But I am curious – what were those differences over in 2005/6? That is something interesting to look in to.

I wonder if there’s something else at work, and that is this: certain disciplines actually like walled gardens, or castles without gardens altogether. I mean, the avidness with which I have seen some people in the sciences and social sciences gravitate toward webct type things.

I attended a few teaching workshops in 2005 or 2006 where the divide between liberal arts and sciences seemed pretty stark.

Even when we realize this, I don’t know if we will truly realize how that came about. When the powers that be saw the EduPunks leaving the LMS for blogs and wikis and other tools – what do you think they did? ‘Hey – we need to add those tools to our product!’ The sad truth is – EduPunks are probably most responsible for creating the ‘walled garden’ effect than anyone else. The more we leave the LMS behind, the more they are going to try and assimilate what we are leaving for… rather than trying to understand why we are leaving. That’s just the way businesses work.

So the battle is really within the confines of the LMS – trying to win other professors and EdTech people to our cause to get what you said here – an LMS that is native to professors, that allows them to teach in a way that their learners need to learn. Once the demand is there… once there is enough buzz being generated to getheir attentoin… then we will probably see the changes we need.

(it seems to me that I remember there being movies or TV shows about people that were at war with something and then found out that they were actually the creators of the faction they were at war with. Kind of like Terminator, but they didn’t know where the enemy cme from at first. Drawing a blank on what it is, thoug…)

Seriously, I like what you’re getting at Matt. I’m thinking of teaching my culture class next semester off of a blog instead of moodle and rethink a lot of its original content (form and content are difficult to separate in online courses as in literature, I suppose). But I don’t see myself going CRAZY with a million web 2.0 tools at once. If anything, I see myself scaling back a bit in terms of my strategies and tools and being a bit more minimalist as an instructor. In that regard, though I may not technically be using a LMS in the narrow sense of the word, I think I will be trying to chart some kind of middle course in which the blog structure functions as a LMS.

I have not theorized these choices or thought them through as carefully as you present your ideas here. But for a LMS to truly do what you say it should do, and serve instructors such as myself, it needs to be as easy to use, as natural to use, as blogs have become to younger teachers. (In my department over half of the professors –people who are not very tech minded– use blogs in all of their classes.) When LMS becomes that native to professors, then it will have arrived as a new standard for all courses, all live, hybrid and distance.