Commodity Tools and
Learning Content
Miles Metcalfe
Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication

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Elearning Liberation Front

Elearning is changing

Revolution?

•User-owned technology
• Web 2.0 and “the cloud”
• Easy-to-use software

IT is out of the
institution

Institutional IT
• You used to need an institution for...
• Access to computers
• Access to elearning resources
• Access to the internet

Now, you have all of
this at home

The institutional VLE
• Has it roots in an era when institutions
enjoyed a monopoly on computing
• Is an “enterprise” service
• May not even be accessible from “off-site”

An enterprise service
• Andrew McAfee of HBS
• Enterprise, Functional, and Network IT
• Enterprise IT consists of “applications that
define entire business processes”
• This is the traditional management view
of elearning

Is elearning EIT?
• In most cases
• For most practitioners
• For most learners
• In most institutions
• It most certainly is not

And it never was

Learning design is not a
business process

Teaching and learning is
not a business process

Software Tools

Web 2.0

Learning, teaching, and
Web 2.0
• Community building
• Sharing and publication
• Collaboration and working together

Tools and Web 2.0
• Easy to create compelling learning content
• Easy to collaborate and share online
• Easy to build learning activities and
collaborative sites
• Easy to engage learners in familiar territory

We have issues

Because we have issues
• Shiny-shiny
• Policy
• Business: assessment, quality assurance
• Regulation: IPR, plagiarism, “cyber-
bullying”
• Social: Under-age learners

The social stack
Organise your stuff, by tags, in a personal
Personal tools portal, with desktop tools (example: a desktop
blog editor, an RSS reader, an iCal client). A PLE.
Group collaboration Knowledge: groups/teams integrate knowledge
in wikis and similar group systems. Even VLEs!
Blogs and networks Some items shared within a personal network
and discussed. Attention becomes interest.
Social signals Attention: store, share, tag and classify items of
interest, links, resources.
Internal and external RSS feeds - persisted
Feeds and flows searches, sites of interest, people of interest,
from a VLE or repository.
Adapted from a model developed by Headshift Ltd

For one day only!
• Tools and techniques
• Learning designs
• Pedagogic models T !
H O
• Captive academics

The policy bit
• Business: assessment, quality assurance
• Regulation: IPR, plagiarism, “cyber-bullying”
• Social: Under-age learners
• Standards and specifications:
• Coupling and interoperability
• Data portability and ownership

A reason not to?

Never say never
• The “war on plagiarism” is a battle lost
• Learners are using computers and social
tools in their lives now
• They will use them at work in years to
come
• They will not use them in ways we approve
of if we don’t get involved

One more thing

User-owned technology

No more network
monopoly…?
• The iPhone looks cool
• That it’s an always-connected network
device is disruptive
• What if this works in the market?
• Faraday cages in classrooms?
• Accept we no longer control the
network?

Revolution

Thanks!

Credits
Chains is by Heaven`s Gate (John)'s on Flickr
iMac is by Jonathan Smith (dziner) on Flickr
Map of online communities is from the
online comic xkcd
Social Stack is adapted from Headshift Ltd
iPhone is lifted from Apple
Ravensbourne thanks the JISC for funding
under the D4L and Capital programmes