It seemed to me that Canvas was the most schoolish dimension of college: everything is self-contained, divorced from the rest of the world (alienated), imposed from outside—filled with points, metrics and tasks, like a game in a box.
Learning management systems help make college a to-do list (opinion)
We are not fans of any LMS. They bake in behaviorism, Taylorism, and deficit model surveillance capitalism.
Building digital infrastructure that supports the spiky profiles of neurodivergent and disabled people with our varied and often conflicting needs is one of our great endeavors at Stimpunks.
Instead of closed, top-down systems like an LMS, we prefer indie ed-tech, toolbelt theory, bricolage, niche construction, and self-organization.
Flexibility is key.
The LMS reduces schooling to a to-do list.
It occurred to me that given the dominance of the LMS, all of schooling is now a big to-do list.
Learning management systems help make college a to-do list (opinion)
But if college is just a big to-do list, where is the adventure? The joy? The meaning?
Learning management systems help make college a to-do list (opinion)
The LMS reinforces the status quo.
When Jesse and I first posed the question of our presentation’s title—what if bell hooks made a learning management system—we did so playfully. It was during a discussion at the Digital Pedagogy Lab 2015 Institute, just about one year after we posed a likewise playful question at OpenEd 2014, namely “What if Freire made a MOOC?” But a strange thing happened on the way to trying to answer our question. Or, a few strange things.
First, we recognized almost at once that hooks wouldn’t make an LMS, that the very structure of the LMS, the assumptions upon which it is based, the pedagogies it has baked into it, the way that it reinforces patriarchal, capitalist values would never be worth a critical feminist remodel. Erected as it is from the concrete and girders of a predominantly white male educational psychology, the LMS would essentially need to be razed and the ground laid with new pasture before a space more viable, more critical, more feminist, more liberative could be grown in its place.
Which leads to the second strange thing. If we use that metaphor—of a learning “space” where something may be grown, mantled or dismantled—we don’t have to think too far into a critical pedagogical stance to see that the ground, the organic foundation upon which we might build or grow, is itself problematic. For the ground upon which we are accustomed to building is the ground of the institution, of everything we know about institutionality. And no matter how hard we try to escape it, if we are starting from the same clay, we will end up within the same walls.
If bell hooks Made an LMS: a Praxis of Liberation and Domain of One’s Own
The LMS is inside us.
We roil at the limitations and oppressive qualities of the LMS. But the problem here is not the LMS-it is that, despite our best efforts at creating other platforms, we still think through our own internal LMS. The problem is that whether we are using Blackboard or teaching in Canvas or building a Domains project, we are most likely not doing thinking that is liberative enough.
The point is not just about platform. The point is about praxis.
If bell hooks Made an LMS: a Praxis of Liberation and Domain of One’s Own
the LMS is an outlook, a standpoint, a conviction. Like it or not, it is in our blood as a product of our privilege and our educations. It is not a cage we put students in as much as it is an artificial playground over which we can be masters. It is, in fact, a learning space, but not for the content we put there; rather it is a space of enculturation into an oppressive educative model which each of us has born the weight of, and into which we each believe, to varying degrees, students should be baptized. The same is true of the classroom, the academy, the professional conference. These are spaces we understand, where we are not marginal, but where we can invite the marginal to participate, to become not-marginal. And this invitation to the middle is an act we say is elevating, is doing good.
If bell hooks Made an LMS: a Praxis of Liberation and Domain of One’s Own
The LMS never addresses below the surface.
But rules, procedures, and steps are exactly what code defines, and when we fail to acknowledge this we fail to see the pedagogical power that technology and the LMS can have in our classroom.
So the LMS underscores and codifies a set of beliefs and values: with our courses we should build standard interfaces, provide standardized features and tools, and promote, among our students, the expectation that their experiences from one course to the next will be, standard and predictable.
Through its coded spaces, the LMS values a learning experience that is as streamlined and predictable as possible, and, thus the teaching we do in the LMS never addresses the Web below the surface. What spaces can we imagine on the Web that might push us deeper?
Messy & Chaotic Learning: A Domains Presentation at Keene State College | The Fish Wrapper
The primary operation is the acquisition of data.
There are other considerations as well. How does this tool represent a politics of oppression-the surrender of privacy, data, authorship, authority, agency, as well as issues of representation, equity, access? Who owns the tool and what are their goals? How is the production of this tool funded? What influence does the maker of this tool have on culture more broadly writ? What labor is rewarded and what labor is erased? What is the relationship between this tool and the administration of the institution? Who must use this tool and who is trained to use this tool, and is that labor compensated? These are all important questions to ask, and the answers may play a role in the adoption of any given tool in a classroom or learning environment.
Reading the LMS against the Backdrop of Critical Pedagogy, Part One – OFFICE OF DIGITAL LEARNING
But in many cases, and especially with the LMS, adoption comes regardless of consent. In only a minority of situations are faculty and students part of the discussion around the purchase of an LMS for an institution. In those situations, we must abide by the use of the LMS; however, that doesn’t mean we must acquiesce to its politics or its pedagogy. In order to intervene, then, we must step back and rather than learn the tool, analyze the tool.
When we do that with the LMS, we find that its primary operation is the acquisition of data, and the conflation of that data with student performance, engagement, and teaching success.
Reading the LMS against the Backdrop of Critical Pedagogy, Part One – OFFICE OF DIGITAL LEARNING
Make space at the margins.
There are multitudes of voices that we won’t hear because we do not feel safe in their spaces, on the margins. And safe, for educators, usually means expert, superior, capable, competent. When we enter the margins from our roosts in academe, we suffer the surrender of our confidence. In the face of what might be being created in the spaces we don’t occupy, our knees wobble.
If bell hooks Made an LMS: a Praxis of Liberation and Domain of One’s Own
By offering a room, we make ourselves the lessors. By making space, we claim space. “These are your walls,” we say. “These are your walls that I’ve given you. These are your walls to hang upon them what you would like. I have made them of plaster and drywall. I have painted them. I have put in the studs and I have raised high the roofbeams. But truly, this is yours. I have made you a space where you can be who you want to be.”
If bell hooks Made an LMS: a Praxis of Liberation and Domain of One’s Own
We need to design learning where there is no option for oppression.
If bell hooks Made an LMS: a Praxis of Liberation and Domain of One’s Own
Punk Rock Indie Ed-Tech: Iconoclastic DIY
For his part, in that Stanford talk, Jim Groom pointed to 80s indie punk as a source of inspiration for indie ed-tech. “Why 1980s indie punk?” Groom explains,
First and foremost because I dig it. But secondly it provides an interesting parallel for what we might consider Indie Edtech. Indie punk represents a staunchly independent, iconoclastic, and DIY approach to music which encompasses many of the principles we aspired to when creating open, accessible networks for teaching and learning at [the University of Mary Washington]. Make it open source, cheap, and true alternatives [sic] to the pre-packaged learning management systems that had hijacked innovation.
‘I Love My Label’: Resisting the Pre-Packaged Sound in Ed-Tech
The LMS is our major record label. Prepackaged software. A prepackaged sound.
‘I Love My Label’: Resisting the Pre-Packaged Sound in Ed-Tech
Pre-packaged sound. Pre-packaged courses. Pre-packaged students.
‘I Love My Label’: Resisting the Pre-Packaged Sound in Ed-Tech
If we don’t like ‘the system’ of ed-tech, we should create one of our own.
‘I Love My Label’: Resisting the Pre-Packaged Sound in Ed-Tech
“Indie ed-tech” – what we’re gathered here to talk about over the next few days – is inherently ideological as it seeks to challenge much of how we’ve come to see (and perhaps even acquiesce to) a certain vision for the future of education technology. An industry vision. An institutionalized vision. Indie ed-tech invokes some of the potential that was seen in the earliest Web technologies, before things were carved up into corporate properties and well-known Internet brands: that is, the ability to share information globally, not just among researchers, scientists, and scholars within academic institutions or its disciplines, but among all of us – those working inside and outside of powerful institutions, working across disciplines, working from the margins, recognizing the contributions of those who have not necessarily been certified – by school, by society – as experts. Distributed knowledge networks, rather than centralized information repositories. “Small pieces, loosely joined.”
“Indie ed-tech” offers a model whereby students, faculty, staff, and independent scholars alike can use the “real-world” tools of the Web – not simply those built for and sanctioned by and then siloed off by schools or departments – through initiatives like Davidson Domains, enabling them to be part of online communities of scholars, artists, scientists, citizens.
‘I Love My Label’: Resisting the Pre-Packaged Sound in Ed-Tech
