Hi All, Nuno, I want to pick a small fight with you, because I think that this has a broad relevance to our experience as web-site builders.
Nuno Lopes wrote: > I agree entirely, but we should never forget that the teacher > responsibility is to teach, and the student's responsibility is to > learn. > > As a teacher an eLearning system is just a tool. The level of content > managed and delivered by these systems may be instructional or > educational. Is the teacher's responsibility to fill in the gaps by > providing proper content. While I basically agree with your sentiment about the role of the teacher, I want to take issue with your use of the word "tool". Generally, one of the differences between how developers see their websites and how users see those websites is this: Developers see their sites as *things*, users experience those sites as *places*. There is a tendency on the developer side to think of educational websites as like books. They are not experienced like books, they are experienced like museums to which the class goes on a field trip, or like classrooms in which a class is held. They are no more "tools" than a school building is a "tool"; that is to say, only in the broadest and least useful sense. This difference between "tool" and "place" is an enormous difference. Think for a moment about what it would be like to deliver even a lecture-style class to 30 people in a room which is only one seat wide, but with a 100 meter ceiling. The instructor would have to yell, and the people in the back would only be able to intermittantly make out what the instructor was saying. The difference between thinking of a site as a "tool" vs. a "place" is the tool paradigm (useful in so many ways) misses how *all pervasive* the site's effects are, in the way that physical architecture's effects are pervasive in the behavior of people in a building. To say "it is the teacher's responsibility to fill in the gaps by providing proper content" is a red herring. It presupposes the point of an educational website -- it's primary value proposition -- is to "deliver content", as if it were a book, and as if its lacks would be in the area of informational content and could be ameliorated by supplimentary content from an in-person instructor. There are certainly sites for which that is true -- but that is hardly the direction in which education (or training, or any other sort of site) is heading. (If it were, there wouldn't be the enormous diet for forum, chat and other interactive tools as parts of these things.) In particular, you seem to be presuming that there is an instructor present out-of-band, to interact in some fashion with the student not through the medium of the educational site. That is just simply not the case in distance learning sites. There *is* an instructor to suppliment gaps in "content", but their medium of contact with the students is largely or solely the educational site itself. A teacher can't solve the problems of the electronic equivalent of a classroom one-desk-wide, by simply "providing proper content" -- because the problem is not one of missing content. This does not only pertain to education. Any (even modestly) sophisticated website (or multi-user application) has this issue of "artifact vs. architecture". The people who make it tend to think of it as a thing, like a toaster, not like a place, like a building. And it is in that experiential gap, between developers and users, that so much user requirement falls into oblivion. CMSs live in the midst of this issue. What a CMS attempts to do is dynamically serve up... a place (or multiple places). But as such complicated applications we who work on them rarely conceive of that being the case. Would not our world be a different one, if we spoke not of serving "pages" but "rooms", not of "links" but "doorways"? I think we have a lot to learn from the principles of the art and craft of architecture, about how spaces -- even the illusary spaces of a website -- impact the conduct of people within the space. -- Vanessa Layne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Web Toolsmith TERC * 2069 Massachusetts Ave. * Cambridge, MA * 617 547-0430 -- http://cms-list.org/ more signal, less noise.
