Not sure why the pingback didn't take!

As I read, I wondered whether you might be falling into your own “tyranny of or” trap. As in, “the LMS has this goodness we want, so we either have to get it from an LMS or we can't have it at all.” What if the LMS advantages you discuss could be provided in ways other than through an LMS? In other words, instead of trying to combine the LMS 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 LMS 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 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 LMS – 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 if 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 LMS 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 LMS?

Just some random thoughts . . . interested in your response!

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.