here is, at its very core, a problem with the LMS paradigm. The “M” in “LMS” stands for “management.” This is not insignificant. The word heavily implies that the provider of the LMS, the educational institution, is “managing” student learning. Since the dawn of public education and the praiseworthy societal undertaking “educate the masses,” management has become an integral part of the learning. And this is exactly what we have designed and used LMSs to do—to manage the flow of students through traditional, semester-based courses more efficiently than ever before. The LMS has done exactly what we hired it to do: it has reinforced, facilitated, and perpetuated the traditional classroom model, the same model that Bloom found woefully less effective than one-on-one learning.
J Black on 01 Feb 09Just because you build a wiki, doesn't mean they will come. This has been my and other faculty members' experiences in using wikis in the classroom. We all know the feeling . . . the excitement of seeing and then using a type of software that should be just perfect to engage students and to enable community-building. We work during our break time to incorporate this learning technology in our course only to find out that students aren't that excited about it. I think one of the reasons for the lackluster student enthusiasm toward any type of new technology tool is that they need to learn it. I'm not saying that students are lazy . . . it's just that the internal question, "what's in it for me?" probably needs to be answered.
