Tek4L

How to Kill a Knowledge Environment with a Taxonomy

A well balanced article on the dangers of trying to enforce a strict taxonomy on any knowledge environment. Balanced in that it does not say taxonomy should be dumped and replaced with folksonomies as some current articles do, but that taxonomies should be seen as only part of the picture in the contruction of knowledge environments.

A case in point of relying heavily on taxonomies is the NZ Ministry of Education's TKI portal, where even the search interface tries to force you down the track of picking from a predefined taxonomy before being allowed to enter your own keywords. It will be interesting to see if the upcoming rebuild of this site allows for the inclusion of user defined folksonomies on the records.

http://www.sloodle.com/

A combining of Moodle and Second Life. An interesting idea, but I am not convinced that this type of integration is the best way forward. If anything really useful and interesting is going to happen in elearning then I think we need to drop the current LMS paradigm completely rather than try and combine it with other technologies.

Saw a post from an ed technology list today that made mention of a blogging plugin that someone is working on for Blackboard 7. It is to include the ability for students and lecturers to have a single blog that they can use to contribute posts to the various courses they are members of - the specs sounded quite good, but what would be more interesting is allowing students to use their own blogging tool to contribute to courses.

If a student already has a blogger blog, or some other existing blog, then why make them contribute using a blogging tool that is built into the lms, they should instead be able to input the rss feed from their existing blog for articles with the relevant course tag

The other problem is that lots of courses are going to want students to blog because it is the trendy thing to do (just paper based reflective journals reinvented really), without much thought about the real pedagogical value, and restricting it to an lms/course based system will just reinforce the fact that it is just some boring assessment criteria that 'has' to be done to pass the course, rather than showing it as useful ongoing professional development/social networking/life long learning tool.

Worth a read

education-3.0-V3.pdf