(ok, so I used to be an educational technologist, on a full-time
basis, and had some responsibilities for VLE implementation...)
On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 08:11:01AM +0100, Feargal Hogan wrote:
> All secondary schools in England - education is a devolved responsibility -
> must have a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) up and running this year. The
> intention is that pupils can work on projects at home as well as at school,
> amongst other things. Have a look at Moodle (www.moodle.org) the biggest of
> the open source offerings.
Indeed, however, even when some schools have active open-sourcers on
their pay-roll, manglement may not be too keen, and ultimately decide
to go to the people who've spent the most time schmoosing to the Local
Authority, even if their product is feature-inferior.
Hypothetically, of course.
And rather than spending the cash-available on open-source dev, they
may prefer to go with a closed-source (ironically, taking advantage of
FOSS products [1]) -- even when potentially suggestion the benefits of
paying someone to maintain and undertake a few (15% of their time,
maybe) additional tasks, too.
> Most of these VLEs will have methodologies for resource sharing amongst the
> teachers.
And also for peer-review.
> Our educators are - !!! huge generalisation alert !!! - generally quote
> tech-phobic And if it doesn't come with a DCSF/Becta-approved badge on it
> they tend to be quite resistant.
Where 'they' may be the decision makers. See above. (part of this is
down to the lack of evangelists, for products, rather than the
sales-droids, wanting to get on the gravy train.)
> Certainly implementing something like Moodle in a school requires
> a host evangelist to lead the project. Its not something they'll
> pick up and run with.
It also requires hardware, appropriate routing, ports-opening,
securing the box/software, which, more often is beyond point-click
Windows-folk. Technically, and time-factors. In any case, a project
should be *shared*, and appropriate content included in the school's
own V{L,M}E.
My idea for doing something like this, were it to be something I'd be
asked to get involved in, would be to use Moodle as a platform, and
build some translators for exporting content out, under a Creative
Commons Attribution Share-Alike model.
[1] ah, how i hate the educational software market, and how so many
people see it as a way to make a quick buck. *sigh*.
--
``Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in
half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But
the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on
exploding for centuries.'' (Christopher Morley)
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