Catching Up?

Like others in the class, I seem to be having some difficulty keeping up with regular blogging. Note to self (and others): This doesn't mean that it isn't worth doing. Thinking about what to say and writing it is almost always useful. Saying that doesn't make it any easier, I'm afraid.

One issue that would seem to be important to the future of online learning centers on having one place to go to for everything that you do online for a course. That is the aim of a course management system, but one problem is that the available tools are increasing faster than they are incorporated into such systems. There is a lot of creative talent out there thinking of new things we can do online and new ways to do it. By the time a company like Blackboard gets around to putting something like a wiki or a blog into its CMS, there are a couple of dozen other things to think about using as well. For example, Moodle has both wikis and blogs right now, well ahead of most of the other systems, but they are poor substitutes for the software that is available in other places.

I would think that one solution to this would be to incorporate what Google calls widgets (at least I think that's Google's term; there are various words used for the same kinds of things) into a course management system. It would be nice to be able to just find individual tools an pull them in as needed. There are some moves in that direction already. KSU now has the Horizon Wimba tools available, but the are expensive and have to be installed by the system administrator. With iGoogle, if I want something like weather or quotations or whatever, all I have to do is search for widgets and try them out until I find one that does what I want. i would like to see an educational/instructional system that does that.

Alternatively, I wonder if one could turn it around. Perhaps it would be possible to have an iGoogle account that is your CMS. Then you pull in the tools you need. If people started creating educationally-oriented widgets for Google, you could build up something there that could rival the "real" CMSs. It would probably be more reliable, too. Google seems to be able to make a system that handles tens of millions of people on a wide variety of browsers in a way that Blackboard cannot.