[vaughany].com

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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Is it a case of the educators being out of date?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.

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.

Well, after a fairly long hiatus during which time my blog was erased utterly from the ‘net (but existed in part in a few people’s RSS readers) and then the fresh version was hacked somehow and 165Kb of dodgy adverts was injected into the main page, I’m back with a fresh copy of Wordpress, a new Twitter account and a general rekindling to blog.

Expect the same life, universe and everything topics (no reason why not) as well as a redoubled effort to get my digital SLR out and about to capture some award winning photographs, but also I’m now getting stuck into virtual learning environments, teaching and learning technologies, and Twitter. God, I love Twitter.

More soon.

~Vaughany.