Jeff Swain at Purdue’s TLT Symposium

Posted on March 6, 2008 
Filed Under CIC, Podcast

Earlier this week we asked Jeff Swain to attend the CIC LTI Committee meeting on the campus of Purdue University. Typically either John Harwood or I attend, but given travel schedules we asked Jeff to go and represent PSU. Reading his thoughts and reflections it sounds as if the CIC LTI grou is thinking about a lot of the same things we are … particularly as they relate to LMS/CMS issues and the fallout from the BlackBoard patent ruling. The best part for me reading Jeff’s report were his opening thoughts …

I attended my first CIC Learning Technology team meeting yesterday and I came away with two major impressions. First, I was proud to see how much Penn State, and ETS, has to offer. The education technology units at other Big 10 schools are very interested in what we’re doing and they are closely watching our progress as we navigate the web 2.0 world, which is now in its adolescence and, therefore, experiencing the typical growing pains as it moves from infancy to adulthood. Second, I was excited to see how much we can learn from watching what the other CIC schools are doing. We’re all reading the same tea leaves, making decisions based on our interpretations, and implementing a plan of action. All in the name of improving the teaching and learning experience.

I know that when I have attended these meetings in the past I feel the same way and am always trying to think of ways to meaningfully connect with peers at other Institutions. The other thing Jeff is doing while he is at Purdue is attending their TLT Symposium to learn from what they are up to. Jeff is currently serving as the program chair for our own Symposium and will take over as the overall chair next year. He seems to be learning quite a bit and has been doing some podcast interviews with the people he is meeting there. He talks microblogging, spends time with Ed Evans of Purdue, and Albert Simon from Marshall University. All worth a listen.

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One Response to “Jeff Swain at Purdue’s TLT Symposium”

  1. Brett Bixler on March 8th, 2008 3:14 pm

    I’ve been “afeared” for some time now about monolithic CMSes and the tiny disruptive Web 2 technologies that are nipping at their heels. In our case it’s ANGEL and blogs, wikis, etc.

    Unless the CMS has a very open API, a strong developer community, good feedback mechanisms for users (faculty, staff, students) to express their needs, and the willingness of the local institution to develop and maintain resources (staff, test beds, etc) for change, the days of one CMS to rule us all are numbered.

    We need a CMS that has a core set of “stuff” we can all agree on - dropboxes, a core quiz system, grading system, etc., but that we also can seamlessly drop new tools into. For example, imagine being able to drop Twitter into ANGEL - so it doesn’t just work, but integrates with the core toolset in a way that doesn’t require any training to use.

    That’s the goal we need to strive for. It means we have to advocate a complete rewrite for ANGEL, or drop ANGEL and go with a system that does what I listed above.

    Now I’ve spent years (literally) of my life learning, using, and training others on ANGEL. For me to write this here should speak to the severity of the crisis I see looming on the horizon. We have a scant handful of years before the learning community at Penn State becomes so scattered in its use of online tools that we’ll be worse off than we were 15 years ago.

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