There’s been an interesting debate going on in the blogosphere over the last week about the future of the VLE. It all kicked off with Steve Wheeler’s (intentionally over-polarised) post suggesting we should stick two fingers up at the centralised VLE. Posts from James Clay, Matt Lingard, Lindsay Jordan and many others swiftly followed.
I thoroughly recommend you read their opinions before reading on. Go on, I’ll wait…
Right then. My take on the whole thing is heavily coloured by my use of Unix-based computers over the last 10 years or so. To cut a long story short, it’s long been common on these systems to have lots of small separate tools which each do one job very well; you can then do more complex tasks by combining them in various ways through well-defined interfaces.
Compare this with, for example, Windows. Each piece of software is fighting with all the others to include every feature the user could possibly want, which results in big, heavy programs which take ages to load and are often full of bugs. I accept that I’m overgeneralising here, but I hope you understand what I’m aiming at.
So, one of the big problems that I see with the current generation of VLEs is that they try to do everything all in one package. The result is a textbook illustration of the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none”.
WordPress, Blogger and others do blogging better. MediaWiki, WetPaint et al are better for wikis. Facebook and friends connect people much more easily.
I agree with James, Matt and Lindsay (and, I suspect, Steve as well, despite the stance in his post) that there’s still a place for the centrally-run VLE. But it should be more flexible. The word that keeps coming to my mind is ‘agile’. We should be following good software engineering principles and providing tools that are best-of-breed and put the effort instead into making them play nicely together. And we should give learners and teachers the option of using something else if they prefer.
This is where the idea of the personal web/personal learning environment comes into play. By providing a diverse toolset instead of insisting on one monolithic solution our learners and teachers can choose what works best for them. The VLE can evolve into a framework to help coax these tools to play together nicely, and to join them into a coherent whole for those who lack either the time or the inclination to choose their own.
Open standards will help with this. Open source will be a big help too, particularly if a community of developers with educational experience start to contribute. But above all, we need to start trying it out. We’ve got the tools already, all we need to do is persuade our institutions to use them.
What’s your take on all of this? Do you think the VLE should lay down quietly to die? Or should we bravely resurrect it and bring it back to its former glory? Leave your opinion in the comments below, or by linking here from your own blog.
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The notion that the VLE is dead is totally mistaken. In the last two years VLE use has exploded in secondary schools. True it is a result of government pressure but some schools are experimenting with greater levels of integration. I know of several schools that have their own VLE (usually Moodle) developers employed on site. Resources created by my school have been shared with about 200 schools and are used by about 20 000 students. The subjects of interest and discussion are – what works, what doesn’t, how can integration be moved forward. It is possible to see ways forward that will make VLEs (or whatever is a usefule acronym) really move into a higher gear. At the moment all students are offered the same resources althought their preferences are different. Rather like soviet era shops. VLEs cry out for the integration of AI to detect the pattern of feedback and alter the type of resources. There is a need for fine granularity of resources and appropriate tagging and that needs agreement on tagging.
Research shows that the difference in performance between middle class and working class children takes place during the holidays, where working class kids move back and the middle class kids continue to make progress albeit slower. At my school 20% of access to the VLE takes place away from school. Students were online all the way through the summer break.
What we all need to know is what is best practice. Content authors and providers repeat methods for creating content without verifying its effectiveness. To a significant extent the content form is technology lead – captivate works this way so that is how resources are authored. VLEs are the beginning of a step change in teaching, it will need to be associated with all students having permanent access to computers. To date development has been centered on the technology, what is now needed is for that technology to become tranparent and organisation to be centered on the user, the student.
The VLE is not dead it has only just begun and has a substantial future that careers can be built on.
chris bradley´s last blog ..Blog Moodle Installation
Hi Chris, thanks for your detailed and thoughtful comment. Will you be attending the ALT-C workshop in Manchester? It sounds like I wish I could, but I couldn’t make the conference this year.
That’s a very suggestive result about middle class kids making progress in the holidays. It sounds like we’re going to need to work harder to bring the internet into working-class households or find another route to informal learning; probably both. I’d quite like to read the report if you could give me a link to it please?
[...] Then, of course, there are posts which fall into both categories, such as my contribution to the debate on the death or otherwise of the VLE. [...]
Blog post: Moving to a more agile VLE: There’s been an interesting debate going on in the blogos.. http://bit.ly/Re0XQ
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
So VLE not only lives,its central; I would just add that open is not the same as free/cheap
http://bit.ly/NEk2t (link via @timbuckteeth)
This comment was originally posted on Twitter