Disqus - Latest Comments for marksmithers

Re: Why Wave Won’t Replace the CMS

Mark Smithers — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:51:01 -0000

Nice post Jon and I like the image. I agree that Wave alone will not replace the LMS and that we are likely to see GW embedded in LMSs to start with. I touched on this in a short post yesterday that tried to define Google Wave in a sentence (http://www.masmithers.com/2....

I do think that, although GW doesn't replace an LMS completely, it does provide replacements for key items of functionality in an LMS - particularly around synchronous and asynchronous communication and group collaboration spaces.

You make the point about content and I agree the the current LMS is focussed on content delivery but it also seems that more and more content is becoming available outside of the LMS and, indeed, the university. Systems will arise that allow open links to that content at which point, when combined with things like GW we may have a totally open LMS built by and curated by users.

What will remain for the University will be the crticial task of managing assessment in a rigorous and consistent way (one of the great things about your loosely couple gradebook).

So, in summary, GW certainly isn’t an LMS replacement but combined with other ways of delivering content and changing attitudes to the control of content it will probably contribute to the decline of the LMS as a key educational technology platform.

Re: WordPress iPhone App

Mark Smithers — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:21:26 -0000

Well that could get several essays as a reply. Here are just two thoughts (and I'm focussed on university education here):
1. I think there are some pockets where technology has genuinely improved learning but these are often in areas that are unreported on or overlooked in universities. Often because they come about as a result of some creative and innovative academic subverting or going outside of the institutional system.
2. By and large universities are very unsophisticated organisations, are loathe to innovate and pay lip service to teaching and learning. I really don't think that many of them have the organisational maturity or capability to implement the process changes that surround mainstreaming successful educational innovations that lead to better outcomes for students.
Just a couple of initial thoughts.

Re: Assessment as a Social Activity

Mark Smithers — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:48:15 -0000

Thanks for introducing me to the WSU project. Really very interesting. I think @jaredstein raises an interesting point though. I sometimes worry that the focus on connectivism is largely driven by those who are connected and happy to be so. I suspect there are many people that happily have a very low level of connectedness and may be happy not to participate to any great extent, if at all. Having said that I think a lot of this is cultural and will change over time. Encouraging people to communicate in new and better ways has got to be good right.
Regardless, I think innovative and rigourous forms of assessment are crucial to the future of higher education institutions which is why I think the WSU project and your own BYU Loosely Coupled gradebook project are so interesting.

Re: What is your eLearning history?

Mark Smithers — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:59:27 -0000

Thanks Ignatia,
Not sure about the 'paid off' bit :-). I am heaviliy involved in edtech support and strategy at my uni. we should keep in touch and swap notes.
Cheers

Re: What is your eLearning history?

Mark Smithers — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:30:00 -0000

Hi Ignatia,
I was lucky enough to arrive in Australia in 1995 to work as an academic for Deakin University. Even more luckily for me, because of a curriculum redevelopment I didn't have to teach for ten months. I had a desktop and time to investigate what I had learnt about the internet in 1994. I downloaded a free web server - ZBServer I think - and started writing web pages for my courses using using an HTML editor called HotDog. And that was the start of it. Four years later I moved out of my discipline and into elearning entirely. It's pretty much been my life for nearly 15 years now :-).
Cheers
Mark

Re: Deja Vu All Over Again – Blackboard Still Stuck in the Innovator’s Dilemma

Mark Smithers — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:50:01 -0000

I couldn't agree more. I am at a loss to work out why universities seem blind to the rapidly changing modes of knowledge dissemination and informal learning that are occurring around them. It seems that only the very enlightened and maybe the smaller more agile institutions will be able to react in time. I'm not sure that the lumbering, large complex institutions will go the way of the brontosaurus in the short or medium but they will surely become increasingly irrelevant in the long term.

Re: From “Pipeline” to “Learning Cycle”

Mark Smithers — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:13:25 -0000

I am mostly interested in tertiary education and I would see a much more personalised model in which each student has a 'space' from which and into which they would plug in their learning experiences and be able to demonstrate evidence of their understanding and capabilities at all levels of tertiary education and including work place based learning. I'm not sure how this might work in secondary education.