Daily Bookmarks 10/04/2008
-
iterating toward openness » Blog Archive » If Facebook Worked Like Blackboard
A short post, but very pointed–if Facebook worked like an LMS, no real community would ever develop. Questions the whole idea of closed educational systems.
-
-
- shut down all the groups you belonged to,
- deleted all your forum posts,
- removed all the photos, videos, and other files you had shared, and
- forgot who your friends were.
What if Facebook worked like Blackboard (or pretty much any other LMS)?
Imagine if every fifteen weeks Facebook:
-
-
The thing is, this is how Blackboard and other LMSs work right now. When you take a traditional online course in an LMS, at the end of the semester everything you worked on is deleted.
This isn’t the future; it’s the present. Hopefully it will be the past eventually, where we can get away from the model of every student’s work being lost every 8 or 16 weeks and have a more open model where we continually build on past learning.
It would work for a very fast-paced environment that constantly regenerated its content. It would erase the past, forcing its users to generate the future in the moment — what a way to live in the present! But would it work? I do not think we are ready for it now, but the speed with which society is evolving in terms of thought and lifestyle due to technology could feasibly lead up to such a paradigm.