content”. (Ted Nelson would, I guess, call them Web 0.2, but while not allowing a reader to annotate or alter what they read, they do at least allow them to add. Usually as something that’s clearly marginalia, though Wikis are an honourable exception.)

My university has been using Moodle, a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), for the last three years and now the majority of lecturers use it to publish their lecture notes and essay titles to the class, happy that they can restrict access to just their own students. This is important to them for copyright reasons: if only the class can see what they post then other universities cannot copy and use their material. Or other people cannot look and discover material that has been copied from them.

Few teachers use the interactive features, which include quizzes, wikis, chats and forums.

Once a teacher has used the quiz feature they are hooked. They take a long time to develop, but once done they are there for future years without more effort.

Remember how paper-based exercises work? You hand them out on Wednesday, students hand them in on Friday, you waste a lot of weekend marking them, hand them out to the students on Tuesday and they take a quick look, say “oh, 7 out of 10” and crumple them into their bag, never to be looked at again.

When the quiz is marked by the computer as the student completes it they get feedback as they think about the topic. And if you can anticipate common mistakes and phrase the feedback to correct them, (rather than the lazy “no, try again”) they really do learn as they do the exercise, not just run a quick check on what they already know. A language teacher told me that 80% of her job was to deduce the grammatical model of the language the student had in their head, and correct it. Her example, I think, was that in Spanish trees are often masculine and fruit feminine, so manzano (m) means apple tree and manzana (f) means apple. Same for cerezo, cherry tree and cereza, cherry. A beginner level exercise in which the student used the wrong gender in a translation might usefully point out the generalisation. A few fruit names are masculine, though. If a student made that mistake it is better to point it out by saying “although most fruit are feminine, in this case…” and so on.

If you do this in a computer-marked quiz the student will learn and remember. If you write it in red on a paper-based exercise the student did days ago, it is probably a waste of ink. My own linguistic skills were forged by teachers who wasted a lot of red ink.

But why are VLEs like Moodle so attractive to those who just publish their lecture notes, and to students who never see the “web 2.0” features? Probably because the administration have seized central control of the web. No one in this institution can publish a web page as they type, in the two minutes before class. Everything is in a Content Management System. Theoretically this is a good thing. Content is kept separate from presentation, so can be poured by the system into whatever corporate identity is in fashion. Past version are automatically stored for future reference, and as everything is “published” by a central authority it can be screened for spelling mistakes and made properly accessible to all. In practise what it means is that wonderful piece of technology has been reduced to the role that used to be filled by the official printed publications: course catalogues, mission statements and all,

You can’t update on the fly. You can’t fix a mistake quick before anyone sees it. You can’t add today’s news to a language teaching page or react to the latest laptop-left-on-a-train mishap on a humanities computing course page. Ruined for the teacher, but it saves a lot of printing for the authorities.

Fortunately we have the VLE, It has the ability to publish immediately and change on a whim or an error, and that is why its so favoured by those who never venture beyond uploading their lecture notes and announcing the time of the next class test.

We live in dread of the time when the whole Content Management System/Corporate Identity folk finish what they are doing and turn their gaze to search new prey.

So far most people, myself included, use just a fraction of the power of VLEs, of “2.0” in general, which have the power to transform education.

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