[DG: Open Forum] perspective from a T&L group design lenses participant

[Kenneth Romeo]

Well, if no one else is going to bring up this perspective, then I will:

 

I tried to be as much a part of the Sakai 3 effort as I could,
participating in the months building a list of desired learning
capabilities in conference calls and on a massive google spreadsheet. It
was a great feeling, being part of an international effort by teachers and
technical people, trying to point a direction for the future of
instructional technology. We distilled these down to 7 design lenses which
we were told would be the guiding principles of Sakai OAE. But the irony
was that most of the people who worked on the lenses could not be part of
the Sakai OAE, because our universities were not contributing money or
people. No one was more hopeful about the future of Sakai in general, but
it was just very frustrating that participation in the actual work was not
possible. However, as the project unfolded, it became less clear that
those design lenses, not to mention the learning capabilities we
collected, were actually being referenced in the project. Granted, the
whole idea of the managed project was to get the thing off the ground by
not trying to satisfy every little request from what was now a very broad
community. But to me, despite the beautiful user interface, OAE really
couldn't do anything but share documents. It was kind of difficult to
understand how NYU, who was also one of the early adopters of Google Apps
for Education, could justify pumping so much money into what looked like,
well, googledocs. The ultimate irony for me was seeing a presentation in
Atlanta touting the ability of OAE to embed a googledoc into a page. It
was like, why?

 

But more importantly, OAE just didn't have the ability to do what I want
an LMS to do: assessment. Maybe I am not seeing this right because I teach
a language, and my curriculum is not about higher level "collaboration"
and "knowledge construction". And maybe I have a backward idea of pedagogy
which relies too much on lower level tasks like submitting evidence of
being able to *do* stuff, rather than just know about it. But maybe not ..
I think there is still a large portion of higher ed, not to mention K12,
where turning in work by a deadline is a very important part of the
curriculum. OAE had no calendar, and there was no way to set deadlines for
submissions or relinquish control from a document that had been shared.
There was always talk of filling this vast need, that was indeed one of
the 7 design lenses, but it never really got off the ground. In fact, a
working group was formed around improving the CLE tool Samigo, which was
built here at Stanford, perhaps in recognition that many schools would be
using it well into the future. In the spring of this year, as the 2012
Sakai Conference dates approached, Sam Peck got in touch with Teaching and
Learning group with questions about assessment, and we briefly returned to
some of the personas that had been created as part of the UX effort some
time ago. I thought that we might possibly see some new work released in
Atlanta, but as I sat in the audience at Sam Peck's presentation, it
became very clear that all he had was a bunch of slides talking about how
tasks, assignments, grading, and unstructured feedback might lookin OAE.
Not a beta, not a mockup, no wireframes, just some PowerPoint (or Keynote,
I don't know which). This, I thought, has to be at least one of the big
reasons why Michigan and Indiana left. The project was going nowhere.

 

We have to admit that we live in very interesting times for instructional
technology. The landscape is changing very quickly, and it is very
challenging trying to keep up. Everyone, especially teachers, is looking
forward to a day when technology can really change education, instead of
just facilitate the mechanics of it. I still think that education, with
all of its egalitarian goals, is well-suited to an open source/community
component. By implication, I am saying that providers that have profit as
their primary motive are not particularly suited to the education world.
We have textbook publishers as our best, but not only, evidence of that.
Hopefully Sakai will be able to weather this storm, but in any case, I am
confident that as long as there are market forces like Blackboard,
Desire2Learn, and Instructure, there will always be someone out there
trying to do it for free, appealing to an open community to work together.

Ken Romeo, PhD

[http://kenro.web.stanford.edu]

Academic Technology Specialist [http://ats.stanford.edu]

Stanford Language Center [http://language.stanford.edu]

 

p.s. this is from a longer blogpost to a more general audience:
http://goo.gl/efOA8

 

 

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