Faculty use the CMS primarily as an administrative tool … rather than as a tool anchored in pedagogy or cognitive science models."
Several reports confirm that instructors overwhelmingly use content distribution and administrative tools in the LMS while using interactive learning tools only sparingly
LMSs have become little more than "storage facilities for lecture notes and PowerPoint presentations."11
largely failed to empower the strong and effective imaginations that students need for creative citizenship
First, LMSs are generally organized around discrete, arbitrary units of time — academic semesters. Courses typically expire and simply vanish every 15 weeks or so, thereby disrupting the continuity and flow of the learning process.
Second, LMSs are teacher-centric. Teachers create courses, upload content, initiate threaded discussions, and form groups. Opportunities for student-initiated learning activities in the traditional LMS are severely limited.
Finally, courses developed and delivered via the LMS are walled gardens, limited to those officially enrolled in them. This limitation impairs content sharing across courses, conversations between students within and across degree programs, and all of the dynamic learning affordances of the read-write web.2
personal learning networks (PLNs) to manage information, create content, and connect with others
personal cyberinfrastructures
Campbell argued that we should embrace technologies that enable co-learners to frame, curate, share, and direct learning "engagement streams
Value accrues to the system as a whole because the more users or ‘nodes’ there are in a network, the more possible connections there are
several significant weaknesses and challenges associated with PLEs
support
support
Teachers and learners should be encouraged and supported in their efforts to find and use the most appropriate and effective best-of-breed tools outside the LMS
the University of Mary Washington deployed an instance of WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) as an alternative teaching and learning platform (UMW Blogs)
enabling the creation of blogs that automatically enroll students in courses as "members" of class blogs created by instructors
A pilot currently under way at Duke University (http://blogs-dev.oit.duke.edu) is aimed at assessing the viability of WPMU as an alternative platform for instructors teaching undergraduate and graduate courses. The list of potential uses on the pilot site includes using a WordPress blog as "the central course administrative tool" instead of Blackboard.
The LMS paradigm assumes that since some data must be kept private and secure, all data must be kept private and secure.
As depicted in Figure 1, proprietary applications and data such as the student information system (SIS), secure online assessment tools, and a university gradebook should be situated inside the private, secure university network. Personal publishing space, social networking, and collaboration tools live in the open, flexible cloud.
a loosely coupled gradebook is perhaps the essential module that brings all of the "small pieces" together.
instructors and students need a private, secure way to communicate about student performance on assignments, quizzes, and tests
If these artifacts are published on the web, they are individually addressable via URLs, so the OLN’s loosely coupled gradebook would simply require the submission of the URL instead of requiring students to upload the artifacts to a traditional gradebook. Instructors would then see a list of student names and links to the artifacts they published on the web
No Android, and not as ubiquitous as GTalk for Apps (which runs on ALL platforms).
It's also one of the places where Office 365 shows its strengths, since you can get into a shared group of documents and very quickly give them a read and an edit in the same place without leaving the page to go off to some other property
This is what a cohesive Web office experience should feel like, though like we mentioned earlier, it still feels like its on its own island instead of being more tightly knit with the Office 365 start page, and Outlook client.
While really impressive, there are still some questions over Microsoft's vision of making Office 365 less of a jump-off point for its software and more of a one-stop solution for getting things done from any computer, anywhere.
it's worth looking at Office 365 for what it is, which is Microsoft continuing to move some of the very complicated pieces of its Office software ecosystem into the cloud--in part to make it easier for businesses large and small to get going. The Office software itself is a separate part of the equation--one that's well on its way in that direction.
Notably absent from Office 365's overall interface is Microsoft's suite of Office Web Apps, which is where many of those comparisons to Google Docs have centered
The first thing we should say up front is that Google Apps this is not.
The good news is that in our brief testing, everything worked as advertised. The bad news is that you can't get it right now, and it's still a long ways off from something that lets you every feature out of the Office ecosystem without installing software.
If you actually want to create something, there's still a reliance on having to have the Office software, or go off to the Office Web apps site itself, where users can save to their SharePoint.
The net result of all of this is that Office 365 is not yet quite the true jump to a cohesive set of all of Microsoft's services, gone online and tied together in a way where you can hop from task to task between different 365 components.
There is still an incredible reliance on the software itself, which is bound to change down the road, but for now makes basic workflows like creating a document and getting feedback from team members a hybrid experience, or one that involves juggling products.
In our preview with it, the Web client of Outlook was fast loading and had a few nice tricks up its sleeve, like letting you open up Office attachments in a pop-up Window--something that's quite useful if you're on a public computer that does not have Office installed.
Lync is Microsoft's an instant messaging system with presence; an audio and video conferencing tool; and a voice call service. By design this is something that users install and run locally,
How Lync translates to the Web experience is that users can get a slightly less capable version of it inside a browser window--all without having to install the software client