Forum .LRN Q&A: Response to Request for Comment: dotLRN Technology Governance

From a functional perspective, I personally would also vote for option (c), i.e., all non-learning-specific code should be in OpenACS, and dotLRN should be a set of education-specific add-ons to the base OpenACS code, which is governed and maintained by the OpenACS community in any way they see fit. In my mind, dotWRK is a separate application, to be governed by the stakeholders who build and use dotWRK as they see fit. The fact that there is overlap between code that is useful in dotLRN and code that would be useful in dotWRK is perhaps an indication that the code in question should be contributed to and governed the OpenACS community. There may be complicating technical issues of which I'm not aware, but from functional and political perspectives, this division makes the most sense to me.

The truth is that, as I have been saying, the dotLRN consortium has their hands full just solving the very hard problems specific to teaching online. Those in the community who have not wrestled with these problems before may find it instructive to read Joseph Konstan's thoughts on the subject:

http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage/sub_page.cfm?article_pk=1665&page_number_nb=1&title=COLUMN

Konstan is both a programmer and a teacher. He is a prominent member of the ACM and a Professor of Computer Science at University of Minissota. Yet he says he will not teach online because he doesn't believe that it works yet.

Here is my reply to Konstan:

http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage/sub_page.cfm?article_pk=2547&page_number_nb=1&title=COLUMN

You will see that my reply to him, which is consistent with what I've been saying here, is that nobody can blame programmers for developing ineffective distance learning environments if the teachers don't know what they need from those environments in order to teach effectively. The flip side of this is that, just as nobody can blame programmers for the problem not being solved, nobody can expect them to solve it by themselves, either.

And it is not a solved problem. This is harder than CRM, or ERP, or CMS, or any other big, expensive three-letter piece of software. (And remember, OpenACS has not yet licked the CMS problem.) It's harder because the real challenges are not knowing what to do with the technology but knowing what to do with the pedagogy. You can't solve that problem by writing better tcl code.

Not convinced that the problem is as hard as I'm saying it is? Read this:

http://www.elearningmag.com/elearning/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=18563

Or this:

http://www.nua.com/surveys/?f=VS&art_id=905358138&rel=true

Or this:

http://www.electricnews.net/news.html?code=8108603

Note the dates on these articles. They are all recent. I didn't have to go trolling through years of archives to find a couple of complaints; all I did was to scan back through a few months on a daily blog about e-learning. It took me all of five minutes to find these references.

dotLRN needs teachers as equal partners on the design team if it's going to be more than just another adequate educational portal.

For those who care about OpenACS but don't care about dotLRN, I agree that generic code should be pushed out to the community for their stewardship as aggressively as possible. That plus GPL plus fair representation of the community on the dotLRN governing bodies should provide ample protection. For those who care about dotLRN...well...the MIT proposal or something like it is the only way to drive real innovation and adoption.