Communication-It does your headspace good
http://www.campus-technology.com/news_article.asp?id=11140&typeid=155
My friend and colleague, Mary Jo, just mailed this link to me. The article begins:
Course Management Systems (CMS) have become an essential component of the learning infrastructure at most universities today. By definition and architecture, these systems are course-centric, relying upon a course shell that replicates a traditional brick and mortar classroom, in which content and learners sometimes awkwardly co-exist. While the presence of CMS has grown, wonderful new collaborative communication tools such as blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds have emerged and are often informally and immediately adopted by the “new learner.” [emph mine] The CMS architecture, however, still heavily proprietary, is slow to integrate these rich new tools. Hence, the mismatch between a course- and instructor-centric management system and a new generation of learners demanding more sophisticated, responsive, collaborative learning environments.
We're working on a project to introduce a new CMS to Rutgers based upon the Sakai codebase. One of the things we love about Sakai is its openness. It doesn't dictate how to be used, is flexible enough to be a file server rather than a CMS, provides support for communication, but sadly doesn't make good use of these features - yet.
Our group uses a wiki. I'm trying to blog more frequently. I'm starting to converse with my peers in this medium (ex 1, ex 2, ex 3) and I am starting to 'get it'.
It's about fostering communication, not delivering content. Publishers are working to lock content into a DRM straight-jacket, but I have news for them. Most of their work isn't worth shit.
The important thing is what people say about the content. How they interact with it. how they argue about it. What they choose to integrate into their understanding. And this takes place via social processes.
Communication - its what happens while the content providers scramble to adapt to a digital age.
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