My BFO – Blackboard may be a Learning Management System, but it remains teacher-centered and not learning-centered.

Now, I am not a Blackboard basher…I have enjoyed using Blackboard for six years. But it does have limitations, and one of them is that it lags the rest of the edtech world in features, particularly those associated with Web 2.0.

I was creating some discussion forums and saw that our upgrade to Bb 7.3 this past May had added a new feature – “tagging”

Well all right now!!!

Tagging is an essential component of user-generated material on the web, and is part of what makes Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare, and Delicious work so well. As described in Delicious (relating to bookmarks, but the same principle applies to pictures, videos, posts, etc.):

“A tag is simply a word you can use to describe a bookmark. Unlike folders, you make up tags when you need them and you can use as many as you like. The result is a better way to organize your bookmarks and a great way to discover interesting things on the Web.”

I thought – “Cool, now students can tag their posts and search other posts using tags!” This would be folksonomy at work in my class!

Wrongo!

What I soon learned when I tried out a few threads is that students cannot tag anything, nor can the instructor while replying. It is only when the instructor collects multiple threads that a tag can be added. While this has some marginal usage, it remains Web 1.0 in philosophy. I put tags on my blog posts and appreciate when others do the same. Students have learned to search using tags. Blackboard apparently allows students to search by tags, but only the tags that the instructor has put in on the threads the instructor chooses. This is NOT a folksonomy, but a very teacher-centered approach.

I’ll still use Blackboard…but in many cases it will be a springboard to jump out of into the interactive world wide web…where I can turn students loose and watch the learning occur!

{Photo Credit: shoebappa – Nice picture that combines the concepts of “Blinding Flash” and “NAVY”!}

Jeff linked to some neat visualizations by Chris Lott of data from the Horizon Report in his blog. Jeff then elaborated with some very cool ideas of educational uses:

• Tag clouds for individual and class sets of student papers / essays.
• Tag clouds for speeches and lectures.
• Tag clouds for analyzing the content of websites.
• Tag clouds of classic pieces of literature.
• Tag clouds generated from set of stories covering the same news event.

Just to name a few…

To follow his line of thinking, I decided to dump my last month’s blog posting into ManyEyes, and it produced the following:

Interesting! I can understand George Siemens doing this…as it really causes you to reflect on what you are blogging.

Now the rub…and the question for others.

Most of us click right through that legal agreement clause, but my friend Bud Deihl took the time to read it, and it has some pretty scary language in it. According to the IBM Terms of Legal Use statement, when I created the wordcloud above, I gave IBM “a perpetual, worldwide and irrevocable license under all intellectual property rights (including copyright) to use, copy, distribute, sublicense, display, perform and prepare derivative works of any information that You provide to IBM, including but not limited to arrangements, visualizations, and selections of information, and feedback and suggestions You provide to IBM.” Wow! Hope they do not go too crazy with my blog notes!

But seriously…there is some interesting language here that “fair use” may put to the test. The Terms of Use notes that you “also agree not to submit anyone else’s copyrightable material to alphaWorks Services unless You obtain written permission of the copyright holder to license the copyrightable material to IBM, consistent with the terms of this Agreement. You also agree not to submit any Software to IBM through the Service. You represent that the information you submit does not violate a privacy, publicity or moral right, or disclose personal, government, business or other information without permission. If You are a student or employee of a college or university, a member of the university’s intellectual property licensing department or other authorized person must approve the terms of this Agreement.”

What exactly does this mean? Does every faculty member now need to go get someone’s approval to use this application? If I develop a tag cloud from the collective papers of a class to look for themes, do I need releases from each student? Can one take a chapter from a textbook and develop a wordcloud as a conversation-starter in class?

I do not know. I do know from the blogs above that people are already using ManyEyes. As with many Web 2.0 applications, the early adopters are out pushing the envelopes, and the policy will lag behind. I would be interested in my colleagues’ thoughts on this.