Arstechnica has posted some interesting commentary about Martin Weller’s e-learning article for “On the Horizon”. Weller argues that the university is as much an facilitator of collective learning among the student community as it is a conduit for knowledge. The university combines the interaction between students with the university material and gurus.

He then points out that the online communities we are seeing explode in recent years are fulfilling a parallel function. The “web 2.0″ focus on collaboration, conversation and community is increasingly playing a parallel role to the classroom.

The point seems to be less that Facebook is going to replace the university and more that what students expect from their education community is changing rapidly. As Ars writes,

Weller notes that the software systems that many universities deploy have strict permissions limits that leave the posting of materials and launching of discussions strictly in the hands of the professors. “Why will they [students] accept standardized, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for?” he asks. If the students can’t meet their expectations through these systems, the students will just ignore them and start their own Facebook community; Weller paints a picture of university systems with “digital tumbleweed blowing down their forums.”

I’ve got to agree. All my experience with educational “enterprise” software is that it is a rigid platform with a poor UI. It seems too often it is built by committee with attention to control and features rather than looking at how communities actually interact and communicate.

My question though, and what I would be interesting in hearing, is how many people involved in education are abandoning “approved” e-learning tech for mainstream ones. Are you provided with a university CMS but instead use a Wordpress blog? Do you use YouTube instead of integrated video modules? What about sharing documents, lecture notes or audio recordings? Are your students forming study groups on Facebook instead of on the school’s group software?

UPDATE 1

I apologize for my lack of blogging lately, I’ll try to kick it up a notch soon. I have two book blurbs in the pipeline as well as a few other ideas stirring.

I have been busy teaching my first official class as a prof. It is tons of fun teaching Greek so far, and my students are responding positively to my use of technology in the class. What all do I do, you may ask? Well:

• First and foremost, my university is in the processing of switching their LMS to moodle, and a number of us are testing it out this year. It is fantastic. So I do exercise checkups online, as well as distribute class materials (btw, I’m using Gerald Stevens, New Testament Greek Primer Cascade Books. It is great!)
• I deliver all lessons in Keynote (Mac’s presenter software). I also use Omnidazzle to scribble on the screen when doing parsing and translation. Then once I’m done I upload it as a PDF for them to have.
• I wrote some absolutely terrible songs that nontheless have helped them learn their paradigms. I had to swallow my pride for this part. p.s. Don’t ask, I’m not giving them out
• I started creating lesson recaps. Utilizing Mac’s Keynote recording feature, I basically sit in my office and go through the presentation again, albeit quicker, and speak over the presentation. Then I export it to quicktime and upload it to moodle.
• I encourage the students to use Ken Penner’s Flash!Pro software for vocabulary memorization
• I also read the chapter vocabulary and place them online as mp3’s to help the auditory learners with vocab

I have worked hard this month to get my lessons all prepared because, as some of you know, I’m now officially a p/t PhD student with none other than our biblioblogging Birdman himself, Mike Bird. My Dissertation is on David and davidic typology in the gospel of Matthew. Fun times!

UPDATE 2:
There have been a few new blogs that have come to light in the past few weeks. Some have just started, some I just learned about. These are the four latest to be added to the Deinde Biblioblog search: Sermon to the Hebrews, Notes on 1 Peter, agaphseis, and Confessions of a Bible Junkie.

There was also a big new website announcement, in my mind anyway. Bulletin of Biblical Research (BBR) now has an upgraded website, including free PDF or .doc downloads of the articles. As a proponent of open source scholarship, I did a backflip (figuratively) when I heard about this. A great journal that is now open to the whole world — well, up to 2004 anyway, but a 3 year buffer is not bad at all.
Anyway I say all of that to let you know that BBR, both citations and the full text, are now indexed in the Deinde Journal Search. One other significant addition I have made to this search is the new JETS archive at the Reclaiming the Mind website.

And as to final Deinde search, the web search, I have updated it so that it now searches every site or page that is connected to the NTGateway as well as iTanakh.

That’s all! Cheers!