It also seems like there is now an Apple version of an LMS app of some kind for iTunesU.

I am sure all of this looks pretty cool and works great… but is this really change or just turning the same old model education model into a sexy Hollywood version of itself?

A walled garden is still a walled garden even if it is designed by Apple. Passively reading a textbook is still passively reading a textbook even if you add in some cool swipe motions and 3-D video.

The question still remains – do we really need textbooks and LMS’s for education? Whether you like active learning, social learning, open learning, de-schooling, or any other buzzword from the fringes of education, we all realize that sitting and staring at something for hours at a time with only the occasional move/swipe of the hand is not the best way to learn something.

Sure you can add more interaction and 3-D graphics to textbooks, but we already have a tool for that in the technology world. It’s called a game. What will be the line between interactive iTextbooks and games? At some point we might just need to get over the stigma that some educators have about games and just eliminate the “textbook” category all together. Or maybe that is the path Apple has started us on.

I guess we’ll see once people dig in and start using these apps. I’m sure it will be fun… But will it be Transformers 3 or The Matrix?

Jim Groom gives an excellent response to the question in his post “You Can’t Spell FERPA without FEAR.” You need to read it if you have ever had to deal with the dreaded F word:

I think it is time to reclaim the FUD around FERPA and reinterpret it as it was intended: an act that encourages universities to give students more control over their own data, and by extension their own teaching and learning.

“Taking a course online, by yourself, is not the same as being in a classroom with a professor who can respond to you, present different viewpoints and push you to work a problem,” Professor Neem said.

Sadly, this shows how little this professor knows about online learning. Professors can respond to you in online learning – sometimes even more often than they can in the limited time that face-to-face courses afford. Professors can present different viewpoints online (or anywhere they want for that matter), and they can push you to work a problem.

There are many benefits to face-to-face learning that online learning can’t accomplish, but unfortunately none of them are touched on this article. Fairly typical.

Of course, many of my face to face classes had professors that couldn’t be bothered to respond to me, present different viewpoints, or push me to work a problem. These are personality traits of individual instructors, not characteristics of online learning.

No wonder online learning is still in an uphill battle. Many of the “experts” that the media find have no business being interviewed in the first place.

If you can create your own “Circles” as they call them, and then share what you want with them and even do video chats – you pretty much have the beginnings of a Learning Management System.  If they integrate Circles with other services (like Blogspot) – that would make it even more interesting. You could make a blog private and then with one click allow access to one circle (course).

Like Google Wave, invitations are limited (and will probably be highly sought after for a while). But will the failure of Google Wave make people too cautious to try this? And when was the last time Google had a big hit idea on their hands? Who will want to start using this and then have it canceled in a year or two?

Okay… I do want to give it a shot. And you probably do to. But Google Wave (and Lively and…) all showed us that major interest from the educational world is not enough to keep a Google project going. Which is one reason why I tend to doubt we will ever see a Google LMS.

Or maybe not.  Read this article on new features that Chegg.com has added.  Let me draw your attention to one of the last lines – a quote from Dan Rosensweig, the current chief executive:

“Education is one of the areas where technology has not had a chance to work its magic”

Really? Thank you for insulting everyone that has been working in the Ed Tech field for the past 50-100 years. Yes, there is much more that technology can do in education that has not been tapped yet. We have a long way to go. But we have also come a long way, too. There are thousands of examples where technology has had a chance to “work its magic” on education.

I guess at least they are not as bad as the Borg, thinking that they invented all of the magic that is happening.  They just want to ignore all the magic that has already happened.

And at least unlearning is grammatically correct.

Now a “disgruntled” college student has started UnCollege.  Which might be a good idea, except that most employers won’t even give a second look to a resume with something so grammatically incorrect on it. And UnCollege is all about getting a job – but more on that later.

I am all for people learning outside of the college box.  There is great value in real life experience, trade schools, apprenticeships, and other things like that.  College is not for everyone.

The problem I have with UnCollege is this statement: “In other words, he spent his time in class thinking to himself, Why do I need to know this?”

Why do you not need to know it?  Is knowledge only useful if you use it someday?  This is one of the greatest misunderstandings the anti-college crowd out there has: if it won’t get me a job, it is useless.  Many people know that there is great value in getting an education, even if it never earns you a dollar.  But our society is constantly setting up colleges to be one thing: 4 year long job training fairs.

The reason colleges are failing in some people’s eyes has nothing to do with the colleges doing anything wrong, but in that they are being expected to do things they never were designed to do.  And colleges themselves don’t help when they market themselves the wrong way.

Also, it is pretty arrogant to ask “when am I ever gonna use this?”  How in the world can anybody even try to answer this? Pull out a crystal ball? No one can ever know when you are going to use anything.  No one can predict the future. People can try to answer when and why you will need to know something, but there is no way for them to know that for sure.  Let’s be real here: people start asking why they have to learn something once they get lazy and don’t want to work at something.

In college I took a class in invertebrate paleontology.  I have not used it since then.  Was it a waste of time? Nope. Mainly because most everyone reading this has to Google those words to find out what they mean and I don’t.  Who cares if it ever helps me get a job?  It is knowledge.

Now, if I went out and told people I was an expert in invertebrate paleontology, how would you know I was telling the truth?  The UnCollege way is me saying I learned enough, so there.  The real college way is to look at my transcript and see I only had one class – so I do not qualify as an expert.  Which way is the more realistic?

What the hell?! First Facebook and now Yahoo! have screwed me (us) over. Two really simple, very functional, extremely valuable web2.0 tools that I’ve been preaching and pushing all year b/c they are/were incredibly useful — delicious and drop.io — and the parent companies pulled/are about to pull the plug.

• October brought us the announcement that Facebook bought drop.io and that free accounts were to quickly disappear and paid accounts discontinued Dec.15.
• Yesterday brought us even more shocking news that Yahoo has decided to sunset their very popular social tagging tool delicious.

Damn them.

Now what do I tell faculty? What are you going to tell your faculty? How are you going to sell them on some really amazing online tool that does something incredibly useful for their class and yet runs the serious risk of being acquired by [huge company name here] and very quickly wiped out?

Yes! I’ve found this great tool that helps you meet that learning objective, keeps your students engaged, encourages active learning … but just an fyi — don’t get too dependent on it, b/c it’s very possible someday you’ll suddenly have to export everything, find a new tool, and figure out how to migrate from one to another.

[Update: Now Yahoo! Says Delicious Will Live On ... Somewhere Else]

But so did the educational community.  Petitions were signed and multiple instances of prior art were cataloged.  Ultimately, I think it was the outcry and effort of millions of people around the world that brought about this final development.

I am no legal expert, but surely Blackboard can’t keep the $3 million-plus dollars it got in the original lawsuit once the patent is finally gone, right?

Anyway, this is hopefully a big reality check for Blackboard – don’t claim to invent something that you didn’t and then use that false claim to throw your weight around the educational community.  Hopefully, we will see a new, more humble Blackboard come out of this.

Yeah, I’m not holding my breath, either.

But it is just not us morons that use Google. Children are also being adversly affected, as attention spans are constantly being withered by each new tech toy we inflict on them.

Or are they?  Virginia Heffernan raises some interesting points in her New York Times article “The Attention-Span Myth“:

But the fact that the attention-span theory makes news of what was once considered ordinary or artistic behavior is not what’s wrong with it…. Instead, the problem with the attention-span discourse is that it’s founded on the phantom idea of an attention span. A healthy “attention span” becomes just another ineffable quality to remember having, to believe you’ve lost, to worry about your kids lacking, to blame the culture for destroying.

Heffernan doesn’t make a slam-dunk case – probably because it is obvious that she doesn’t set out to make one. The goal of the article is to make one think.  That last part of what I quoted is what really grabbed me.  I wonder if all the education-revolution advocates out there realize that once they get their revolution, that education will still end up being just as bad as it is now.  We accuse universities of not changing with times, when they obviously are.  Headlines tell us that people don’t find degrees as valuable as they used to, when in fact research proves that record numbers of people actually do think they have great value. We believe every asinine headline that comes along, even going to the point of holding conferences around half-baked theories of the “failure” of higher education.  I’m beginning to believe that the real problem in education is not the universities themselves, but the so-called reformers that steal headlines by flapping their jaws about things that just aren’t true.