This morning’s first talk, by John Appley and Albert Borroni of Oberlin College, raises a very interesting problem:  as the LMS becomes increasingly popular, its functionality will be increasingly desired by groups and organizations (such as departments, administrative offices, etc.)—but putting content from such groups and organizations into the LMS places that content behind a password.  There’s thus a tension highlighted here between the LMS’s closed structure and the need for certain kinds of college communications—particularly, in their analysis, public relations type information—to be open.  (And thus their talk focuses on ways that information from the LMS might be fed into open websites.)

For my purposes, though, this also highlights another question about openness and the LMS:  there’s certain kinds of student writing and interaction that really benefits from openness as well.  It’s been useful for me, in my teaching, to have my students writing in public spaces, such that they have a wider readership for their thinking than just me, and even than just themselves.  When students’ work can potentially draw responses from other interested readers, they wind up thinking more seriously about the relationship between writing and audience, and about the ways that their thought fits into a wider realm of discourse than just the protected space of the classroom.

On the other hand, it’s necessary for them to be safe as they’re learning, to be free to make certain kinds of mistakes and missteps without fear that every little foible will be instantly discoverable by every future employer’s googlings.  So while I want to use open social software tools to run my classes, I want my students to use screennames within those tools.  I distribute to the class a “super-secret guide to screennames” such that we all know who’s who, and are required to be responsible to one another in our discussions.  In the end, I think this is a pretty good balance between ensuring that the classroom remains a safe space and fully situating it within a wider network of discussion and exploration.

(tags: LMSLAC2006)

Ooh, boy, is this going to be interesting.  I’m arguing in my presentation tomorrow that (in a very small nutshell) the so-called “learning management system” is not about learning at all; it’s content management, sure, but active learning (at least in our touchy-feely small liberal arts college model) requires a kind of interaction that the LMS does not provide.  And I’m going to be very curious to see how this goes over.

The keynote address for the symposium was just delivered by Cyprien Lomas of the University of British Columbia, examining the history, development, and future of the LMS.  A very interesting talk, in many ways, that introduced me to several systems that I wasn’t aware of.  But while he did mention the ways that students of the “net generation” are pressing institutions to provide an increasingly interactive set of tools not just for acquiring information but for authoring as well, he ultimately seemed puzzled by this drive, and troubled by the efflorescence of possibilities.  I’ve seen this same kind of response in our administrative computing folks, whose response to the call for blogging software on campus was “which one? We only want to support one.” One blogging engine, one wiki engine, etc.  What they seem to be missing is the fluidity with which many active users of social software move from one system to another, using different systems for different purposes.

What they see as “a loose assortment of annoying tools,” I can’t help but see as possibility.

(tags: LMSLAC2006)

I’m in Portland for the weekend, attending a NITLE symposium on Learning Management Systems in the Liberal Arts College at Reed.  It promises to be interesting, not least at the moment when I stand up and say “forget the LMS!  It’s no good!”

I’ll be blogging the event as appropriate.  And I’ve got my eye out for Laura, who’s supposed to be around here somewhere…

(tags: LMSLAC2006)

While the panic has subsided (in no small part due to my having woken the fuck up and said NO, thank you, to a new administrative task that I was being asked to take on), my workload has not diminished.  If anything, the stack in front of me has grown in the last week, and exponentially.

And so I’m at it, reading big piles of stuff, writing letters of recommendation, conducting interviews, producing reports.

Oh yeah, and thinking about how it might be a good idea to write the presentation that I’m going to be giving at the conference I’m going to this weekend.  That too.

The funny thing is, is that I’m doing all this writing about blogging these days—the BlogTalk talk, the Claremont Discourse lecture I gave last week, and now the blogs-as-learning-management-systems talk coming up in Portland.  But the more I write about blogging, the less I seem to do it.  And the long-range forecast for the blogging thing isn’t really looking so great right now.  I’ll hope to get back in the groove here soon; the longer I’m away, the harder it is to get going again…

I completely collapsed again last night, apparently not as recovered from my jet lag as I’d thought.  I was dead asleep before 10 pm last night—but then woke up in a cold sweat sometime before 2 am.  A serious cold sweat—I actually had to move to another spot on the bed because the sheets were too damp to stay put.

And that was the end of sleep last night.  As soon as I woke up I began thinking, which is never a good thing, particularly when what I’m thinking about is how I’ve managed to dig myself into another hole, work-wise, taking on way too much and suddenly finding myself uncertain that I’ll actually be able to get everything done.  I’ve got, depending on how you count them, two or three major projects that are going to need serious attention over the next six to eight months.  That’s not counting my own writing project, which I’m now realizing is going to have to be put off until the December break, and then again until summer.  And my administrative responsibilities at the college are, I’ll only say, mounting.

Yesterday afternoon I was quite convinced that I could manage all this.  At 2 am, not so much.  I’ve now spent the last three hours trying to get some clarity on the situation, and while I’m not exactly in what I’d call a panic over the situation, I’m not all that far away.  I think if I’m going to survive this, I’m going to need a really good research assistant or two, particularly next semester.  That and a really, really good scheduling system and task prioritizer.

Now to draw a deep breath and plunge in…

I’m back in SoCal, and so is my suitcase, though it decided to take a little breather in Houston halfway through the journey. (So yes, for those of you keeping score at home, I’ve now had a bag delayed two out of the last three times I’ve checked luggage in. And they wonder why we insist on carrying on!) While my suitcase is lounging around at home, taking long naps and eating bon-bons, I’m madly trying to get caught back up on campus. I’ll hope to have something worth posting about in the next couple of days.

Right before I left for Paris and Vienna, I did an email interview with a writer from Media Life magazine who was working on an article about The Anxiety of Obsolescence.  The interview, unsurprisingly, was mostly about the television end of the novel-and-television relationship, but the questions were interesting, and the article turned out pretty well, I think.  (And it may be the first time in the history of ever that a review of an academic book ended with the weekend box office report.)

Given how little of my rambling made it into the article, though, I thought I’d post the entirety of the interview, for my own future reference, if nothing else.

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Panel 3
Anne Bartlett-Bragg and Ricardo Cambiassi

(tags: blogtalkreloaded)

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So the talk went extremely well, I think; I got some good, challenging questions that I’m looking forward to pondering at some length. And I’d point you toward the talk, so that I could get more feedback from you guys, too—but, at least at this point, the video’s not up. All the talks before mine are up. The two talks after mine are up. Did the camera simply refuse? How rude!

[UPDATE, 3.38 pm CET: It’s up now. Whew. I was getting a little paranoid!]

Panel 1
Elmine Wijnia & Ton Zijlstra and
Uldis Bojars, John G. Breslin & Alexandre Passant

(tags: blogtalkreloaded)

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