Reclaiming innovation! EDUCAUSE online report
Important thoughts that caught my attention:
IT people should not be separate from academics. It should be one team.
If the Internet was created within the university, it was a product of the university, how come is the university so alien to it 25 years later?
We privilege a mindset that views learning not as a life-affirming adventure but instead as a technological problem, one that requires a “system” to “manage” it.
With Learning Management Systems students are contained in a system, not outside in the wild web trying to find out new adventures, new uses for tools or even creating new tools. They are managed. Why would they need to be managed?
Giving a deeper thought to this idea:
Imagine what higher education institutions could do if they started approaching academic publishing platforms as collaborative, open spaces for community-authored materials. What if educational institutions start reclaiming innovative learning on the web?
The most striking pedagogic short come of LMS is that in an era where we should be guiding students how to cope with uncertainty, chaos, and an information age of huge complexity, the university forces students to spend countless hours within a closed system that does nothing to help students improve their practical web skills.
Solutions maybe come in a form of small pragmatic initiatives within the university. Maybe daring to try out different ways to design and setout a learning environment with not a very much clear and defined picture of how its going to look like, but withe the courage to delve into the wild and experiment with the new to bring some of that into the university.
LMS is a monolithyc element. What is needed to be changed? In my opinion LMS has its role in the university, maybe that role even needs improvement but I would not say it needs to be removed. What needs to be done in work towards a culture of innovation within the students and staff community.
Here is a video about this idea of culture of innovation in USA
“It gives you a greater sense of the realism of the web”
The full report can be read here
2 more good reading related to this topic is The Invented Story of the Factory model of Education by Audrey Watters
John Udell: The Disruptive Nature of Technology a podcast that I will hear tomorrow.
My canvas 