Forum .LRN Q&A: From Course Management to Curricular Capabilities: A Capabilities Approach for the Next-Generation CMS

Thanks for starting this thread, Dave! Have you (anyone else?) checked out the website based on these principles: http://www.knowledgeroom.info/? This site allows you to set up a temporary account, and I think it is instructive: the user is presented with navigation list that opens up spaces, similar to Dotlrn, but I think moving one powerful step forward in the direction metaphor and sequencing.

First, the spaces as user-relevant metaphors: research center, skill workplace, conference center, debate hall, portfolio gallery, map room, assessment suite ... There is something about the metaphors and interface design that help me understand better what I am supposed to do there, and therefore, invite participation. We have most of this functionality in Dotlrn, but in Dotlrn, in comparison, these spaces appear, from the perspective of developers, as functionality, and from the perspective of course or university administrators, as, well, administration. The article's argument is that the perspective of developers and administrators is understandable and relevant in what he is announcing to be a prior phase of lms development, for they got it up and running -- but that the criteria of relevance suggests a much stronger user-orientation: not simply "usability", but professional practices. The knowledgeroom metaphors speak to students, instructors, researchers, and professional/corporate work teams: the spaces one finds here are much more readable in the sense of telling me what I might find and do there that is relevant to my disciplinary or professional workflow.

Second, through these metaphors I find the sequencing much more accessible, and that helps me imagine what to do there, too. Our Dotlrn functionality, even with the tabs, appears in comparison as but a list: the tabs are only roughly ordered, they go everywhere and nowhere: the knowledgeroom metaphors relate much more powerfully to the meaningful sequences of group work. For instance, I can more readily imagine a sequence of spaces for academic research groups that would include: thesis, literature survey, data collection, analysis, evaluation, presentation, suggestions for future research such that at every point I would know where I am in the process, and when I enter a space, I would know what I am supposed to do there.

The author of "From Course Management to Curricular Capabilities," Van Weigel, also offers dozens of offhand comments suggesting very powerful insights into the lifeworlds of those who might use our technologies. For instance, he says something like: "why create an lms for academic purposes when 99% of their users will go out into the world and use corporate teamware?" My reflections on this confirmed my observation that as long as the lms is treated as "secretaries, typewriters, and toilet paper," as mere tools, then the whole business can be relegated to assistants, treated as a mere service, and thereby downgraded. Van Weigel (following John Seely Brown and others closer to us, such as the reports of the Otter Group) starts from the situation and needs of professional working groups that are deemed so important that the participation of the top managers of the corporations/projects is taken to be essential to project/teamware implementation and success.

I hope everyone will excuse me if, for the sake of the argument, I would characterize Dotlrn spaces as "disconnected, sandbox stuff for school" instead of "highly-specialized, customized, and remarkably efficient places for collaborative work". That is, when I was working on "the Dotlrn Gardens thing" (refactoring the application with css) I was thinking in what I now see to be essentially decorative terms -- adding flexibility in colors, shapes, typography, layout, etc. But with this article (ok, I am reading a bunch of others in this vein, but the occasion is the present post) is leading me to think about specific, professional workflows, modelling the interface and design on the user's lifeworlds, and away from applications suited to the Taylorization and administration of the mass university and towards a criteria for relevance that would lead our users to interact with the application because it helps them remember what they are doing, why they are there, and where they are going. For the past year, I thought Moodle, the favorite of teachers in the public schools, was an admirable model: it was nicely warm and fuzzy, with icons and photos and context-dependent help. Now I am thinking of professional work teams where people are apprenticing themselves to their disciplines. A relevant comparision here might be to the university-level web literacy approaches, and my favorite is the The Road to Research" from the Wesleyan University Library.

I am curious to hear from others on how this article would lead us to redesign Dotlrn.