To VLE or not to VLE? (Virtual Learning Environment)
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a question because our county has chosen an expensive contracted supplier and we’re nearly ready to roll.
The thing is, I don’t really understand what all the fuss is about. To me it seems that we are just starting to implement something that has nearly had it’s day. Many of the blogs I have been reading are talking about the popularity of Bebo. Well, most of the young people I know use Facebook, and I used to use myspace but have recently switched. Some people use Flickr for their photos, others use Picassa. Keep this in mind when reading the following quote from Wikipedia:
In ‘Virtually There’ a book and DVD pack distributed freely to schools by the Yorkshire and Humber Grid for Learning Foundation (YHGfL) Professor Stephen Heppell writes in the foreword: “Learning is breaking out of the narrow boxes that it was trapped in during the 20th century; teachers’ professionalism, reflection and ingenuity are leading learning to places that genuinely excite this new generation of connected young school students – and their teachers too. VLEs are helping to make sure that their learning is not confined to a particular building, or restricted to any single location or moment.”
However, it might make sure that their ‘learning’ is confined to a certain, safe, assessable group of web applications. At worst it could just be a place to upload assignments as ‘Blackboard’ was during my degree course. It may well be 21st century, but only just. I can’t help thinking that the money being spent on implementing the VLE could be spent on enabling people to use Google Docs or Flickr. If we learn from the online world of our students, we’ll see that they relish choice and personalisation. I know that we need to have some idea of what our students can do, but I think we are a little obsessed with having control over it.
