No monopoly on good ideas

Harold Jarche's recently posted some interesting thoughts about the differences between Social Media sites and LMS.  To me, though, the fundamental issue has to do with innovation.  One of the fundamental premises of LMSs (or other ERP systems for that matter) is managing access privileges.  Professors have certain rights to modify or work within the LMS, administrators (deans, registrars, etc.) have other rights, and students still others.  While there are benefits to the approach, it has a major shortcoming in that it inhibits innovation.  LMSs make the traditional and yet fallacious assumption that the person that has a particular job will always have the best ideas about that job.  As, Eric Von Hippel has demonstrated lots of great ideas come from the fringe, from out of the blue.  Because of their rigid privilege structure, LMS can't cope with this.  Moreover the fringe ideas are often half-baked or worse.  To sort the good from the bad takes a village, as they say.  Because LMSs are modelled for moving communication vertically up and down a hierarchy they make it difficult for the right kind of community to form.  As education should be all about innovation, the future of educational software will look more like a network of social media apps and than a monolithic ERP system.

Comments

[Weissman]

You write:

"As, Eric Von Hippel has demonstrated lots of great ideas come from the fringe, from out of the blue."

In fact, I would say that most, maybe even the vast majority, of great ideas come from the edge.