VL-istically speaking

Yesterday Steve Wheeler raised a two fingered salute to open another chapter in the ongoing VLE-PLE debate  (see VLE vs PLE fight club for an earlier installment).  It’s an excellent post but I’m not wholly convinced.

Firstly, some points that Steve and I probably agree upon:

• Personal Webs have an important & central role in the future of technology enhanced learning
• Wherever appropriate teachers should be given freedom to teach with the web technologies of their choosing
• Students should also be encouraged to use the web technologies of their own choosing to support their learning
• More focus is needed on the teaching activities and not the tools that enable them

However, unlike Steve, I believe that VLEs (institutionally managed webs for teaching & learning) are here to stay and have an important role in the future:

1. Not all teachers are tech-savvy ‘edupunks’.  Many are not interested in developing and teaching with their own personal webs.  Some would need considerable support to do so.  This will undoubtedly change over time but for a good while to come many teachers want to be provided with a single, simple, managed & supported platform.

Storing Stuff

Not quite sure where I’m going with this one but the issue of storing stuff has cropped up a few times in the last week.

• Eportfolios – a place to store stuff and make it available to different audiences – yourself, your peers, your teacher, your employer, the world. At work we’re looking at Mahara & Pebblepad
• Repositories – see my earlier post on Language Box, a place for teachers to store, organise, share  teaching material
• A course team needing to share material for developing a new module – we’ve been looking at delicious, Google sites & our VLE, Moodle

So lots of people with similar requirements, storing and sharing stuff online…. still no idea where this is going so will need to return to it…

Eportfolios

I’ve been looking at “eportfolios” recently – specifically Mahara & MyStuff, though previously I’ve experimented with elgg too. I say “eportfolios” because I’m not 100% certain what an eportfolio is and just to confuse me further elgg seems to have repositioned itself and dropped that moniker completely:

electronic portfolio, weblog, resume builder and social networking system [Mahara]

OU’s ePortfolio tool [MyStuff]

social networking platform. It offers blogging, networking, community, collecting of news using feeds aggregation and file sharing [elgg]

And one more I haven’t looked at yet (because it costs!)

much more than an eportfolio. It is a Personal Learning System [Pebble Pad]

Blimey! My exploration has been partly initiated by some interest from within the LSE but also by the need to keep an eye on what’s out there… and there’s certainly plenty of talk about eportfolios. I’m still uncertain as to how such a system might be used here, so some initial thoughts:

Some lecturers don’t use VLEs

No, really, it’s true! How many do and don’t is difficult to say, but it seems clear that institutional take-up is significantly higher than take-up by individual academics. 95% of UK HE institutions have a VLE but if 50% of teaching staff use it across the country I’d be surprised to say the least. What do you think?

I recently completed my Master’s project which begins to explore the why not? See Why Don’t All Lecturers Make Use of VLEs? What Can the So-called “Laggards” Tell Us? (PDF). When writing this masterpiece I was unable to find any other research focussed on staff who have never used a VLE and asserted that there wasn’t any! However, one of my markers has suggested that I may have exaggerated this lack of non-adoption research. If anyone has anything on non-adoption of VLEs / LMSs based on research with those who haven’t adopted I’d love to hear.