VLEs: problems with the one-stop shop

VLEs. I'm not a fan.

It's taken me a long time to articulate why I dislike them so much, and I'm not finished yet, but here are some initial points:

VLES don't do one thing well. They do two things badly.

Specifically, they do administration and they do teaching/learning. Not the same!

Administrative activities (e.g. creating class lists, tracking attendance, allocating parking spaces) (yes, I've seen a VLE that does that) and learning activities (e.g. collaborating on a projects, research, work submission) have different stakeholders and different management requirements, which, in turn, require different infrastructures.

Administration:

Administration can only be done by designated, authorised people within a known & standard framework - such as the teacher (who is authorised) taking the roll (which is standard). There is a significant disadvantage to the teacher innovating by taking the roll in a different way, or by involving the students in the roll call, or taking the roll differently from all the other teachers. Every teacher - and only teachers - must take the roll the same way for the overall system to work.

Administration is never collaborative. Administrators intrinsically have set roles in a hierarchy. Individual innovation does not help administration.

Teaching and learning:

Good teaching and learning (in my opinion) is all about freeing up the individual. (Isn't that the goal of education? To free the learner? Education creates knowledge in the mind that wasn't there before - it is intrinsically innovative.)

Innovation - by the teacher, by the learner, by the group - is the key deal, and it is supported beautifully by collaborative technologies. We've never had it better for constructivist pedagogy. The sharing, swapping, and creation of new knowledge - all of this can be done, and is done, in social network environments, both online and in the physical world.

But not in VLEs.

One round peg, one square peg, one round hole

Both administration and pedagogy are necessary in schools. They are also completely different in what infrastructure they require. This (in my opinion) has been the great failing of VLEs - they all try to squeeze the round pedagogy peg into the square administration hole.

It hasn't worked very well. Trying to coax collaboration in what is effectively an administrative environment, without the porous walls that social media thrives on, hasn't worked. The 'walled garden' of the VLE is just not as fertile as the juicy jungle outside, and not enough seeds blow in on the wind.

That's why I'm always cautious of the 'one-stop-shop' approach in education - administration and pedagogy are very, very different shops. It's like having a fishmongers and a haberdashers sharing the same store - no discernible upsides, but a LOT of downsides (stinky fabric springs to mind).

The limits of the one-stop-shop: real world examples

On that note, a lot of good lessons for e-business can be found in 'real-world' business. For example: In the real world, there is a sliding scale between quality of product and specificity of store. Clothes provides a good example:

Tesco: sells everything from food to electronics, and all clothes from underwear to fancy dresses. Has very low quality clothes.

H & M: sells men's and women's clothes for many occasions together, has medium quality clothes.

Savile Row tailor: sells only men's clothes, and of that, only suits, has extremely high quality clothes.

The higher the specificity, the higher the quality.

...the point that is interesting here is not that Tesco sells bad clothes, but that there is no example of a Tesco-like sells-lots-of-different-things store that sells very high-quality clothes. (Harrods may be the exception here, but theirs is a very old business model that I don't believe anyone is now trying to reproduce.)

An andecdote

Way Back When I was still in schools, I started a project with some Australian year 8 students. I got them all to write blogs. The goal was to teach them some persuasive writing skills, how to 'play nicely' online, and just a little dash of html.

Two weeks in, an extra blog popped up - one of the kids in the next class had joined in because he thought it looked fun.

I won't be impressed by any VLE until it can let it's own members do the same.