Ronda Wery's List: 5371

• The built–in pedagogy of the big systems is based on traditional approaches to instruction dating from the nineteenth century: presentation and assessment.
• It would be wrong to see today’s CMSs as monolithic in their instructivist or behaviorist pedagogies.
• Today’s CMSs can be customized, changed and adapted, so why aren’t faculty tinkering with them in an effort to make their individual pedagogies work online?
• Their adoption of technology is based on top–down directives rather than interest or aptitude (Samarawickrema and Stacey, 2007). They do not possess the “information literacy” skills now required of many undergraduates (Reid, 2006), despite an assumption that professors are all computer–savvy (Dykman and Davis, 2008). Some of these faculty have been teaching in the classroom for many years, and have developed successful instructional formats for themselves, be they traditional or more collaborative. Then they are assigned to teach online. When they ask where to start in creating an online course, they are usually pointed to the college’s preferred CMS. And that’s where the pedagogical guidance begins.
• yet most are novices when it comes to the Web
• while many use e–mail and some use discussion forums or plagiarism–check applications, none were communicating with students via current Web technologies such as video or audio chat, and only a few were experimenting with blogs for classes
• A more recent study of faculty, most of whom had used Blackboard for over two years, still showed similar use patterns (Chang, 2008). The fact is that most of our faculty were, and continue to be, novices when it comes to learning applications of the Web.
• These users were trying to reduce their cognitive load by limiting their use of the software, while Web experts were able to keep their goal in mind easily while searching more deeply.
• Expert users contextualize their resources fluidly and organize materials effectively, while novices just upload and share files, hoping students will find them (Reanut, et al., 2006).
• When faced with a different interface or online environment, novices are inclined to utilize only the aspects they understand from a non–Web context.
• Novice users rely heavily on the first tier of accessible features, and depend on elements that assist their memory and prompt them to enter information. To operate the system, they require “restricted vocabularies, simple tasks, small numbers of possibilities, and very informative feedback.” (Chen, 2001) The counterintuitive interface of a program like Blackboard stops Web novices in their tracks.
• The buttons link to pages that simply provide a place to upload a document, which is exactly what most instructors do: upload word–processed files of their classroom materials.
• Blackboard “tends to encourage a linear pathway through the content” [3], and its default is to support easy uploading and text entry to achieve that goal.
• Faculty are led by the interface of a CMS not only because they do not immediately see an alternative, but because the familiar signposts (the Syllabus button) imply a single way of completing the task (upload a document). Only the Moodle system provides a default setup that looks like a calendar-style syllabus
• Even after several years of working with the CMS, faculty requests for help focus on what the technology can do, rather than how their pedagogical goals can be achieved.
• Few instructors are consciously aware that CMS design is influencing their pedagogy.
• The vast majority of complaints about CMSs come from innovative, heavy users of Web technologies, those accustomed to customizing applications to make their work more effective. They also come from behaviorists and constructivists who face significant limitations in many systems. Novices happily use the high–tech CMS as a glorified copy machine (Dutton, 2004; Walker and Johnson, 2008)

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• making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge
• access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages.
• a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge
• • thid is important!
• swiftest communication between individuals
• growing mountain of research
• bogged down
• conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear
• he effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial
• methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose
• truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential
• publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record
• there are plenty of mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific records.
• The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.
• A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

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