Well, Saba called me out in an semi-anonymous (there’s a picture, but I don’t know who of, and there’s no name – in social media?) blog post on the LMS debate (a bit late to join the fray, no?). I was surprised by the way they referred to me, but there you go(ng). I made a comment which is awaiting moderation, but I’ll give it to you here in the interim:
I don’t know who to thank for this post, but glad to see it. I would like to point you to a subsequent post: When to LMS about why I don’t have a problem with the functionality, I have a problem with the philosophical stance.
Formal learning is necessary, and tracking it can be required, but it’s a small picture. When you look at the larger picture, as you talk about: user-generated content, etc, the notion that you can *manage* this activity becomes somewhat ludicrous. And you don’t want to manage it so much as support it. It’s the move from being an ‘instructor’ to a mentor, a facilitator.
I look at your list of capabilities, and I see support, and facilitation. Hear hear! Great stuff. It’s not management. If you’re doing it task-centric, and community-centric, you’re doing it right, but then it’s not course-centric, and really you’re no longer coming from the perspective of where LMS emerged from.
Yes, Dave Wilkins of Learn.com and Tom Stone of Element K have already argued that the label is still needed in the marketplace, but I’m really trying to shift the way people think about what their role is, and to me using the label LMS is a major barrier to shifting out of the comfort zone. And to me, that’s not just a game of semantics, it’s a fundamental perspective shift that’s necessary and desirable.
Yes, kudos to your customers who are getting much broader leverage from it than I‘m worried about. But despite your claim that my concerns are ‘old news‘, the results my colleagues saw at a recent elearning event in the UK, Allison Rossett‘s recent survey results, and my own client experience suggest that way too many organizations are still seeing things in the old way.
So, what do you think?