Here. (h/t S. Downes)

So my thought for the day: What are we doing to make sure this situation does not repeat itself with PLEs and PKMs?

Here’s the thing – it’s 2000 all over. Eportfolio is the new LMS.

Watching a recent vendor presentation I thought – I can’t believe this is happening again. That single phrase. In a loop. In my head.

Because remember — this happened once before. The LMS vendors came in with an assessment and management tool, and told us it was an elearning solution. At the time, I was on the other side of the equation, with a company trying to sell award-winning goal-based scenario software to colleges who were saying — but we already HAVE an elearning solution. It’s called Blackboard. Or WebCT. Or whatever.

And so Blackboard, an assessment and management tool, determined the pedagogy of colleges for eight or so years. Because teachers wanted to import rosters, we put students in a closed box and told them it was elearning.

When it wasn’t. The truth is the kids were doing more elearning on MySpace than in Blackboard.

How do we avoid it again? How do we avoid imposing something that is just pedagogically WRONG on a new set of students because we need to meet some institutional assessment needs?

There’s only one way — loosely coupled assessment.

If we are going to talk assessment, we are going to have to segregate it. Your assessment tool should ONLY assess.

We don’t need to talk more about student needs wth vendors that supply assessment tools. We need to talk to them less about student needs. It’s not their business.

Literally: it is not their business.

In fact, we should remove student needs entirely from the equation.

The students know they can get far bettter solutions to their problems for free elsewhere. They don’t need a eportfolio system to post thier resumes on.

So enough of letting assessment vendors tell us what facilities we will be forced to use in their walled garden, and expecting us to be excited about it. Enough with assessment vendors selling us “environments”. What we should be doing is describing the the enviroment that might exist – students using Wordpress, Blogger, S3, GDrive, email, messaging, etc. And then we should ask if they have a tool that can evaluate that. How will their tool interface with the learning environment we’ve constructed?

Anything else is insanity.

So, I’ve just stumbled into a gold mine. Via an inbound link from Stephen Downes, I’ve discovered that much of what I’ve been calling an inverted LMS has been called elsewhere a PLE (personal learning environment):

Helen Barrett receives an email from Mike Caulfield describing an Inverted LMS, which turns out to be the PLE, independently discovered. More here. She also gets a note from a graduate student, who writes, “I’m trending towards the view that the system we will end up with will use RSS to expose content, tags to organize it, and open ID to selectively share content with certain people.” Yes, as people look at the potential of online technology, they begin reaching similar conclusions. Independently, autonomously.

And it’s true! There is much overlap. But just as I’m about to object that the Inverted LMS goes further than the PLE, I find this post via connections to Downes: Leigh Blackall’s Die LMS Die! You Too PLE! And stuff like this warms the cockles of my heart. All the cockles. Every single one:

Question to the PLE: Why do we need a PLE when we already have the Internet? The Internet is my PLE, ePortfolio, VLE what ever. Thanks to blogger, bloglines, flickr, delicious, wikispaces, ourmedia, creative commons, and what ever comes next in this new Internet age, I have a strong online ID and very extensive and personalised learning environment. Actually I think the PLE idea is better envisioned by the futurist concept known as the Evolving Personalised Information Construct (EPIC). I think we already have EPIC, so why do we need the PLE?

OK — apart from the fact that his was written over a year and a half before, and that it spells personalized with an “s” — isn’t it really Enterprise Learning Systems Considered Harmful to Learning?

The gift keeps on giving: there’s apparently a del.icio.us tag for PLEs. I know because my article was tagged by someone under it. And among those articles are ones that deal with these questions of how loose the PLE should be, ala Blackall.

(Why so few American representatives, I wonder? It’s all Canada, England, New Zealand, and Australia…)

I don’t think any of these ideas are new, really; it’s more that they’ve been refined during the long dark reign of the LMS. Looking at the network of people I’ve stumbled into I can see that they’ve been pushing these ideas outside the mainstream for some time too.

But I can’t help but feel that something is starting to happen here, when so many unrelated people are coming to the same conclusion. The very power of blogs to do what we see here — to organize people and refine ideas, to propel thought forward, to get things done — is what has revealed the LMS model to be such a cruel joke. So it’s not surprising, perhaps, that as blogging becomes ubiquitous these ideas, once considered digital utopianism, now can be expressed in very real and practical terms.

And even where the ideas are old, they now relate to a trailing-edge frame of reference — or soon will.

Over the next couple of days I’ll sift through my newly found goodies, and share what I find. I have a feeling it will be pretty extraordinary.

This is fascinating, to me at least. Marc (are we allowed to call him Marca?) came late to blogging, but he’s clearly making up for lost time and talking to the right people.

But what I noted in his recent post was how much his view of the larger web (via Sifry) matches exactly what we’ve been talking about over here vis-a-vis the Inverted LMS (or really the Inverted CMS idea applied to education). Marc writes:

The first time I met Dave Sifry, over three years ago, he told me that conversations on the Internet would eventually all revolve around every individual having a blog, each individual posting her own thoughts on her own blog, and blogs cross-linking through mechanisms like trackbacks and blog search engines (such as Dave’s Technorati).

The advantage of this new world, said Dave, is that each individual (anonymous or not) would be publicly responsible for their own content and in charge of their own space — substantially reducing the risk of spam and trolls — and the communication would flow through the links. There would still be the risk of link spam, but at least this new world would make people more responsible for their own content, and that would tend to uplevel the discourse.

I think Dave is exactly right, and the implications of this new world are very interesting.

The rest of the post is worth reading too — it’s more of a head-nodder, mostly reiterating stuff that ALL bloggers learn very quickly, but it’s great to have it all in one place. And it has the neat advantage that you can send it to the non-believers with a note that says “From the guy that co-founded Netscape.”

I’m saying, it doesn’t hurt.

Gardner Writes has a good critique of of my Inverted LMS post, which raises a number of important issues.

So let’s say first I am both manifesto-prone and conversation-addicted, and those things generally equal out. 

This is conversation Mike speaking.

The question Gardner poses is whether “student-centered” swings too far in the other direction:

But I’m driven to respond because the matter is not simply one of awakening from a “hasa” world into the brave new “isa” world. If only it were that simple. “Hasa” and “isa” are not alternatives. They are partners in a dance. They are both parts of the inescapable, imperfect, provisional, necessary work of conceptualization itself. Of identity.

There’s a “hasa” element in our experience that we should not reject, lest we swing from one mistake to another.

I absolutely agree on this point. The interplay between who we are and what we are contained by is inescapable.

Or rather, I should say the tension between those two models is inescapable, since we can model most things either way.

So are we entering a brave new world of isa? Partially. I heard Dave Weinberger the other day on IT Conversations, talking about his latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous. It seems related to this. One of the advantages of modern tagging systems is that we break free of having to impose a single hierarchy on things. In the world of data, you can file the spatula both in the silverware drawer and by the grill.

I think that’s a really major thing, and we’ve only scratched the surface of the ramifications of that. And at the same time I think that the chance of hierarchy and taxonomy going away completely is exactly zero. As I said in the original post, it’s too comforting. Inspired by your post, I’ll clarify even further: it’s too useful.

I’ll give a great example — in my free time, I co-run a pretty prominent online political community called Blue Hampshire. It’s run on a piece of software called Soapblox, which allows all 600 members to post their articles on the site and comment and rank them and so forth. And compared to the blogswarms I’ve been a part of, Soapblox is very much a box. You’re in that community or you’re not.

Now would I dismantle that community and break it into 600 Wordpress blogs x-reffing each other? Not on your life. Or at least, not yet. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why that would be a disaster, but I’ll mention four:

1. Comfortability: People on the site very often come from DailyKos, a national site that runs similar software. They know how this system works. Why not capitalize on that?

2. Power in Numbers: As one of three managing editors of this 600 member site, I represent the community. Because we’ve pooled our effort here, I can get candidates to talk to us. I recently got all the Democratic campaigns to write up a short paragraph for us describing explicitly what their differences on Iraq policy were. Had we been seperate blogs, they never would have considered that.

3. Shared Identity and Unique Experience: People sometimes x-post to other sites, but what the community really appreciates is stuff written for them precisely. There’s something about having something very precisely keyed to members and not available anywhere else (including one’s personal blog). You see people express this feeling often in comments.

4. Policing: The nice things about boxes is you can very satisfyingly kick people out of them if they break rules of engagement.

Is all this possible in a more distributed model? Maybe. I’d say most likely. You can kick someone out of an MU aggregator by unsubscribing to their feed. You could syndicate more selectively. You could collect stats to show your bargaining power….etc.

But the point is this: the very simple model of Soapblox, for all it’s faults, enabled us to become the number one blog community in New Hampshire within three months of our launch. And more importantly, it has allowed our members to have a real effect on both New Hampshire and national politics. We’ve involved over 600 people (that have signed up to post),  and we average about 70 comments and ten posts a day. Campaigns contact us, rather than we them.

And I’ll admit we couldn’t have done that, on that level, using a more loosely coupled model.

At least, not yet.

There’s a lot more I want to say, but I will end with this — where Gardner says…

But the impulse of which the LMS is an institutional perversion is not, I’m beginning to think, wholly wrong. The challenge is to re-imagine school so that the boundaries can be artful, changeable, semi-permeable, and the result of creative decisions, not administrative convenience.

…I think we’re in complete agreement.

 So if I know all this, why the manifesto?

Because I think 99% of people don’t even know there is another way. And they can’t imagine another way things might work.  And frankly there’s no really extant example that goes as far into the attribute model as Blackboard goes into the container model.

So while it might seem unneccesarily Hegelian, I think we need to talk about what the antithesis is, and hopefully build it. It’s not always obvious, for example, how one might model a study group vs. a class using a less container-oriented approach. Part of that is doing what Gardner describes — understanding the good things the modern LMS/CMS has done for us.

But I think the other part is building the antithesis and taking it for a spin. It’s only in that way that we can really know it’s efficacy, and to my knowledge no one has tried that yet.

My gut is if we do this we will find ways to deal with many of these issues — if we give it a chance.