Technology At City University of Seattle

For almost 10 years systems like Blackboard, and more recently Moodle have been the preferred choice for educational learning systems. The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jim Groom, an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington, says colleges should move away from commercial course-management tools to reflect new Web trends like social networking.

The interesting part (read more about this here) is that this is one of the things we have been doing. The Wiki system in Moodle is something we are trying out to see how well it works, and what the rates of adoption are for students. Do students really prefer to learn from blogs, or are they “used to” the current static systems in use.

The biggest question though is are students and instructors ready for this kind of change. Experience shows that when something is done in public that people are more reluctant to be a participate or developer of content. While we could shield information behind passwords, that would not be optimal in the longer run. It would be great to use social networking tools to expand the learning base, engage students using tools they are comfortable with, but that also means a change in the way that education is taught, and how people teach.

The video raises interesting ideas, ones that would be awesome to implement. The problem is going to be cultural, not technological to make something like this happen.

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