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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