After my last post I don’t care if the VLE dies or not (which was my purposefully leading perspective on the “is the VLE dead or not?” debate which Steve Wheeler lit the blue touch paper on this week) I read around on the comments and posts which are still coming in to the key players’ blogs.
Daniel Kennedy blogged his general agreement with James Clay about finding a middle ground between institutional control and the learner’s ‘personal web’. Adapt and survive, in a sense (not that in my opinion the VLE is in any way dead or dying). But what caught my attention about Daniel’s post was that his institution is using Microsoft’s SharePoint as a VLE.
Now, VLE stands for Virtual Learning Environment, and this is usually used to describe one piece of software / web application, such as (to name but a few) SharePoint, Blackboard and Moodle. Other phrases exist, such as ‘personal web’ which has been used to describe the various web 2.0 tools which exist (and they do, en masse) used for educational purposes.
As James points out the VLE could be the start of the ‘personal web’ if more learning professionals were willing to embrace them:
From my experience, most e-learning professionals aren’t engaging with the Web 2.0 tools and services out there let alone learning professionals. At ALT-C 2008 for example, six hundred delegates who were coming to a learning technology conference, and of those less than 8% were using Twitter!
Is it a case of the educators being out of date? (By the way: twitter.com/vaughany.)
When I was at school we didn’t have computers or the internet, we had chalk boards and ‘copy this into your workbooks’. Thank goodness, teaching has come a long way (and hopefully, so has learning). Since then, as a teacher I have used the internet and VLE products to teach, I am reasonably certain, very effectively. So if today’s learners are web-aware (or whatever phrase you wish to use to convey a reasonable degree of IT awareness) and the educators are not, isn’t that the first most serious problem which needs addressing?
I was a teacher, but I am not currently. I’d like to make this clear. Steve works in the Faculty of Education at a university. I’m not going to argue with his wisdom which must greatly exceed my own. Other ‘heavyweights’ such as James (and others, just read the comments on the various blogs and follow the links back) are also professionals and have lots more experience than I do. But one point I would like to make, as a former teacher but as someone who now works to support the development of a VLE, is that your VLE may not be a VLE.
‘The right tool for the right job’ is an important phrase to remember. Steve and Daniel’s university uses MS SharePoint as their VLE. Wait… what? SharePoint being used as a (let’s expand the acronym here so we have a full understanding) virtual learning environment? I’ve seen SharePoint used as a VLE elsewhere, albeit briefly, and I was not impressed. I personally see it as a high-quality extension to MS Office: it has collaborative editing of documents, version control of same, the ability to group users into departments/sections/hair colour as required with varying levels of permissions and a ton of other useful features besides. But none of the features of SharePoint actually strike me as facilitating teaching or learning, simply as facilitating better document management and control, and to a point, presentation of said documents.
Calling something a VLE when it is not is a sure-fire way of undermining the whole concept of what a VLE is and does. I could call Notepad a word processor or Paint (sorry for picking on Microsoft) a graphics design package. I would be wrong. If there’s no learning inherent in the system then don’t use that word.
There is no reason why the acronym VLE could not be used to encompass all non-physical tools which could be used to facilitate learning, itself containing the Managed Learning Environment (SharePoint, Blackboard, Moodle) as well as the personal web), or maybe it is the other way around, with the PLE containing the personal web as well as the VLE… Too many acronyms spoil the learning.
My (further) 2¢: give the learners a structure which fits the institution’s way of working, within a framework of tools the learners can use, or not, at their own discretion.
–
This, below, is the essence of what I want to write, but know that my experience and understanding of teaching using (VLE/PLE/Web 2.0/all the many and various methods available to us) is considerably less than that of most of the people involved in this debate, and therefore my opinion is based on same, but I still want to write it:
If you think the VLE is dead, you’re not doing it right.
Pat Parslow says:
I have to agree that the VLE term is heavily misused. In our institution we use a package designed as a VLE, but it is used mostly as a content management system. I believe that that is quite a common situation, and leads to the suggestion that the VLE is dead – people not working out how to make full use of the features end up leaving the system looking like a ghost town.
September 13, 2009, 12:47 pmI do think that the personal learning environment will tend to win out over the institutional ‘package’ though. The flexbility to pick and choose tools is very hard to grant in an institutionally controlled environment, leaving students and teachers feeling as though they are using out of date systems.
It occurs to me that I have learned through using our VLE. I have had access to it for 7 years now, and in the first couple I learned a lot through thought provoking conversations with my peers (using a forum system in the VLE). Since then I have learned how policy can restrict functionality. I have also learned about 20% of the functionality of the VLE. It is not too big, or too complex – I just don’t have enough control over what I am allowed to do in it to be able to learn to use it effectively.
If the VLE is dead, you only have policy makers to blame.
Vaughany says:
Hi Pat, thanks for the comment.
As I said, I am not a teacher any more, and I took the job I am now doing specifically to use (develop) Moodle. So, I am biased, I freely admit.
What I truly believe is there is a ‘right tool for the right job’, but if the job is teaching (or facilitating learning if you like) then there may be more than one right tool, which is how I see the ‘personal web’. A VLE will be a part of that for a while yet I think, even if that VLE evolves into something different along the way.
Some of the critics have slated the VLE for it’s inflexible nature and institutional control. My counter-argument is to get a more flexible VLE (and get the powers that be to support it and it’s development) which, while no easy feat, is certainly achieveable. (I was trying to suggest this at my last place of employment but didn’t manage it.) And isn’t institutional control what an institution is about? (Just a thought.)
I’m an avid Twitterer (as you may or may not have noticed!) and I originally got in to tweeting because of the T&L and e-Learning professionals who resided there. The recent ALT-C conference spilled over into Twitter massively, and there was I soaking up as much of it as I could. Some of those professionals took the ‘dead’ side of the debate and others took the ‘not dead’ side, but I think the best aspect of the debate was just that: debate. Get some people together who are heavily involved in the teaching and learning process (wether it’s e- or not e-…) and thrash out the arguements so that established practices can be honed and/or new directiopns can be taken. As frustrating as I found some aspects of it (like not being able to get my point across eloquently in 140 characters) I think it was beneficial in the long run.
September 14, 2009, 10:02 pmFfynnonweb » Blog Archive » eLearning Blog // Don’t Waste Your Time … » Dear Blackboard … says:
[...] Paul Vaughan: Is your VLE really a virtual learning environment? [...]
September 22, 2009, 10:55 am