Is this our modern course management system? 

Sitting at a desk, staring at a screen, and punching buttons in a Pavlovian manner works for educational technology nerds like myself.  It's an efficient way to transmit information, but it doesn't provide the rich education that liberal arts colleges promise.  A college diploma is more than a set of facts; it is a maturing of the entire person through a conversation with other people, theories, and disciplines.

Studio education is used in many design disciplines as a way to bring students into a discipline.  Making learning public, these disciplines give us a model for the next generation of educational technology.  Rather than worrying about peer learning "leading" to cheating, why don't we think about its power to engage and inspire?

Social software like blogs and wikis work. Claremont Graduate University has been using Elgg, a social software system, to support courses for the last two years. 

We've learned that: 

1. Students place a high value upon ownership of their content.
2. They benefit from peer learning.
3. Most are motivated by the public nature of their work.

Taking these principles, and building on educational theory, I have developed a design theory on how to build social portfolio software.  This design centers around three core principles. 

A social portfolio should:

1. Support student ownership
2. Enhance peer learning
3. Focus on ease of use

Below is a walkthrough of my eportfolio software.  It is currently in its 8th major version, and is used by a wide variety of organizations and schools around the world.  While still having a ways to go, it helps to demonstrate some of my beliefs about how a portfolio system should work.

link: http://www.vimeo.com/1258170

Elgg and my plug-in are both licensed under the GPL, meaning that anyone is free to download, use, and modify it as they please.  People interested in learning more are encouraged to visit my blog at http://conversation.cgu.edu/garrettn/weblog for updates, or to contact me through email at nathan.garrett@cgu.edu.

Flicker Credits:
•    Writeable Walls InQbate CETL in Creativity University of Sussex
•    1975: And the Changes To Come

In doing the rewrite on the folio plugin, I came up with some thoughts and guidelines that helped me with its development I am going to include the below in the ReadMe doe included in the zip as well. I would appreciate any input people may have, as this is still very much a” thinking out loud” process for me.

• MVC Framework
o Folio V.7 is the first iteration that has anything like a model / view/ controller design.
o Each table in the database is an object (model). These are stored in mod/folio /object and are all singular in name (page and not pages).
o All object name, aka folio_page, are prefixed with the mod folder name. This could allow for using php’sautoload feature, removing the need to have explicit include statements.
o The model, aka folio_page , has SQL functions for Select, Update, Insert, and Delete.
I kept these using SQL language, aka Update and not edit, to make them easier to remember. I found this made using things very easy. If I wanted to load a User, change their name, and save, then if is the following easy to understand and write 3 lines.

$user = folio_user::SelectWhereIdent(2);
$user->name =”bob”;
$user->Update();

o Selects have multiple forms, but always a SelectWhereIdent(ident) form for easy loading by the table primary key.
o Controls are in the view/ directory.  Generic ones are in the names of the object (such as comment.php).  More specialized controls are under their main name, e.g. RichEditor.php.
• Html
o Every page hit by a browser is in mod folio html. All Js and css files are in /js and /css . All have a php extension that are turned into js or css thru rewrite rules. This allows a high degree of control over expires headers, using url for full instead of relative paths, and so on.
o The nice thing about this is that we can have standard htaccess rules for all plugins. Anything with /news/title/3 goes to /mod/title/view.php?title=3. Anything with /news/title/3 Bells/edit goes to /mod/title/edit.php?title=3 Bells . Obviously there will still be exceptions, but it would greatly simplify matters.
o Each html page contains as much of the div and layout code that I could factor in there.
• Ajax
o All postbacks go to /ajax folder. As an example, the page edit goes to /mod/folio/ajax/page_update.php . Similar SQL phrases like delete and insert are also used. Part of the Post is a Redirector object. This is used to tell the Ajax page what to do as a result. Standard options include redirecting to another page, echoing a field, and adding a message to display on the next page load.
o The reason I like this setup is that I always know where post backs are being handled, I can have have a high degree of control over the resulting actions, and I can use the save backend for Ajax as well as normal post backs.
• Echo
o The only pages sending non-error output are those in html and ajax . All other are side-effect free to include, all code is safely enclosed in functions.

Over the past year or so, Ire been working on Egg, an open source social software package. We've been using it to support a number of classes offered at CGU. It has proved to be a fairly effective classroom support tool. Now, however, we need to take it several steps beyond the existing well-trodden CMS territory. Improving the effectiveness of our existing tools is valuable, but getting students to voluntarily use a system is the ultimate proof of its effectiveness. How can we generate real community and value to individual students?

Two research avenues are open to my group. The first is intellectual community, and the second is peer learning. The universities' president is quite interested in the first (and a fellow labmate, Peter, is already working on this). There has been plenty of research showing that community is important in education and pedagogy. However, I more interested in the second.

So much of educational software is built with the assumption that learning is a solitary activity. If the option to share work is even built in, it is generally hidden deep in the system's setting, and definitely is not the default. Building a system that supports peer learning, recognizing its primacy to the educational experience, could encourage both students and teachers to learn from each other. Peer learning is not a new concept, and many researchers have been working in this area before. When I think that my contribution will be is in the importance of encouraging ownership in peer-to-peer systems. Furthermore, I believe that encouraging ownership, giving students a sense of control over their online identity and making their work public by default, could be a valuable research contribution.

I've been working on this angle for several years now, but am now finally beginning to make some headway.  I have a JISE paper under review at the moment that shows the importance of ownership and community in satisfaction.  It also shows that students perceive Elgg as more of a social system than Blackboard, which is what I'd expect given their different design.

I am currently working on getting my dissertation proposal approved.  I'll post a short version here soon. 

In other news, Elgg looks like it'll be undergoing a major redesign for the v1 version.  At this point, I'll probably end up updating Folio to be compatable.  As a result, I won't be making most of the custom changes that have been requested by various parties.  Instead, my focus for the next two months will be on enhancing the tag functionality and working on a page-by-page recommendation engine. 

Nathan