Contemplating Stephen Downes’ “Learning Networks”

Stephen Downes revisits his 2004 presentation Learning Networks.

First, I do not work at a university but at a secondary school. In fact, my time as a full-time educator began in 2004 around the time of Stephen Downes’ presented this originally. The challenges are admittedly different, but not entirely. Here are some thoughts in reaction mixed with my experiences.

In reviewing Stephen Downes’ text and re-presentation of the Buntine Oration: Learning Networks, delivered in 2004, I was fascinated by not only how prescient it seemed but how much I agree with him on just how little has changed.

It was strange to simultaneously hear and read the words, “I wasn’t so much speaking as listening, not so much showing as searching. I am a student of learning technology, but learning technology is for me becoming increasingly empty,” because they contain so much resonance. I must admit to pangs of eerily similar feelings at various times since first becoming involved in the field.

While I generally resist that feeling as much as possible, the strength to do so is primarily rooted in the kind of thinking that Downes and others like him share and champion. It is possible to reject the prevailing attitudes and efforts in favor of more organic options, like the ethos of connectivist MOOCs and the similarly inclined. Fortunately, I believe there will always be an impulse to “rage against the dying of the light.” That keeps me hopeful that there is room for positive change.

Interestingly, the landscape that characterized the demise of “learning objects” in 2004 seems to be perpetually replayed. One could easily substitute “learning objects” with open education resources, which might not be a complete like for like, but remain more alike than not. OERs had almost fallen a bit out of fashion in the last couple of years but they are experiencing a resurgence with multiple entities vying to be the Google of OERs, from non-profits to the latest news about Amazon.

Meanwhile, learning management systems (LMS) have become even more entrenched in the education landscape. This is becoming increasingly true at the secondary level too. I have written it before but it bears repeating. An LMS is not so much about learning or even content as it is about management.

If there is any doubt about this claim, one need only look at the recent emphasis on their improved analytics capability. That is the latest competitive advantage being marketed as yet another reason why they are superior and must be used.

Yet the consequences of the notion that an LMS is a requirement for online learning has had even more obsequious consequences. Downes alluded to this when he discusses learning design. An LMS, by nature, privileges certain kinds of pedagogical approaches, in some ways heavily influencing how a course is meant to work. What’s more, as the concept of blended learning has grown so too has the influence of the pedagogical shift conditioned by the LMS. Certain procedural ways of operating are baked into many an LMS.

Often the results are more structure, more pre-made curriculum, or more prescriptive efforts, depending on the context. Yet these results extend beyond only content packaging, as well. Again, the LMS benefits administrative and management tasks over learning ones.

In order for Learning Design, the specification, to work as advertised, it must control the selection and display of learning objects. But in order to do this, you have to know what objects you are going to select and display. A script has to have lines; it’s not improv. So someone must select the set of learning objects to use in a given learning design, and to put this list in the learning design itself. (Downes)

The nature of how a teacher must interact with most LMS options imposes its own baked-in structures, not to mention the most easily available forms of assessment. It can easily begin to dictate terms to an instructor and begin transforming a class before it may be completely obvious. I would also submit that very little of this transformation benefits the student but rather advances administrative controls. Downes highlighted this fact when he revealed the administrative dashboard of the Open EdX platform and referenced it again in this presentation.

I agree with Downes’ assessment of learning design but think that it might even be conservative given how things have evolved.

Learning Design is, in my opinion, very much a dead end. A dead end not because it results in e-learning that is linear, predictable and boring, though it is that. A dead end not because it reduces interaction to a state of semi-literate yes-no, true-false multiple choice questions, though it is that. It is a dead end because it is no advantage over the old system – it doesn’t take advantage of the online environment at all; it just becomes an electronic way to standardize traditional class planning. (Downes)

Learning design is not only a dead end, it also imposes its own kind of hegemony. It plays the single solution fantasy that if there was just one place where everything could be presented and controlled it would be easier for the student. Yet, when has there ever been a single source for learning? Even under the traditional model of a single teacher guide in a course, a student’s learning has never been contained within a physical classroom. Why should an online course seek that kind of solution?

However, it is the sentiments in the Coda section of Downes piece where I find myself the most aligned. I would argue that the rise of the LMS has cast a long pall across the education landscape.It may have begun at the university level but it certainly is growing at the secondary level. Since they all are essentially walled gardens or silos, they inhibit the growth and development of online learning as a new and different environment, as well as practice. There may be specific times where this is warranted, but I question just how often. Plus, it need not be the default.

Teachers that find a way to succeed in spite of the limitations are locked away from public view. Exemplar models of online teaching practice or individual teachers remain simply unavailable to outsiders. This is part of what makes cMOOCs so fascinating. The gears are so often exposed for anyone to see.

One of my favorite examples of the open and transparent approach is DS106. It is truly the MOOC that became a community. It continues to run as a face-to-face offering on the campus of University of Mary Washington and elsewhere and commands a significant following long after each individual iteration.

DS106 is a model of how to leverage blogs, RSS, and more while creating a learning environment that is open, inviting, and freely available. DS106’s ethos of “narrating the work” is deeply embedded in nearly every task. Plus, people are doing things all over the place. What’s more, the community that has grown up around DS106 embraces that ethos and the leaders have been exceptional about drawing back the curtain to show how it all works.

It is a course but need not be approached as one with a variety of tasks that can be sampled a la cart. Learning tasks are crowdsourced, with students able to both contribute assignments and rank them in terms of difficulty. And all of this and more is accomplished completely without an LMS.

Thoughts on the Curtis Bonk MOOC and Learning Management Systems

Recently, I have been pretty actively engaged in some coursework about blended and online teaching. While I have been teaching in both arenas for few years now, I am always on the lookout for new wrinkles and developments. Plus, I am just a learning junkie.

Were it completely up to me and I didn’t need to chase graduate credits to climb the wage scale for my teaching position, I would almost certainly focus a significant amount of professional development efforts on Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). For the past few years I have been following and continuously fascinated by the work that George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier have been doing. While I have never been able to stay completely focused on one of their MOOCs for the entire run, I have been following along in one way or another since the  CCK08. I was quite excited for year’s Change11, yet have been only able to dabble a little here and there, pretty much for the aforementioned credit chase. I am hoping to spend some more time this summer poring over more of the change11 weeks that I was too busy to investigate.

Still, timing was ripe and I was well primed to start following Curtis Bonk‘s attempt at a MOOC, called Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success. I first discovered Bonk a few years ago during one of my forays with the Flat Classroom Project. Since then I have gotten a lot more familiar with his work. He is one clever and comic professor. So his presence and the topic were instantly interesting.

As week 1 wraps, the course has me reflecting on a few things. It has reminded me of just how much I dislike Learning Management Systems (LMSs) in general. Bonk’s course is using Blackboard’s new CourseSites product, which is their new free application. In what is kind of a product debut, this course has already exposed not only its flaws but the flaws of an LMS being used for an experience that includes so many people. Currently this course is at over 3000. These kind of tools are really just built to scale like that. This product is particularly feeble in its ability to handle this kind of load. As in all MOOCs the discussions are enormous and overwhelming. Despite participating pretty strongly, that aspect can be pretty dissatisfying. Clearly others have felt similarly, because the discussion board for week 2, at least check on day 3 only has 30 posts.

All of my previous MOOC experience strengthens the notion that some of the best online learning happens across distributed networks. Even for Bonk’s course some of pretty interesting conversation is already happening outside the course itself, here and here. Even Dr. Bonk, himself, jumped into the fray of the Comments sections for both blogs’ rich exchanges. After all, LMSs are a whole lot more about management and whole lot less about learning, to be sure. Even the idea of blogging within an LMS seems to defeat the whole purpose of the activity. Yet somehow the CourseSites folks have served up that possibility. Truth is, threaded discussions might be the only real value added by an LMS and mainly because they simply act as a single repository. Even Siemens, Downes, and Cormier have gradually angled away from linking to an LMS.

An LMS is by its very nature closed . Also seemingly closed is the content or resources.  As much as I like Bonk and his work, I am a little disappointed that essentially all of the resources for the course are written or produced by him. That belies a little of the openness, despite Bonk’s clear open nature. This makes participating a bit like being an outside observer in one of his Indiana University classes, which is certainly worthwhile to me. However, I can see how that limits the appeal and weakens it claim of MOOCness, if there is such a thing.

I am going to stay with it, in part because I am interested in the content. Plus, it weaves nicely with some of the other PD on which I have been working deeply. However, were that not the case, I am not sure I wouldn’t be feeling a little like some others. There definitely seems to be some serious criticism flying around the blogosphere, which I have joined. Still, in spite of any criticisms I am still fascinated and want to continue.

LMSs versus PLEs: Acronym Antagonism Again

In reviewing the literature regarding Personal Learning Environments (PLE) and Learning Management Systems (LMS) I found myself returning again and again to my own experiences with both. At this point, I have used most of the LMS options either as a student or teacher.

I finished my graduate degree with a series of online courses using WebCT, finding it to be reasonably effective but awfully clunky. Granted, this was about six years ago and WebCT was soon to be cannibalized. For the last three years, I taught an all online course using BlackBoard and found it also to be reasonably effective but increasingly limited as I got more familiar with it. This year that same course has migrated to Desire to Learn, which is a fairly decent upgrade over the BlackBoard experience, but not without its limitations. Lastly, I have spent the last two years using Moodle for a couple of different teaching purposes, most notably as the online hub for  a hybrid or blended course, depending on the preferred term.

What I kept thinking, as I took stock of all of these experiences, is how in every case I was never asked about the LMS. It was always provided as the only option. I understand this to a small degree being the student, but not so much as a teacher.

Each LMS has its pros and cons, of course, but the truth is the differences are not so great. They are all a bit awkward to use and lack almost all of the elegance that the web can offer. From a visual design standpoint alone, all leave a lot to be desired, despite the customizable options. Some offer more flexibility than others but none of them really give students any genuine customization options. Ultimately, however, I find them all to be terribly restrictive and, as George Siemens put it, more management less learning systems.

What’s more what I have been thinking more and more of late is how a lot of the tools and functionality of LMSs are designed to solve educational challenges that seem somewhat dated, stronger in working with pedagogical models from which I personally have been using less and less. For example, all of these systems make it fairly easy to distribute curricular content in a top-down, knowledge is a product, manner. They often function as little more than as an alternative textbook. While there certainly remains a place for this in many courses there are innumerably cheaper and easier ways to accomplish this.

Additionally, a major component in all is the ability to create tasks like quizzes and other assessments, but most often these are assessment models that are not of much use to me. I have wondered recently if all LMSs essentially work best on a pedagogical legacy that is rapidly becoming less significant or even obsolete and they are not really appropriate to learning or education as we would like it to be.

Apart from the technical limitations, in every experience the ownership of content is very clearly a point of contention. In each of my teaching experiences the institutions make it clear that in providing the LMS they make some claim to the ownership of the content. This is considerably problematic and a serious attack on the disposition of openness that Martin Weller advocates, one that I find attractive and inclined to support.

Prior to teaching with any of these systems, I would cobble together various preferred web tools to use with my students, including blogs for distributing class information, wikis for student content production, and occasional discussion boards for threaded conversation, among others. I have even used the more expansive Ning a few different times, until they began to charge for its use. Usually, I used free  tools individually that I thought were good at doing one thing really well. This eclectic “system” mirrored my own approach to creating my PLE.

I find myself drawn more and more to the notion of the PLE. Of course I have been engaged in developing my own PLE for quite some time which makes me partial. However, the core aspects of the trial and error, process of discovery required to develop a PLE fosters precisely the kind of learner qualities that most educators want their students to ultimately gain. So it seems to me that the establishment of a PLE is a worthy goal of a grander education experience. In my mind using a LMS and PLE are two ways of differentiating instruction, despite the fact that neither is passive or agnostic and can shape both tasks and thought.

Still, there has to be a place for a better more sophisticated LMS. There is no question that a LMS offers educators a lower point of entry for moving into the digital realm. Moreover, I am convinced that more and more educational experiences are going to exist in some kind of hybrid or blended form. So it will become increasingly necessary for institutions to provide some LMS options. Yet, I echo Ewan Mackintosh‘s concerns that when an LMS is rolled out as the only sanctioned solution for an institution that it becomes a de facto ceiling rather than a floor. The truth is most LMS solutions are all too tidy and tightly controlled with no easy way to move or extract content. They possess nearly none of the messy realities of learning.