Buy a car. Use it.
Moved house: ex-landlords being, well, daft; broadband still not sorted out after well over a month; doing anything over mobile broadband on a poor laptop is painful to say the least.
Updates soon.
I have a little more faith in my fellow human beings, and it’s all thanks to science-fiction books.
I get through a lot of sci-fi, because I read for pleasure and I get a lot of pleasure out of the fantasies and escapism which sci-fi provides. The downside is that I now have a kind of “vendor lock-in” with just three authors (Banks, Reynolds (who recently signed a £10m, 10-book deal), Hamilton) whose work I enjoy and have read, re-read and re-read again, so I have nothing new to read by these authors.
It is my intention to read a lot of ‘early’ sci-fi, of the Asimov and Philip K. Dick eras, but I find this harder going than more modern sci-fi, so I thought my luck was in when totally by accident I stumbled across a promising new (to me) author who I had not before heard of and whose books I had not read. The author is Kevin J. Anderson and the books were the Saga of Seven Suns.
Well, five of them. The last five.
I saw the five books at a local car boot sale. They are well presented and in good condition, and the rear covers described the sort of story I wanted to read, but the first two were missing. “No bother,” I thought, “I can pick up the others on eBay.” So I paid for the five books and left.
But the chap I bought the books from said he had the others at home, and his wife (nice passing the buck there) didn’t pack them, so I went back to him, brandished a green beer token and asked him to post them to me. Call it an exercise in human decency. I stood to lose, well, a fiver, which I had already saved several times over by buying five books for £2 when the RRP is about £8 each, and I stood to gain two more books for £5 (or so, after postage and packaging) which, again, woould have cost £8 each in the shops. Whatever the outcome I was quids in: five books for £2 (saving £38 of the £40 RRP) or seven books for £7 (which is nice, considering the title and number of the books) saving £49 of the £56 RRP…
I suppose I always knew the last/first two books would turn up, judging from the well-to-do, easy-going nature of the chap I entrusted my hard-earned cash to, but I wouldn’t have even considered doing that back where I used to live in Somerset. Maybe I’m not giving the people there enough credit, but I think I know the people and the place well enough not to trust even a penny to someone I met 10 minutes ago.
I love it down here. 
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.
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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.
Actually, I would, as I specifically applied for the job I am now doing (Moodle Developer) because it was working with Moodle. So I would at least care if that VLE died.
Enough of the purposefully facetious and leading comment.
I’m not a teacher any more. Most of the comments being made about the VLE/PLE debate focus on the teachers and the teaching, but that doesn’t concern me. I’m a developer, a techie. I’m currently working with Moodle as my main focus but things change. I may soon be getting invlolved in Mahara development, or Drupal, or Joomla, or goodness knows what else may come along.
I’m currently lucky and thankful that there are employers out there who have enough presense of mind to employ people to develop open-source software for the benifit of not just themselves but for the community too.
As long as there is technology out there which needs developing, I’ll be happy (and employed, that’s the critical one). As for the teachers, I’ll let the debate continue.
Am working with comma separated values at work and wondered if there was a better or more frequently used delimiter out there. Yes, this is a very geeky poll.
