I like the turn you take with this, and I think in many ways your reading is more apt. Oddly enough, the trend in NYC while I was there was that more and more of the poor and disenfranchised were being pushed out to borders of Nassau County (or suburban communities) as prices in Brooklyn and Queens became more and more outrageous. In fact one of those suburbs (Valley Stream) is where the security guard was killed on Black Friday in Wal-Mart. And the town I grew up in, Baldwin, has in many ways reflected this changing reality. whereas the middle class and wealthier populations on Long Island were doing one of two things—heading back into the city or going further out on the Island. Kinda like the Girdle of the invisible class Engels talks about in The condition of the working class in England in 1844 and the housing question. There was even the case that the homeless were pushed out to no mans lands like the swampy bay surrounding JFK airport, further imposing that invisibility.

But even that fails as an analysis, because with close to two million people on Long Island alone, there are all kinds of exceptions, gated communities, and insular class-centered developments. All this to say while my metaphor here is admittedly flawed and over-generalized, this post was very fun to write. And yours still gets at the heart of the matter with CMSs beautifully. Now I have to watch some gated community films, let me think: the Stepford Wives, ET (though not really gate), hmmmm, I’m at a loss here.

After all, it’s not as though the rough-and-tumble world of the web’s inner-city doesn’t continue on (albeit in different ways, as time passes). But CMS actively removes edutech from those developments.

The only difference between CMS and gated communities is that the security cameras are all pointed inwards; but then, that’s the insularity of the model and its drive to control and administer.

So how then do you mean Blackboard cordons us off from the rest of the web?

I guess this is part of a larger questioning on my part, and I have to admit I am hard on BlackBoard consistently, and many have pointed out perhaps too much so.

Fair enough, that may be true, but I don’t think it is in the long run. I also don’t think BlackBoard is the sole problem with edtech, but they are a kind of perfect example of how the corporate designed, proprietary management systems do indeed estrange us from the very resources and openness that should characterize education. And to be fair, educational institutions and government more generally are an integral part of this equation as well, and a major aprt of the problem.

So, with all that said, what I mean by BlackBoard “cordons us off from the web” is that we are conducting web-based learning for classe (whether as an online component to f2f course, hybrid, or totally online course in silos? This is not just about sharing within one course, but how about between courses, or disciplines, or even schools? How do you know what is happening in other courses in terms of teaching and learning? —and might it be beneficial to start thinking about educational institutions as transparent learning communities? Right now, the web is exactly what you suggest, another window separate from the institutional IT framework. It’s as if it doesn’t exist within the logic of most educational CMSs. It is something to be shrouded in fear when it involves teaching and sharing online, and I think these system illustrate how divorced most class-based discussion and sharing has become from all the amazing tools and publishing options we currently have. Moreover, Bb’s ability to keep up with these tools is doomed at best, open source projects like Drupal, WordPress, etc. outpace software like Bb so entirely when it comes to integrating the web by making syndication and publishing so easy, that soon enough educational institutions will be paying 100s of thousands of dollars to be effectively irrelevant when it comes to teaching and learning technologies. Which ar radically different than administrative technologies, which is basically what Bb is, and that a lot of money to post a syllabus, share some documents, and email a group of students–wouldn’t you agree? Moreover, most instructional technology divisions at universities have been straddled with Bb and that is supposed to be their teaching and learning tools, what a joke—it makes their jobs not onl boring and monotonous, but it does not forward the mission of the university when it comes to innovating within our moment and introducing students and professors to relevant tools for this day and age. Does this make sense?

I’m glad I stumbled upon this. I’m definitely going to have to come back and read it all over again one more time to make sure I got it.

One thing, though I’m not so sure about: you write, “What changes is not the actual underlying technology of CMSs as outdated systems of delivery and management centered around a course, but the general sense that the internet is a dangerous place (which it is) and teaching and learning needs to be cordoned off from that (which is questionable).”

I am in a graduate degree program even as I write this (hey, it was free), and we’re using Blackboard for our courses. I’m certainly no fan of Blackboard’s platform, but it is hardly the fascist state you describe here. Sure, no one in their right mind would ever use the library links that Blackboard provides. But there’s nothing in Blackboard preventing anyone from opening a separate window and running a quick Google search. The instructors never know the difference. My personal access to the internet remains uninfringed.

So how then do you mean Blackboard cordons us off from the rest of the web?

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.