This is the presentation that Jon Dron and I did in Vancouver for the Canadian Moodlemoot. We looked at the redundancy between three big institutional e-learning apps- LMS, e-portfolio and social networks and tried to overview issues of integrating these- or not.

1. Confounding redundancy: LMS, Social
Networks & E-portfolio Systems
Terry Anderson
Jon Dron
Feb. 2013

3. LMS
• Tool for teaching effectiveness
• Good class management tools
• Structured learning paths easily created
• Course-centric view of learning
• Tight group controls and safety (Safety of
campus)

4. E-Portfolio
• Process and product
• Archiving, artifacts and reflections
• At a course, program or institutional level
• CVs and the next step
• Network entity and presence
• Lifelong learning
• Personal ownership of process and product
• Exportable to other personal archives??

5. Social Media
• Tool for Building Personal Networks of people and Resources
• Means to reify and share knowledge
• Ownership and identity
• Supports long term partnerships, relationships
• Weak and strong ties
• Boundary crossing and serendipity
• Place for coalescence of Sets into networks and groups, nets
into groups.
• Discovery, external validation “danger of good ideas”

6. The future: Beyond the LMS to Personal Learning
Environments (PLEs) (Anderson 2005)
My social Life
My work
My school(s)
My calendar
My profile
My hobbies
My files
My publications
E-portfolios
My conversations(s)

7. • If you think of the internet as an
environment that is moving and shaping all
around you, then you will have a better
attitude to be able to handle the flood of
information that is coming at you.”
Stephen Downes, 2005

8. A learner-centric view of mobile seamless learning
Lung-Hsiang Wong
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2011.01245.x/full

9. Making Sense of Social forms
collective
net set
group

10. Group model
• Membership and exclusion, closed
• Hierarchies of control
• Focus on collaboration and shared purpose
• teachers: guides
group
8

11. The net model
• bottom-up, open
• inclusive
• focus on individual and connections
• teachers: role models and co-travellers
net
9

12. Set model
• cooperation, anonymity
• focus on filtering and selection
• tags and categorisation
• teachers: curators
– and publishers
set
10

13. Individual Capacity
• LMS
– Security, records management, synch and asynch
group tools, wikis, gradebook
– Tools for groups, support for constructivist, and
collaborative learning
– Single institutional Login and identity
– Export in and Out – while retaining privacy

14. Individual Capacity
• E-Portfolio
– Supports reflective as well as summative e-
portfolios design
– Integration of personal blogs
– Export in and Out – while retaining privacy
developmental (e.g., working),
reflective (e.g., learning), and
representational (e.g., showcase),
Wikipedia.

15. Individual Capacity
• Networks
– Auto and user tagging to insure effective
harvesting
– groups, nets & sets
– Collective tools enhancing persistence,
transparency
– Casual, informal learning, spaces and resources
– Export in and Out – while retaining privacy

16. Integration to PLE
• Password management and minimal
disruption
• Little “application centric behaviour”
• Standards-based and adherent
• Easy data import/export

17. Many pieces loosly joined

18. The Athabasca Story
• LMS – Moodle Hard
• E-Portfolio- Mahara
Soft
• Social Networking - Elgg

19. The Athabasca Story
Low learner control
• LMS – Moodle Hard
• E-Portfolio- Mahara
• Social Networking - Elgg
High learner control Soft

20. Function <> technology
• Blog <>blog
• Discussion forum <> discussion forum
• It’s all about the orchestration of phenomena
(Arthur, 2009)

21. Summary
• As all three applications evolve, they tend to
acquire affordances of one another.
• Eliminating one only makes sense if all of its
affordances are exploited adequately by the
other two
• Technologies are more than tools
• Joining the pieces effectively first with and
then beyond online campus 1st priority