Chalkface Blog

With more schools thinking of installing VLEs next year, it is instructive to look at the experience of the HE sector. They are about three years ahead of us, and starting to see the cracks…

Is the brave new world of e-learning envisaged pre-dotcom / UKEU collapse now in danger of degrading into a prosaic reality of wall-to-wall Blackboard and WebCT courses all looking the same as each other, with most, with a few outstanding exceptions, not doing anything more than being expensive vehicles for content delivery with a few token underpopulated, largely unsupported, and unfocused discussions for good measure?

Across the elearning blogs I read (nearly all HE-orietated) there is a strong move away from monolithic MLE/VLE products towards more flexible (and cheaper) solutions, each of which attempts to do one thing well. In some cases, they are not even installing their own software, but rather encouraging students to use free services – Blogger and Flickr are the most common examples.

The key issue is the motivation behind implementation. College (and school) managers like the data-gathering aspects of all-in-one elearning systems; “If I can measure it, I can manage it”. But any single system has only limited permutations, and this leads to a deadening monoculture in the classroom.

Teachers fall into two groups;

• those who want to stick with paper anyway and will passively resist any kind of elearning
• enthusiasts who are driven by a desire to enthuse and motivate students. They value diversity above all else, and will use your big, expensive VLE as just one, occasional, tool in a much larger set they have assembled for themselves.

A bottom-up approach to introducing elearning is likely to lead an ecosystem of many different, competing tools within the school. This does reduce the potential for global results reporting, but experience in HE suggests that potential was never going to be realised anyway. The benefit, as any ecologist will tell you, is that the more species you have in a particular ecosystem, the more more likely the system as a whole is to survive.

In the wake of the recent London bombings, the ICE idea was widely circulated by email

ICE stands for ‘In Case of Emergency’: it’s what the emergency services will look for if you’re involved in an accident and have your mobile phone with you. This straightforward idea was developed by the East Anglian Ambulance Trust and is supported by Vodafone.

Then – red faces all round – a second email claiming it was a hoax.

Be very careful with this one – although the intention is great it is unfortunately phase one of a phone based virus that is laying a path for propagating very quickly. Passing it on is part of the virus interestingly, such is the deviousness of the people who write these things.

We have already seen the “second phase” where a program is sent as part of a ring-tone download that goes into your address book and looks for something it recognises – you’ve guessed it, an address book entry marked “ICE or I.C.E.” or whatever. It then sends itself to the “ICE list”, charging you for the privilege.

It now turns out that the hoax claim itself was the hoax. Here are your authoritative references:

• East Anglian Ambulance Service NHS Trust (Originators)
• Vodaphone (sponsors)
• Urban Legends (hoax tracking site)

Mainly I’m just very unamused that someone would seek to sabotage this excellent initiative. It’s like throwing stones at fire engines; one of those things that leaves even the wettest of liberals longing for a more disciplined society.

But I’m also fascinated by the way that an asynchronous medium like email can get stuck in this kind of feedback loop. I’d predict that you’ll see a ‘standing wave’ of accusation and counter-accusation hitting your inbox for a few days now, before the damping effect of static reference sources kicks in.

Meanwhile, my phone now has an ICE entry in the contact list. Does yours?