I think this also shows how some people are placing unfairly high standards on distance education. Like the new movement to get online students to prove they were the one doing their work. A f-2-f student can walk in with a printed paper and doesn’t have to prove that he was the one that wrote it. In the same way, some try to place the burden of keeping student work on the instructor or institution rather than where it belongs - on the student. I think I will start having our professors add a little statement to classes that state that they are going to use tools off of the school server and just like papers that are returned - they will have to keep track of those materials. Those sites could go out of business, so be ready, blah, blah…

Of course, it is interesting to note that some of the people that are crying out “student work is being kept on a foreign server out of our school’s control!” are also using Blackboard… hosted on BB’s server, that is. Which would put it all in the same boat. Of course, few doubt BB is going out of business soon. One can always dream….

You are wild, I see the pattern emerging and it both thrills and frightens me
@Matt,
I agree with you entirely that the Course Management Systems as we know them are primarily administrative tools. And for the most part that is how it is used. The idea of using the various free and online tools for teaching and learning brings the question of archiving into sharp focus, and I think your point is an excellent one. One of the things we have been doing with UMW Blogs, as a way to manage this, is to archive an XML file with all of the faculty, students, and staff posts. This way, even if a professor or student deletes their online work after the fact, we have a record of it for at least three years, which the current guidelines suggest. And it is easily searchable.

So, we can keep there work private if they delete it, and have a copy on hand should we need it for the very reasons you mention. But that is our local UMW Blogs installation at Mary Washington, as for the bigger issues with all these third party tools? Well, that is something else all together. However, I might add that as it stands now do we archive student papers? No, and professors return them their work with comments often. So, I’m not sure it is always the case that it’s the professor’s responsibility to preserve student work. A professor needs to have a record of the grades the student got, but it is often the student’s job to produce a copy of the work in question. And to that end, these tools work quite well with placing the responsibility on the student, not the institution. Which is where it should be to some degree, I mean this is their education, they are defining it,and they must be the caretakers of their digital lives.

We do need places to adminstrate courses - and therefore, I think the acronym should really be CAMS. You need to be able to get a class role, post grades securely, maybe a few other details. Also, some courses touch on sensitive subjects that shouldn’t be exposed to the wide world. So, yeah - stick a discussion board in there.

The big question should be - why do these things cost so much? There isn’t that much complexity behind what they do for crying out loud!

To me, the CMS should be adminstrative only, a place to touch base and then launch in to the wide world of learning. But I currently do that with BlackBoard, WebCT, and Moodle.

Of course - there is a danger with that. Say you want to use a cool new blog site for posting course reflections. You run a class like that. Some student does a poor job and they fail. Course is over, you move on. The student challenges that grade, it goes through massive admin channels, and then to you. You go to pull up the student work to show why they were failed - and that blog site has bit the dust and gone out of business. That student’s work on that blog was part of the records your required by law to keep. So now, you are fired and part of a big lawsuit. Its gonna happen someday unless people start thinking this one through some more!

I don’t know how to answer that one, but we need to get thinking on it soon.

I definitely think this history is a bit streamlined and generalized, so your point is well taken. In fact, this is far more impressionistic a reading than academic in that regard.

Also, I think your last paragraph gets to the heart of the matter beautifully. Re-framing the questions to an institutional logic of openness is key. Yet, the idea of openness seems to be one of the terms that is being bandied around liberally these days. I’m not always so sure what it means, and the terms along which campuses go about resolving this issue will remain extremely imporant.

But, I think there is something else here. Whether or not institutions decide on a policy of openness, the fact of the matter is that the web as a loosely coupled institutions for learning has arrived in many ways. And I find it less and less compelling to think for and through edtech on an institutional level. I think part of what makes many of these tools compelling is that they still remain in a kind of interstitial space between the institution and the individual, erring more towards the latter than the former. I mean, how can an institution dictate to a student how much they want to share or not? Same for a professor? I find the tools build the infrastructure through these policies ar made implicit rather than explicit.

Take for example UMW Blogs at Mary Washington, where I work. We have no explicit policies about how open or closed students and faculty need to be with their online learning. We follow rules of copyright, FERPA, etc., but the bulk of the material is sharing one’s thinking process freely in an open space. But the tools a faculty member or student choose makes all the difference in terms of the level of openness they will engage. UMW Blogs will permit far more possibilities for sharing than BlackBoard ever could, and that is a basic architectural and philosophical difference between these two systems. As with either of them, education about privacy, rights, and protecting oneself is essential (and that is a large part of my job), but the very act of stepping out beyond the university and exchanging ideas with others has never been easier, because of the very design and logic of these new tools. I guess that why the incorporation of these elements into a closed, centralized system scares me so, it promises a marriage between unfit bedfellows.

I’m not sure that reading of history is entirely accurate. There were other “closed systems” than CMS. This one survives even now.
http://www.akiva.com/default.asp?l=1&id=8
But there were also stand alone grade books, quiz tools, including quite a few non-browser based systems. Many of these were home grown.

CMS addressed a support-provider issue - how to sustain the environment given what was then an explosive growth in use. Support providers also seem to have a preference for closed systems, primarily to have an institutional approach to addressing FERPA and Fair Use issues.

10 years later, the question is whether any of this still makes sense or whether CMS is sustained mostly by institutional inertia. But that question may be too hard to answer. Perhaps a better first question is whether we should have more openness. While the answer to that may seem transparent to you, most campuses haven’t resolved the issue.

It is really a privilege and an honor to have commentators who are compassionate, empassioned, and far smarter than the humble proprietor of this blog. In fact, I just want to say thank you all for sharing this much here in the comments, it’s amazing to me. I say this as I prepare to respond in-depth to each of you, and keep a kind of placeholder that I am reading and thinking, because when folks like you step up, I have to further m game, which is meager to start with, but you all make me better. How much better, well check out Andy Best’s comments on the Prom Night post from a week or so ago, he and Brad Efford and Sebastian6 took a throw away post and made it one of my favorite forever given the running commentary.

I’m gushing here, because I feel rich thanks to my community, and you all make it so. Thanks for taking my nuttiness seriously enough to turn it into something valuable and real (is there an emoticon for crying?).

It’s simply not true:

From here: http://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/harcourt/broken-window-myth.html

A 1999 study of the 17 largest cities compared each city’s most recent drop in homicides. New York’s rate of decline was the fifth-largest, behind those of San Diego, Washington, St. Louis and Houston.

San Diego, seated along a major drug smuggling corridor close to the Mexican border, is particularly interesting. In the late 1980’s, its police department began adopting a very different style–a problem-solving, community-oriented approach. While recording impressive drops in crime between 1993 and 1996, the city also posted a 15 percent drop in arrests and an 8 percent decline in complaints of police misconduct.

I know this is tangential to the argument, but hey, I got to fight the myth when I see it. Having seen what presidential candidate Giuliani proposed as “serious” solutions to crime and terrorism in America it should be very obvious to us that this myth has not only serious implications for the minor offenders we lock up, but for the world at large.

@martin

Reading your defense of gentrification I think there’s some confusion there between ‘gentrification’ and developing a, as you mention, derelict area.

For me, gentrification means a concious explotation of people who are excluded under the capitalist system (which itself is most certainly not ‘natural’).

A section of society is without local jobs, their own land or the means to adequately support themselves, they are abandoned by society through their agents (in a ‘democracy’) the government - who claim the best government is to do nothing in their neo-liberal rhetoric.

The area, is consumed by poverty and then crime and becomes run down. But under the capaital system it becomes cheap too. Humans with their pesky ‘culture’ and natural sense of community start to rally round. They start community groups, stick up for themsleves …students and artists move into cheap spaces - and then developers with money see the profit margin on the land deal.

They start to move in and economically drive out the poor - who have to stay poor to maintain the 90-10 balance in ownership and profits in society.

This is what the word gentrification describes specifically and it’s negative to me. It means putting people down - then kicking them when then try to get up.

Attaching metaphors to this that suggest ‘natural’ is quite dangerous and learning towards social darwinism (for want of a more accurate term).

The gentrification argument brings to mind Jane Jacob’s distinction between organic and planned urban growth. CMSes are clearly the latter.

Plant succession… why not imbrication? Or parallel development, CMS on one planet, Web 2.0 on another.