Social Media is Killing the LMS Star - A Bootleg of Bryan Alexander’s Lost Presentation

What I’d like to do today is develop a metaphor. Partly my purpose is to provoke. But I really would like to use that metaphor to help us reflect and reconsider the relationship between social media and course management systems.

Some relevant background: I’m a former faculty member (English) and current workshop leader. I’ve been research, teaching with, writing about, and contributing to Web 2.0 since 2000. Most recently I’ve published a series of articles; more importantly, I’ve conducted a survey of how American liberal arts campuses use social media.

Terms: we’ll use “CMS” as often as possible. “Web 2.0” and “social media” are used interchangeably.

Part 1. Web 2.0 killed the CMS star

We can begin by considering Web 2.0’s triumph in the world. These technologies may once have been discussed in embryonic terms, as fads, post-Dot.Bomb flourishes, or marketing twitches. How far has Web 2.0 has come in the past near-decade! We can point to projects operating at a vast scale: 260 million Facebook users, more then 100 million bloggers, 45 million Twitterites. We can note the vibrant creativity of Web 2.0, with variations appearing for every type of application, and new forms appearing regularly. The influence of social media reaches across sector after sector of culture and society - beyond education, consider Web 2.0’s influence on government policies, law enforcement, publishing, journalism, romance, family life.

In the same period of time, say since 2000, how far has the CMS come? CMS software is now widespread in academia. Within the United States Blackboard and its ingested competitors are the leading standard, used by a majority of campuses across higher education. Several commercial and open source alternatives continue to compete, including Desire2Learn, Sakai, and Moodle. Over the past near-decade CMSes have not only grown in scale, but feature development. Consider the variety: gradebooks, registrar system integration, e-Reserve integration, discussion tools, drop boxes, news alerts. Consider too the growth of parallel Web 2.0 tools: wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, podcasting. Recall the development over the years of campus support structures, stretching from IT maintenance to academic computing training to library outreach.

Now to compare CMSes and Web 2.0: imagine an alternate history, a counterfactual, whereby the world outside academia had Blackboard instead of Web 2.0:

§ White House health care reform debates: each citizen must log into a town-hall-associated “class,” registering by zip code and social security number. Information is exchanged between “town classes” via email. Relevant documents can be found, often in .doc format, by logging into one’s town class.

§ Iranian activists collaborate via classes, frantically switching logins and handles to keep government authorities from registering and snooping.

§ “Citizen media” barely exist. Instead we rely on established authorities (CNN, BBC, Xinua, etc) to sift, select, and, eventually, republish rare selections of user-generated media.

§ Wikipedia, Flickr and Picasa, the blogosphere, Facebook and MySpace, the world of podcasting simply don’t exist. Instead, we rely on static, non-communicable Web documents, and consult the occasional e-Reserve, sometimes on a purchased DVD.

§ The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) maintains fan clubs, small, temporary groups where fans of certain bands and artists can sign in and listen to time-limited, DRM’d music. “It’s like tape trading, but legal!” says one promotional campaign.

[Generating other examples is left as an exercise for the audience. (IF CROWD IS SMALL ENOUGH, OR BORED, ASK!)]

Note that this isn’t just a technological alternate history. It also describes a different set of social and cultural practices.

Now, this is clearly an unfair comparison. You might protest that CMSes weren’t designed for such diverse tasks. You could also step back and question the title of this talk - how can you say the CMS is “dead,” if you’ve just described a vibrant, deeply-rooted combination of growing technologies and campus engagement? Surely even a casual glance at conference presentations, Educause Review publications, even the Chronicle of Higher Education mentions reveals a living, vibrant subculture, er, world?

These would be two very fair charge. After all, it’s commonplace in the technology world to overstate deaths. For example, the death of Windows is regularly proclaimed, even as at its lowest recent grasp on the operating system world is 89%.

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead.

Paul Graham, April 2007

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

No, those two charges have some truth in them. I did say my purpose was provocation. But they point to realities in our world, and help explain our metaphor: today’s CMS is like radio, still existing, but of marginal and diminishing utility, while the rest of the world has moved on to video and other media. After all, despite video killing the radio star back in the 1980s (and the song refers to a generation before that), radio is still around. It’s widespread, with tons of broadcasts and receivers still occupying slices of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio is huge, in fact, if you remember that WiFi is actually radio. It’s just lame.

Do I need to explain? I probably don’t have to restate the classic complaints of radio content being dominated by flat and commercial content. I can point to radio’s near absence from any public discussions about media. Or think of how we use the ancient term “wireless” to describe our growing dependence on, well, radio waves; it is as if the term “radio” is so depressing that we shun it even in our vocabulary. The origin of this shunning can be dated back to the Great Depression, at least in the United States, and the legislation culminating in the great Radio Act (1927). That Hoover administration law established licensing and policing regimes which severely constrained the number of stations, and limited access to radio content production to wealthy corporations. Aside from the persistence of fringe radio, like ham, border, college radio freeform, and pirate stations, the new radio legal framework stilled the bubbling creativity of early radio right away and through our era. What fine creativity managed to strain itself through the network structure (the great age of radio drama, “theater of the mind”) ended up drained to other media as they arose over the decades: film, tv, video, and then the internet. Once we had Bertold Brecht writing plays for radio, neighborhood-based radio shows, and the stupendous Orson Wells; then we moved on, through payola, and onto Kasey Kasem and Clear Channel.

There are exceptions to the grim landscape, beyond the aforementioned loci of creativity in marginal radio (pirate, border, freeform). First, we can point to the excellence of some radio reporting. Second, some radio enterprises have engaged with the digital world in an intermittently innovative way (consider the BBC, for example). But as a whole it does not risk a great deal of controversy to see radio as something historically marginalized over its latter lifespan, and one consistently prevented from realizing its creative potentials. Indeed, most audio innovation has outflanked radio. Think of Web radio in the 1990s, the rise of podcasting, and now projects like Pandora, LastFM, and Imeem: it is as though digital innovators have developed an alternate history of their own, a parallel world where radio cut loose and explored possibilities.

Hence the title of my talk. CMSes lumber along like radio, still playing into the air as they continue to gradually shift ever farther away on the margins. In comparison, Web 2.0 is like movies and tv combined, plus printed books and magazines. That’s where the sheer scale, creative ferment, and wife-ranging influence reside. This is the necessary background for discussing how to integrate learning and the digital world.

PART 2. Why the CMS is usually the wrong tool for teaching and learning

If the CMS is that marginal, can’t it be used for teaching? That is, shouldn’t we consider the field of education to be a niche, which might be well served by our analogical radio? Unfortunately, this margin and that niche don’t map well onto each other, to the extent that education extends beyond single classes and connects with the world.

For example, consider the first generation of digital teaching practices, from roughly 1980 until 2000, internet and Hypercard through the Web. We developed a series of technology-based practices with pedagogical benefits, from hypertext to improved reference access via digital documents to engaging a virtual audience for composition. CMSes offer versions of most of these, but in a truncated way. Students can publish links to external objects, but can’t link back in. (In fact, a Blackboard class is a fine place to control access to content for one concerned about “deep linking”) An instructor can assign a reading group consisting of students in one’s class, but no one else. These virtual classes are like musical practice rooms, small chambers where one may try out the instrument in silent isolation. It is not connectivism but disconnectivism.

Or consider the digital pedagogies we can derive from pre-internet practices, such as media literacy and journaling. Again, these can be conducted within a CMS. Blackboard and Moodle offer journal components, and professors can readily built media criticism assignments into class spaces. These experiences are analogous to the pre-digital classroom, and can work well enough. But both refuse to engage with today’s realities, namely that media are deeply shaped by the social. Journaling privately, restricted to an audience not of the writer’s choosing, is unusual. Similarly the public intellectual concept, which predates ARPANET, doesn’t really apply to the closed classroom environment.

Return to recent times, and the CMS-social media gap widens. We’ve seen an explosion in computer-mediated teaching and learning practices based on Web 2.0, in variety and scope too broad to summarize here. Think of the range from class blogs to Wikipedia writing exercises, profcasting to Twitter class announcements, mashups and academic library folksonomies and researchers’ social bookmarking subscriptions. CMSes react in the following ways: first, by simply not recapitulating these functions; second, by imitating them in delayed, limited fashions; third, by attempting them in a marginal way (example: Blackboard’s Scholar.com). CMSes are retrograde in a Web 2.0 teaching world.

CMSes shift from being merely retrograde to being actively regressive if we consider the broader, subtler changes in the digital teaching landscape. Web 2.0 has rapidly grown an enormous amount of content through what Yochai Benkler calls “peer-based commons production.” One effect of this has been to grow a large area for informal learning, which students (and staff) access without our benign interference. Students (and staff) also contribute to this peering world; more on this later. For now, we can observe that as teachers we grapple with this mechanism of change through many means, but the CMS in its silo’d isolation is not a useful tool.

Moreover, those curious about teaching with social media have easy access to a growing, accessible community of experienced staff by means of those very media. A meta-community of Web 2.0 academic practitioners is now too vast to catalogue. Academics in every discipline blog about their work. Wikis record their efforts and thoughts, as do podcasts. The reverse is true of the CMS, the very architecture of which forbids such peer-to-peer information sharing. For example, the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS) has for many years maintained a descriptive listing of courses about digital culture across the disciplines. During the 1990s that number grew with each semester. But after the explosive growth of CMSes that number dwindled. Not the number of classes taught, but the number of classes which could even be described. According to the RCCS’ founder, David Silver (University of San Francisco), this is due to the isolation of class content in CMS containers.

At this point the radio side of the argument raises objections. To begin with, the classic double problem of privacy and copyright. CMSes offer strong protections for both, guaranteeing class privacy by restriction to registered students, and intellectual property defense by matching the requirements of the TEACH Act (US, 2000).

Each of these has merits, especially as government and campus policies ramify. But we must not assume they are unanswerable. First, the privacy issue can be overstated. If we’re interested in student information being unshared, then policies need to address digital venues beyond the CMS, which makes the CMS only one part of a solution. Second, if we’re concerned about student sensitivities in response to criticism, then the CMS strategy requires also a careful consideration of how classmates treat each other. After all, as many studies have shown, peers are quite capable of abuse. There are many responses, usually cultural and pedagogical, but those are instructor-based “soft skills”, separate from a CMS. Moreover, this environment should help students learn their own soft skills of online community interaction… except that they generally have already been participating in virtual communities, elsewhere, for years, and under different circumstances. In fact, as a recent Pew study has shown, traditional age students (i.e., teenagers) are more likely to control their own privacy online than are adults. Moreover, unless we consider the CMS environment to be a sort of corporate intranet simulation, the CMS set of community skills is unusual, rarely applicable to post-graduation examples. In other words, while a CMS might help privacy concerns, it is at best a partial, not sufficient solution, and can even be inappropriate for already online students.

If we focus on the copyright issue, then the CMS makes for an apparently adequate shield. It also represents an uncritical acceptance of one school of copyright practice, as it enforces one form of fair use through software. However, it does not open up the question of copyright. Compare, for example, with the Creative Commons option increasingly available to content authors in platforms such as Flickr or WordPress. That experiential, teachable moment of selecting one’s copyright stance is eliminated by the CMS.

Another argument in favor of CMSes over Web 2.0 concerns the latter’s open nature. It is too open, goes the thought, constituting a “Wild West” experience of unfettered information flow and unpleasant forms of access. Campuses should run CMSes to create shielded environments, iPhone-style walled gardens that protect the learning process from the Lovecraftian chaos without. Yet does this argument seem familiar, somehow? It was made during the 1990s, once the first Web ballooned, and new forms of information anxiety appeared. Mentioning this historicity is not intended as a point of style, but to remind the audience that, since this is an old problem, we have been steadily evolving solutions. Indeed, ever since the 20^th century we can point to practices – out in the open, wild Web! – which help users cope with informational chaos. These include social sifting, information literacy, using the wisdom of crowds, and others. Such strategies are widely discussed, easily accessed, and continually revised and honed. Most of these skills are not well suited to the walled garden environment, but can be discussed there, of course. Without undue risk of exposure.

Put another way, we can sum up the CMS alternative to Web 2.0’s established and evolving pedagogies as a sort of corporate model. This doesn’t refer to the fact that the leading CMS is a business product, produced by a fairly energetic marketplace player. No, the architecture of CMSes recapitulates several aspects of modern business. It enforces copyright compliance. It resembles an intranet, akin to those run by many enterprises. It protects users from external challenges, in true walled garden style. Indeed, at present, radio CMS is the Clear Channel of online learning.

PART 3. Why the CMS is wrong for the big movements sweeping cyberculture

In my mind and in my car, we can’t rewind we’ve gone too far

If we look towards the future, how do these trends continue? Does my tortured metaphor have any play left to it? Any discussion of the future is really based on selecting one combination of factors from the broad range of possibilities and trends. Accordingly, I will discuss four here.

To begin with, one burgeoning field of research, practice, investment, and growth concerns real-time search. Sometimes known as “live search,” this refers to searching digital information for relevant material chronologically. One seeks the most recent data or document. The concept dates back to the early blogosphere, when services like Technorati, IceRocket, then Google Blogsearch returned results ranked in time as well as relevance. News searches, such as Google News, offered a similar approach. But more recently we’ve seen realtime search take off with the explosive growth of Twitter. Several high-profile events have been explored productively via Twitter, such as the Hudson River plane landing earlier this year, and the Iranian election controversy.

To better serve (and profit from) this approach, Twitter purchased a search firm, then incorporated its functionality into the relatively spare Twitter main page. To compete, far larger Facebook launched its own realtime search this week. It’s likely that we will see other projects in the near future.

The academic uses of realtime search follow the pre-Web pedagogy of seeking timely references to a classroom topic. Think of a professor bringing a newspaper to class, carrying a report about the very subject under discussion. How can this be utilized practically? Faculty members can pick a Web service (Google News, Facebook, Twitter) and search themselves, sharing results; or students can run such queries themselves.

Can a CMS incorporate this? No evidence of such is available at the moment. Perhaps a realtime search function is under development under the radar. But could such search index materials beyond one specific class instance? For now, the CMS landsape is a multi-institutional dark Web, an invisible, unsearchable, un-mash-up-able archipelago of hidden learning content.

A second emergent field concerns social media literacy. An increasing amount of important communication occurs through Web 2.0 services. Consider the Obama campaign in 2008, and the subsequent presidency’s Web strategy. Think of traditional news media using social media, or the rise of amateur, citizen journalism. The recent health care insurance reform debate is being fought across the social Web, with Sarah Palin shaking things up via a Facebook note, and the White House fighting back with Web video and crowdsourcing. Class materials increasingly occur with Web 2.0 components. Can the practice of using a CMS prepare either teacher or student to think critically about this new shape for information literacy? Moreover, can we use the traditional CMS to share thoughts and practices about this topic?

A third emergent topic is the long-considered semantic Web. To put it far too simply, this movement assigns better metadata to digital documents, allowing the development of programs using that information. Reuters, for example, has been applying ClearForest Gnosis software to its archived content, in order to expand our ability to search it. We cannot do justice to the semantic Web in this very short space, nor address its numerous and persistent challenges. But we can note that the open Web is where a good portion of this work occurs, and that such development continues to grow. Is the contemporary CMS connected to this “Web 3.0” in any way?

We can imagine one. What if a campus were able to assign good semantic metadata to its accumulated body of content housed in CMSes? What kind of searches could be run across that diversity of materials? Could a campus work to expose some of that content, in order to increase its value and utility?

A fourth topic concerns mobile devices, and what some call “the internet of things.” CMSes have moved steadily towards PDAs and phone, improving our ability to connect with them via those popular devices. The internet of things refers to a vastly more challenging concept, the association of digital information with the physical world. It covers such diverse instances as RFID chips attached to books or shipping pallets, connecting a product’s scanned UPC code to a Web-based database, assigning unique digital identifiers to physical locations, and the broader enterprise of augmented reality. It includes problems as varied as building search that covers both the World Wide Web and one’s mobile device, revising copyright to include digital content associated with private locations, and trying to salvage what’s left of privacy.

How does this connect with our topic? Consider a recent article by Tim O’Reilly and John Battle, where they argue that the internet of things is actually growing knowledge about itself. The combination of people, networks, and objects is building descriptions about objects, largely in folksonomic form. That is, people are tagging the world, and sharing those tags. It’s worth quoting a passage in full:

“It’s also possible to give structure to what appears to be unstructured data by teaching an application how to recognize the connection between the two. For example, You R Here, an iPhone app, neatly combines these two approaches. You use your iPhone camera to take a photo of a map that contains details not found on generic mapping applications such as Google maps – say a trailhead map in a park, or another hiking map. Use the phone’s GPS to set your current location on the map. Walk a distance away, and set a second point. Now your iPhone can track your position on that custom map image as easily as it can on Google maps.”

(http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194)

What world is better placed to connect academia productively with such projects, the open social Web or the CMS?

4) What to do?

And now we meet in an abandoned studio.

We hear the playback and it seems so long ago.

To introduce a personal element, not one associated with my organization: in recent years, I have argued that it is simply a good idea for academia to engage more fully with Web 2.0. Pointing out then-emergent tools and practices, I recommended we explore them, participating in their development, being good citizens of cyberculture. “Engage more with Web 2.0!” is clearly one take-away from the preceding text, if I have been at all persuasive.

But in 2009, the ground has shifted. These tools and services are only emergent in the way the outer parts of a decades-old tree are fresh; the rest has now been around for a while. Web 2.0 has developed for some time, with parts maturing, and its reach both global and historical. This is not, to return to our metaphor, radio confronted with an upstart, but radio facing an established medium, like film or video. No, our task now is to recognize that our campus populations are already part of the social Web.

Think of informal learning, which occurs beyond our ability to stem. Wikipedia results crop up towards the top of many Google searches. Google also rewards blog content, based on blogs’ tendency to hyperlink extensively. Users produce and search content through social media platforms, notably Facebook, and also Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, and so on. It is long since past time to determine if we will engage with this world.

But let us not abandon the CMS. Radio still has powers and uses. National Public Radio, for example, has enormous influence on American academics. Radio theater is not very lively any longer, but some fine programming draws on that tradition. Podcasting and radio often interact productively.

And so we can think of the CMS. What is it best used for? We have said little about its integration with campus information systems, but these are critical for class (not learning) management, from attendance to grading. Web 2.0 has yet to replace this function. So imagine the CMS function of every class much like class email, a necessary feature, but not by any means the broadest technological element. Similarly the e-reserves function is of immense practical value. There may be no better way to share copyrighted academic materials with a class, at this point. These logistical functions could well play on.

What about the other functions, the classroom affordances? Just as National Public Radio probably wouldn’t make for good tv, and some people have terrific voices, but not a lot of visual impact, for some pedagogical and curricular needs, the CMS walled garden is well suited. It makes for a separation from the social media world, a paused space, perhaps one fertile for reflection. If that works for some situations, then it works, and should be selected… consciously, not as a default or unreflective option, but as the result of a pedagogical decision process.

Meanwhile, we need to watch for where innovations occur. That’s largely going to be Web 2.0, a hub of invention so busy that it’s difficult to keep up. CMSes also innovate, but more slowly, generally, and often echoing the social Web. Web 2.0 isn’t always open, so its innovations might surprise us. For instance, consider what it would take for Google to roll out a CMS.

For now, I am eager to hear your thoughts and comments. I also appreciate other metaphors, if you can offer them, now that you are hearing the Buggles, and will hear “Video Killed the Radio Star” for some time after this presentation. Thank you.