Open Education Skeptic: We Are All Prof. Gradgrind Now

By Michael Feldstein | January 4, 2009

Since I have made a commitment to take the umbrella concept of open education more seriously, this will be the first post in an occasional series in which I express my concerns about open education as a way of working through the issues. It is also part of an occasional series of posts about or inspired by the book . In this case, I would say “inspired by” is the correct phrase, because although the concern I want to talk about was triggered by the chapter ”A Harvest Too Large? A Framework for Educational Abundance”, the authors are clearly aware of the concern I raise here (as are a number of the other chapter authors in the book). My issue is more with the naive formulations of open education that I often see floating around in the blogosphere.

Specifically, I’m afraid that the popularization of “open education” will further reduce our already stunted notion of what the verb “to educate” means until its meaning disappears altogether.

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Posted in Higher Education, Openness | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Keeping Work (LMS) and Play (Social Networks) Separate?

By Michael Feldstein |

MergingArts has a good audio interview with Inigral CEO Michael Staton. Michael makes some good points about the nature of sites like Facebook that raise questions about a number of academic social networking efforts. Essentially, he argues that people don’t want to mix their work and social spaces. There’s an almost ontological separation of the two. Unlike, say, chat, which isn’t a “space” per se, Facebook is a “place” where people hang out. They’ll go there to check out what’s happening when they have a little free time, like a dorm floor lounge or a favorite pub. This is very specifically not what people want to do with work spaces, and they don’t want them mixed.  Most people don’t go to the office to hang out in their spare time. So how can social networks enhance work-like endeavors such as formal education?

Inigral’s answer is to carry the work relationships over into the social space. If we make friends with and hang out with the people we work with, we will probably feel better about our work, try harder to please our colleagues, be less afraid to ask for help from them, etc. Other efforts that focus on embedding social networking tools directly into an academic space like an LMS may have a tougher time of it. It’s not obvious that current-generation social networking tools will transfer to direct work tasks in the way that, say, presence awareness and chat do. There’s definitely some more thinking to be done in this area.

On a related note, Inigral has posted a survey regarding how new media is being used in higher education. If you have something to contribute in this area, please go on over and participate.

Posted in Higher Education, Usability and Human Factors | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Permissions and Usability

By Michael Feldstein | December 31, 2008
No Fishing....

Creative Commons licensed; photo credit: Angus Mackie

In a recent post, I reviewed the advantages of Bodington’s unusual system of assigning access privileges and mentioned that the Sakai community is planning to support Bodington-like permissions in a future version. There was some follow-up discussion of this on the Sakai pedagogy listserv. In particular, John Norman pointed out that the more flexible permissions structure comes with significant usability challenges. I don’t have any clear-cut solutions to these problems, but I’m going to think out loud here and see where I can get with it all.

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Posted in Build This, Please, Content Management & Taxonomy as Knowledge Management, LMOS, Usability and Human Factors | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Your Predictions for 2008?

By Michael Feldstein | December 30, 2008

Well, it’s December 30th, and I have already gotten my first invitation to contribute to a “predictions for 2009″ article. And it got me thinking about a twist on the question. What developments in the world of educational technology during 2008 will turn out to be more important in retrospect than they were widely recognized to be at the time?

Discuss below.

Posted in Blogo-eroticism and Other Hype, Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!) | Leave a comment

Permissions and Openness

By Michael Feldstein |

I’ve been reading Opening Up Education. So far, I’m impressed. It’s hard to get all the articles in a collection like this to be consistent, coherent, and equally interesting, but the editors seem to have managed to do just that. 

I want to comment today on the piece about Bodington by Stuart Lee. Long-time readers know that I have been a fan of this system. In the first part of a multi-part review of the system, I wrote:

I have long complained that LMS permissions systems are usually too rigid and narrowly defined. Bodington’s permissions are more flexible than just about any other LMS I’ve ever seen. (It’s possible that dotLRN’s OpenACS-based permisions are as flexible, but if so, then they are hidden deep under the hood–typically out of the reach of most faculty members.) In most systems, you have a few pre-defined roles–teacher, student, administrator, TA, etc. These roles generally have pre-defined permissions. You can create groups that are essentially nested containers, e.g., a student group will always be a strict subset of the class that contains it. Likewise, these groups are often (though not always) mutually exclusive, i.e., a student can’t be a member of both Group A and Group B at the same time.

Bodington works completely differently. Every object–a content bit, a discussion forum, etc.–can have an arbitrary number of groups attached to it, each group can have an arbitrary number of overlapping members, and each group can also have arbitrary fine-grained permissions for the object.

At the time, I caught some flack for focusing on what some viewed as trivial aspects of the system. But Stuart’s essay, along with some recent comments to the Sakai discussion boards about the version 3 vision document, show that this stuff really matters.

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Posted in Build This, Please, Educational Pattern Languages, LMOS, Openness, Usability and Human Factors | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment
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