The Wales-Wide Web

Scott Wilson's Workblog:
The VLE of the Future

"UCISA recently asked for people to come up with ideas on a "VLE of the future". I'm not sure if my response is exactly what they were after, but I've included it below as I think people from a wider audience might find it interesting. In summary, the VLE of the future isn't a VLE, doesn't belong in institutions, and isn't a portal...", says Scott Wilson who works for the UK JISC e-Learning Framework.

Scott gets it about right in seeing the future VLE as "personal, and it will have features that support informal as well as formal learning situations, and a whole range of social activities that we would barely recognize as "learning" today."

Many e-learning researchers will recognise Scott's vision and at least within the open source development world there are signs of emergent applications which can do the job.

The problem is that e-learning is still dominated by large enterprises and by educational institutions. The former see e-learning as providing costs effective just in time training solutions, whilst the institutions are generally using e-learning applications to extend access to existing courses.

This begs the question of just who is going to lead the change to personalised non-formal learning. One argument, I suppose, is to say it will just happen as more and more people use different software applications "to create their own contexts and invite others to join in, publishing their activities and materials either through simple hosting services, or perhaps directly". That sort of supposes that changes in the institutional organisation of learning will be driven by a bottom up demand for new forms of learning.

I am not convinced. Take the UK Open University for example. Although they have great researchers and developers the UK OU still uses (non interactive) television as one of its main teaching media. with FirstClass being used for communication. OK, FirstClass is at least a communications platform. But it is hardly the creative environment Scott dreams of. I talk to many developers and researchers working in universities. Almost to a person they cannot get their own universities to adopt the more creative pedagogic approaches they talk and right about, still less to abandon their addiction to existing VLEs.

Things are maybe beginning to change - mainly because of the increasing use of web logs and the potential of standards like RSS. But I think we have somehow to firstly mainstream our ideas and secondly, have to close the gap between research and practice. This means building up more cross disciplinary development projects and groups involving pedagogists and educational researchers and learning technologists as well as the managers or whoever else makes decisions.

It also means we have to start exploring what the new roles for educational institutions might be and how they can support networks for developing less fomalised knowledge creation and sharing.