In the past (1996) we had websites presenting information. It was in the days that most of us assumed that good education was all about feeding the students on the right time with the right knowledge (sometimes even piece by piece: like in programmed instruction).
Then check it with tests and Word-assignments and show them the way to other resources. The first VLE's showed also that face on the early internet.
Typical parts in these days: resources, weblinks, quiz, faq, glossary, guided instruction (AICC)
Around 1997 the next generation VLE's came up: websites combining the presentation of information with tools to support the communication about these (new) artefacts: forum, *) chat, poll, shared workspace,
It could help the individual student to sharpen his individual thoughts by comparing them with the expressed thoughts of himself and others in the forums or by sharing collected (and self created) artefacts. Moodle was born in this era, focusing on forums and missing in the beginning the shared workspace.
With Wikis (popularity starts around 2000) you introduce a new kind of tools: it offers the opportunity to construct - in a loosy way **) - together with other students a new knowledge artefact while the teacher can monitor the ongoing work (and give on-line helpfull cues). Without the wiki the collaboration is happening outside the view of the helpfull teacher: they get an asssignment, construct something in Word and deliver that after several weeks as their masterpiece: difficult to help them during these three weeks and give feedback on their learning process if you only can see the final product.
The last innovation is that the focus is more and more shifting from teachers to students:
- Give students tools so they can monitor (and steer!) their own learning process. (MoodleFN, the project templates and our own humble checkmark-graph, visible in my personal icon are such attempts, I hope Martin spends some time on it.)
- Giving students access to the tools for creating the education artefacts in a course: students as constructors: glossary, wiki,
(So when can we give students AS CONSTRUCTORS access to all these beautiful teachertools like book, multipage, quizz, lesson, (shared) journals, etc... WITHOUT LOOSING THE PRIVACY RESPECTING MONITOR FUNCTION for the professional teacher/coach. Can't we create a mechanism like in the wiki: teacher class group student access under the same button and combine this witha better filtering on the edit-fields, also wished for non-expert teachers as editors...)
I disagree with the well meant attempts to limit the teacher in his choices. ***)
Why not allow them to add all kind of tools inside a wiki?
OR...why not allow them to add all kind of tools in the sidebar of a central forum? Wasn't that the original thought behind the social format?
If you want to help the teacher with his design choices, then a growing set of templates would help more then restricting possibilities.
*) Social Constructivism is not the inventor of this forum-idea: I found the idea in a book from 1962 by A.D. de Groot (founder of the Dutch Curriculem Institue and famous writer of "(Misconseptions about) The thinking of the chessplayer". The book is called Methodology, foundations for research and thinking in the Social Sciences. In this book the author explains that after constructing your artefact you "as little scientist" go back to the forum for checking your idea/theory/idola against the thinking of the "ruling" community..
**) In the past the Computer Industry was trying hard to build very restrictiv tools to collect and store Knowledge (AI), what never worked in educational settings.
***) Do you remember the early discussions abaout the wish to have a Wiki in Moodle? Now we have two