Fwd: Re: ::fibreculture:: WebCT, Open Source and Beyond

[Lisa Gye]

I'm resending this as it still hasn't appeared...

>>> Lisa Gye 9/08/2005 2:35 pm >>>
Julian Knowles wrote:
<snip>
I use WebCT for what it can do... Sure, it is pretty clunky at times, 
and makes assumptions about the way people might want to access 
information on-line, but its not like you need to use it exclusively (I 
am make the same point again, I guess). It has some decent features and 
doesn't crash.. The problem is that many e-learning people treat is as 
a complete tool, when in many respects it is just one of a number of 
tools and approaches which can be used to teach.
</snip>

Just further to this - I think it makes sense to differentiate in terms of what is being taught. If you are teaching new media then it seems inevitable that you might use teaching software differently than if you are teaching in another discipline area. I think that the lack of differentiation in courseware is a big problem for some and not for others.

Our official courseware here at Swinburne is Blackboard. The same features are available to all teaching staff regardless of whether you are teaching circus arts (yes, we really do!) or media studies. If all we want to use the courseware for is to deliver consumables to students then I guess it is a relatively stable platform. But then again I wouldn't know because I'm not that interested in it. I generally like to use whatever tools are best for the job - which means more work but also, hopefully, better outcomes.

As an example, in a subject that Esther Milne and I are teaching on issues in electronic media, we are currently using a wiki for research projects. Within a week students were raising questions about the impact that this system might have on them as they worked with it. Questions like - can anyone edit my pages without my permission? What can I do to protect/share my work? What kind of copyright applies to my work? What if someone gets into my account and pretends to be me? Given that these are all issues that are addressed by the curriculum, we were of course delighted. 

The point is that I don't believe that software of any kind offers a total or final solution (pun intended). The best evidence of this is Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX - what was a handy fast and efficient way to publish html has become overburdened with 'features' like automatic style sheets that only assist students in producing web documents that look like ransom notes.

 What makes me most uncomfortable about official university coursewear is the built in monitoring features. Each faculty has a learning and teaching facilitator who can monitor all of the activity on any subject on the system - this information is then fed back to Learning and Teaching Services who keep track of who is doing what so that this can be measured against some spurious quality benchmarks. It's another example of what Andrew Murphie has called 'audit culture'. The layering of bureaucracy on top of academic load, ostensibly there to assist, becomes yet another series of boxes to be ticked off. 

Now I'm ranting...or at least I will be shortly...

Cheers, Lisa





Lisa Gye
Lecturer in Media and Communications
Swinburne University of Technology
http://www.fibreculture.org/ 
http://halflives.adc.rmit.edu.au/ 
http://www.swin.edu.au/sbs/media/staff/gye/ 
Tel: +613 92148345
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