Social Media is Killing the LMS Star

Session Title: Social Media is Killing the LMS Star

Presenter: Bryan Alexander, Director of Research, National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE)

Time & Date: 1:30 P.M. - 2: 15 P.M., Thursday, August 13, 2009

Location: Rm. C180

Session Description: The social media revolution has emerged as a powerful force for open education, while its success has repositioned course management systems (CMS) as a retrograde movement.  Many Web 2.0 platforms and more services carry an increasing amount of educational content and communication, from informal to official learning.  Multimodal forms have enabled a growing diversity of new teaching and learning methods, from the course blog to lecture podcast, Web 2.0-based simulation games to new levels of wiki-enabled collaboration.  Older pedagogies and research practices are given new life, such as the return of the public intellectual, the rise of new media literacies.  Much of this is done via the open Web, meaning practices are visible, practitioners receive feedback, and new channels for communication appear.  Indeed, a meta-community of social media educators has appeared, with edubloggers and others using social media to share insights about teaching and learning with social media.

As social media reshapes the world’s information ecologies, CMSes are increasingly repositioned as reactionary platforms.  While the open Web?s content grows by the minute, CMSes have classically restricted access to content generated by teachers and learners, partly for copyright compliance reasons.  That now constitutes a multi-institutional dark Web, an invisible, unsearchable, un-mash-up-able archipelago of hidden learning content.  Moreover, the practice of using a CMS is now problematic.  The habits involved in taking or teaching a class through one at best ignore emerging digital literacies, since they do not require engagement with the social Web (or the older Web, for that matter).  At worst CMSes train students and teachers alike in habits increasingly both outmoded and opposed to openness.

While this duality might seem like a culture clash, in fact the war has largely concluded.  CMSes are not in demand outside of schools, nor are they highly sought after by the new generation of faculty members, and certainly not by students.  Web 2.0 services do not seek to imitate Blackboard (closed spaces have long been available); instead, imitation now runs the other way.  Social media tools steadily appear for the leading CMSes: blogging plugins, wiki modules, podcast services, social bookmarking options.  These tend to be variations on a silo theme, restricting content to class instances, but represent at least an architectural progress.  In the meantime, faculty turn blogs into books (and vice versa) and job offers, students form ad hoc study groups on Facebook, librarians seek to reinvent their field, and the total amount of learning content grows.

It is vital that education realizes the informatics ground has shifted.  We can now realize the pedagogical and information-architectural limitations of the CMS, and so choose wisely when to use it.  We can devote our energies to using social media more widely, but also more effectively.  A greater participation in Web 2.0 means more use cases, further discussions of practice, and further development of our collective knowledge.