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The CMS and the PLN

January 19th, 2010 jonmott Leave a comment Go to comments

It’s a been a long time since I blogged. Between sending my son off on a mission to Brazil, celebrating my 20th anniversary with my sweetheart, working on some offline writing projects, taking some time off for the holidays, getting back into the swing of things with the New Year and the new semester, and launching our loosely-coupled gradebook at BYU . . . Well, let’s just say I’ve been a little busy.

During my blogging hiatus, I did manage to get a paper published with my friend and colleague David Wiley. In the paper, we catalogue what we believe are the fundamental weaknesses of the CMS.

Writing this paper and taking some time away from blogging has allowed me to think some things through. As the title of my blog constantly reminds me, technology is only as good as the change and improvement it brings to teaching and learning. I have become supremely utilitarian when it comes to teaching and learning tools, applications and platforms. When it comes to the CMS and the Personal Learning Network (PLN), I readily admit that there are plusses and minuses to each. (For some thoughts ont the distinctions between PLNs and the PLE, see the references below).

I’m currently writing from ELI in Austin, Texas where I will make a presentation about open learning networks. As part of my preparation, I asked my PLN via Twitter (see below for a listing) for sources that delineate the strengths and weaknesses of the CMS and the PLN.

Here’s my meta-listing based on the research I did with David for our article, my own experience, and what I’ve gleaned from the resources shared by my online colleagues:

CMS Strengths

  • Simple, consistent, and structured
  • Integration with student information systems (SISs) so student rosters are automagically populated in courses
  • Private and secure (i.e., FERPA compliant)
  • Tight tool integration (e.g., quiz scores populated in gradebooks)
  • Supports sophisticated content structuring (e.g., sequencing, branching, and adaptive release)

CMS Weaknesses

  • As it is widely implemented, the CMS is time-bound (i.e., courses go away at the end of the semester)
  • Teacher, rather than student, centric
  • Courses are walled off from each other and from the wider Web, thereby negating the potential of the network effect
  • Limited opportunities for students to “own” and manage their learning experiences within and across courses
  • Rigid, non-modular tools
  • Interoperability challenges and difficulties (significant progress is being made on this front, but the ability to easily move data in and out of the CMS and to plug in alternative tools to replace or enhance native tools remains to be seen)

PLN Strengths

  • Almost limitless variety and functionality of tools
  • Customizable and adaptable
  • No artificial time boundaries–remains “on” before, during, and after matriculation
  • Open to interaction and connection with persons without regard to their official registration in programs or courses
  • Easily sharable with others both inside and outside of courses, programs, and institutions
  • Student-centric (i.e., each student selects and uses the tools that make sense for their particular needs and circumstances)
  • Compilable via simple technologies like RSS

PLN Weaknesses

  • Complex and difficult to create for inexperienced students and faculty members
  • Potential security and data exposure problems–FERPA issues abound
  • Limited institutional control over data
  • Absent or unenforceable SLAs–no ability to predict or resolve Web application performance issues, outages, or even disappearance

This is far from a comprehensive list, but it begins to clarify the picture in my mind. If we persist in an either-or debate about the CMS versus the PLN, we will be falling victim to what Jim Collins calls the “tyranny of or.” When faced with difficult decisions, we often cast them–artificially–as dichotomies. We must do this *or* that. Collins argues that the alternative is to find ways to leverage the “genius of and,” to bring together the best of both alternatives and create a chimerical best-of-both-worlds solution.

That is the vision of the open learning network–to bring together the best of the CMS and the best of the PLN to create a learning platform for higher education that meets the broad and diverse needs of faculty members and students engaged in the teaching and leaning process. Doing so is what I get paid to do–to provide technologies that will help teachers and learners be more effective without having to worry about technological complexities and navigating the swirling waters of apparently contradictory paradigms.

Please comment with your suggestions for improving my listing of strengths and weaknesses and I’ll edit the lists (with attribution). If you have additional resources to add, please share those as well.

More fun to follow soon . . .

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RESOURCES

ELI’s “7 Things You Should Know About … Personal Learning Environments”

Alec Couros: “What is a PLN? Or, PLE vs. PLN”

Steve Wheeler: “It’s Personal: Learning Spaces, Learning Webs”

David Hopkins: “Pedagogical Foundations for Personal Learning”

John Seely Brown: “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0”

Edublend: “Cloud Learning Environment – What is it?”

grazadio_elearning’s PLE Bookmarks on Delicious

Things I’ve written on the subject …

Bush & Mott: “The Transformation of Learning with Technology: Learner-Centricity, Content and Tool Malleability, and Network Effects“

Mott & Wiley: “Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network”

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Categories: Teaching & Learning Technology Tags: , , , , , ,
  • Golden. Great, useful info.
  • looks like you're much in favor of the PLN
    great thoughts
  • jaredstein
    I responded to this and added some of my own here: http://jaredstein.org/2010/01/21/strengths-and-weaknesses-of-plnple-cmslms/

    Not sure why the pingback didn't take!
  • Jason McDonald
    Hey, Jon. Interesting thoughts. A few things came to mind as I read. Would you please take this in the spirit of further inquiry?

    As I read, I wondered whether you might be falling into your own "tyranny of or" trap. As in, "the CMS has this goodness we want, so we either have to get it from an CMS or we can't have it at all." What if the CMS advantages you discuss could be provided in ways other than through an CMS? In other words, instead of trying to combine the CMS and PLN to get the advantages of both (where I actually think you have a higher chance of getting the disadvantages of both), what if you pursued the advantages of the CMS in other (perhaps even non-technological) ways? A few ideas came to mind:

    1) Integration with the SIS: When I worked with the IMC, one of the students exploited a weakness in the LDAP system to allow his little multimedia project to use student information outside of Blackboard or AIM. I mention this only to underscore the fact that the technical challenges of SIS integration are not difficult - a student making $8.00/hr figured it out. What is difficult is navigating the layers of policies on top of the SIS. Some of these, no doubt are necessary. But others are in place to make engineers' lives easier, and still others are there to make administrators' lives easier. We naturally accept those as constraints when they are only constraints because we want them to be. Taking a hard look at data access policies may provide innovative ways for using SIS data without the traditional structure of the CMS - even if it makes the data stewards hot to even think about it.

    2: Institutional control over data (you actually mentioned this as a PLN weaknesses). A wise man once said, "Available information wisely used is far more valuable than multiplied information allowed to lie fallow." It seems like institutions treat data like junkies treat crack - they always want more even when it hurts them. I doubt most modern institutions actually need more data or more control over data. Most of the problems I observe probably are correlated with too much data rather than too little. So is a way to mitigate this PLN weakness (or CMS strength) to redefine what data we want to control? I bet an honest asking of the question, "if I was starting again completely from scratch, would I recreate the system I currently have?" would reveal many places in our system where the data we thought we had to control simply becomes irrelevant.

    3: FERPA compliant. Not to say that privacy isn't important. But there is a difference between privacy and FERPA. And there is a difference between FERPA and how institutions choose to interpret FERPA. If there is an educational opportunity that appears to violate FERPA, what if institutional leaders used their collective influence to modify the FERPA landscape, instead of squashing the idea in the name of compliance? At least sometimes I believe "compliance" is a code word for "easier than the alternatives." What if we refused to let people play that game? What if we really explored innovations in the spirit of trying to make them work, instead of abandoning them as soon as they conflict with the status quo? Does this approach open ways for the PLN to be used to meet the needs we really have, instead of relying on the CMS?

    Just some random thoughts . . . interested in your response!
  • johnhiltoniii
    One strength that you allude to, but maybe don't explicitly state is "flexibility" as a "pro" of PLNs...I'm kind of new at the idea of PLNs; I was digging around a bit and impressed with this PLN -- http://edupln.ning.com/. I look forward to learning more about this.
  • Jon, one further thought/question. I wonder if anyone has done a mapping that connects the strengths/weaknesses of the CMS/PLN with other characteristics associated with technology selection/efficacy in course contexts. Subject matter, class size, instructor experience with technology and/or teaching, instructor teaching style, class level, student demographics, student prior experience, etc.

    It seems to me that (Michael Wesch not withstanding) most of the PLN-not-CMS banner carriers teach smaller, often graduate level courses, typically focused on instructional technology, new media, or similar subject areas.

    As much as the PLN and web 2.0 tools have their appeal, point #1 under CMS ("simple, structured, consistent") seems to count for an awful lot when you're teaching hundreds of freshman in a survey course, for example.
  • Excellent question. I'm so focused on my higher ed context I haven't really thought much about the K12 context. Off the top of my head, I'd say that the modular, flexible framework would make sense in K12. But there are significant privacy and online safety issues to deal with, particularly with 4 and 5 year old children. By the time students are in college, they're adults and can be expected, I think, to navigate an open, online world.
  • Hi Jon, watching your prezo from yesterday and my mind is swimming. I am an IT leader in a large K12 school district in British Columbia. We have implemented a learning portal / platform and are considering integrating an LMS into it. We wrestle with the private vs public question a lot. Most of our teachers (probably a valid generalization for K12) find technology powered teaching and learning to be complex and challenging - some are exploring / using an open PLN approach with students, to some degree. I wonder what your thoughts are on mapping what you talked about in a higher ed context to a K12 context? How well do you think it scales "down" to K12 where the students range from children (4 and 5 year olds) to young emerging adults?
  • Good lists, Jon. One other angle that usually comes up in this discussion is the "real world-ness" of the PLN as opposed to the CMS. Providing the opportunity for students to thoughtfully engage with a PLN during college may provide greater benefits to workplace productivity and lifelong learning than experience with a CMS.
  • Great addition to the list. I included this in my presentation yesterday. Thanks!
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