The shortcomings of these approaches rest in their lack of integration and the control required by many universities. The experience of many educators parallels my own—learners are very active with technology, but once in an LMS space, they seldom do more than the minimum required (a particular concern in courses where dialogue and theory are important to explore). This may be a function of students taking on “the student role”—defaulting to passive behaviour—once in an academic environment. It may also be due to the change in behaviour expected by educators—where learners must leave their tools behind and adopt tools with limited functionality. For an individual used to Skyping, blogging, tagging, creating podcasts, or collaboratively writing an online document, the transition to a learning management system is a step back in time (by several years).
Graham Atttwell on 08 Jul 08BlogTalkRadio is the social radio network that allows users to connect quickly and directly with their audience. Using an ordinary telephone and computer hosts can create free, live, call-in talk shows with unlimited participants that are automatically archived and made available as podcasts. No software download is required. Listeners can subscribe to shows via RSS into iTunes and other feed readers. Our network has produced tens of thousands of episodes since it launched in August of 2006.
