greetings from San Francisco @ Educause Western Regional Conference:
Next-Gen IT: New Leaders, New Students, New Directions, and Expectations
i kicked off the conference by attending a pre-conference workshop called Fitting New Emerging Technologies into our Existing Learning Management Systems, presented by Cyprien Lomas from UBC.
the session provoked interesting discussion on the potential intersection between emerging trends like:
social networks like Facebook, MySpace
locative applications like Twitter
user-created content apps like youtube, Flickr
virtual worlds like Second Life
tagging of content
social bookmarking tools like del.ico.us
and learning management systems (LMS) like:
WebCT
Blackboard
Sakai
Moodle
Angel
Desire2Learn
the “swiss army knife” nature of learning management systems already makes it a place for instructors to do many things, like post course content and grades, give quizzes, and communicate with students via discussion boards, e-mail, and chat.
my question is “how can we enhance collaboration, communication, and community by integrating emerging technologies into an LMS like WebCT?” but instead of answers i have more questions, particularly relevant to social software: will students use these tools? do students want us where they are? (in the case of Facebook and MySpace), what about privacy, security, and campus policies?
maybe the question becomes not only how do we integrate these new technologies with the existing features, but which technologies, and why?
