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Ideals other pages organizing principles | trade-offs | realities this page features | values | privacy | models

Features

What should Ricci Street be? The current popular phrase:

A virtual classroom

Ideally, it should supplement a traditional physical classroom. In addition, it should take advantage of the World Wide Web to let students and teachers do things that a physical classroom can't. In computer terms:

A scalable, extensible, dynamic hypertext

It should be easy for students and teachers to navigate and contribute to.

It should be searchable and interactive. It should have a multitude of off-site links. It should change often.

Except for course-specific time-sensitive material, which should change very often, it should be organized without regard to traditional academic disciplines. Its organizing principle should be the learning, not the course.

It should be accessible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week from anywhere off-campus, even a vacation or business trip, where the student or teacher could get to a web browser.

It should build a learning community by making student work publicly available and by frequently asking for student input and comments, especially to each other.

To further build a learning community, it should include a forum for threaded discussions as well as chat space for students to talk to each other off-campus and to talk to the faculty during office hours.

It should be as inexpensive as possible.

It should have a sense of humor, where appropriate.

Values

He who lights his taper at mine does not diminish my flame.
-- Thomas Jefferson

This section could be very long. As it is -- a series of statements and slogans in four groups: pedagogy, usability, aesthetics, privacy -- each one of these statements or slogans could use a lot more explaining. So I try to practice them throughout Ricci Street.

Summary | Because Ricci Street so extends the traditional classroom, I can usefully think of my job at Medaille College as having a strong customer service component in addition to teaching.

pedagogy

People learn by doing and making, especially in groups. In college, when the groups are courses and you link, blend, or meld the courses, these are also called learning communities.

Students have visual intelligence largely untapped by the oral and paper-based information transfer of traditional education.

After a point, the less talking the teacher does, the more the students learn.

Academic freedom and tenure have driven fear out of the faculty's work, greatly improving quality as well as deadwood. So should teachers in turn drive fear out of their classrooms with a learning-driven grading policy?

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. (source: Thesis #7 of The Cluetrain Manifesto. For "markets," substitute "classes" or "courses".)

usability

Information wants to be free. Those who hoard information for power or profit are good capitalists working on an Industrial Age model of scarce resources that is hard to maintain in an Information Age of networked computers always on everywhere.

Computers should be invisible.

Instead of putting the tools into the computers, we should put the computers into the tools, a.k.a. networked information appliances.

aesthetics

The learning experience can have an important visual dimension.

Black ink on white paper is readable but ugly. TV is pretty but not very readable (for words). The Web works between the two.

A book without pictures is blind.

privacy

Your privacy is important.

If you're concerned about privacy, think about the difference between anonymity and invisibility. Ricci Street will protect your anonymity. While the proprietors of Ricci Street will never sell or give away any of your private personal information, they will use that information for legitimate pedagogical purposes.

However, you are not invisible when you navigate Ricci Street. Your clicks are requests to the server that are logged. In the aggregate, those click paths provide valuable insight. Ricci Street's pedagogy, usability, and aesthetics will improve partly because the proprietors will analyze your clicking paths.

If you feel as though this policy violates your privacy, please raise the issue in the Bistro. As a point of reference, look at how Gerry McGovern's first big splash, Nua, handled it -- before they changed hands. (Go to the Way Back Machine and search for http://www.nua.ie/about/privacy.html)

We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.
-- John Webster

Comfort the troubled; trouble the comfortable.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Models

Around the world, faculty members are constructing online classrooms. For example, Dan Kies has HyperTextBooks at the College of DuPage. EduCause is developing the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, an even closer cousin to Ricci Street based on open standards. I am keeping my eye on it to make sure that Ricci Street stays compatible.

Generically, Ricci Street is similar to a course management systems (CMS) or instructional management system or learning management system. It shares many of the features of close cousins from the proprietary courseware world such as Lotus's Learning Space and Asymetrix's Toolbook.

Other popular CMS software includes Blackboard, WebCT Educational Technologies, and WBT Systems' TopClass. They are transitional products that lead faculty to realize how easy it is to do their own web in an open-source, non-proprietary way.

Advertising-supported Electronic Communities gave the Palace 3D software to colleges, free of charge, as did CommonPlaces with MyBytes, its webtop collection of course and community-building tools. Both were out of business by 2001.

Guided by the features and values above, I evaluated these CMS software applications and many others.

How much does it cost?
How much training does it take?
How well does it attach to other systems (extensibility)?
How easily / completely can it be customized?
How accessible is the source code?
How many clicks does it take to use?

Generally speaking, the answers are not encouraging. Note that they are CMS, course management systems. Their organizing principle is the course, not the curriculum or the ideas / content.

It costs too much, often thousands of dollars.
It takes special training.
It isn't extensible.
It can be customized only within pre-set templates. The do-your-own HTML options are more trouble and won't allow anything fancy.
The source code isn't accessible.
Bottom line -- it takes more clicks that what I'm doing now.

It is, however, very scalable, and that is its problem for me. What most people mean by distance education is an electronic lecture, a correspondence course on the Internet, impersonal and distant. Off-line, that model of education has been popular for a long time. A lecture / textbook / test course in an auditorium at a state university is already distance learning. That's not what Ricci Street is designed to do.

Then I looked at the features of every CMS application and asked:

What does it do? Do I want that for Ricci Street?
If so, can I either make it myself or adapt someone else's free code?

None of them does it all. Neither does Ricci Street, which is the product of a series of trade-offs.