It is in the nature of pedagogy as a social activity to bring the outside world in, and not just some aspects of the outside world but every conceivable aspect—atoms, poems, mountains, revolutions, laws, kidneys. This is how everything in the world becomes learnable within the formalized institutional frame of education —by exophoric reference. If the architecture of meaning of the classroom is like a clause where the given/subject is addressed by the new/predicate, then the given/subject is the taken-for-granted existing knowledge of the student, and the new/predicate is whatever the class happens to be about—and that could be anything at all.
TopParsing The Learning Management System: Giving Shape To Teaching And Learning
Medium looms larger in education than almost any other area of social life. It is in the nature of pedagogy as a social activity to bring the outside world in, and not just some aspects of the outside world but every conceivable aspect—atoms, poems, mountains, revolutions, laws, kidneys. This is how everything in the world becomes learnable within the formalized institutional frame of education (Kalantzis and Cope 2014)—by exophoric reference (Cazden 1988 [2001], Cope and Kalantzis 2017). If the architecture of meaning of the classroom is like a clause where the given/subject is addressed by the new/predicate, then the given/subject is the taken-for-granted existing knowledge of the student, and the new/predicate is whatever the class happens to be about—and that could be anything at all.
The classroom is an epistemically empty space until the world is brought in—via media. The learning management system is an empty medium too. But that does not mean it is without a skeletal meaning of its own. Turning down the volume on Marshall McLuhan, if the medium is not completely the message, at least it gives shape to the message. The content of the educational message may be whatever, but the manner of its bringing-into the classroom expresses a particular orientation to knowledge and learning.
Things change with the introduction of the learning management system, but not a lot because these systems seem to work so hard at reproducing recognizably traditional media. If we are looking to digitization as a source of education reform, we are frequently disappointed. Sometimes the introduction of the learning management system is a step back.
To illustrate this claim, we will examine the ways in which the principal legacy artifacts of educational media manifest themselves in learning management systems—the lecture, the textbook, the teacher-led discussion, and the test. These are the traditional ways in which the outside world has been brought into classrooms, and in the case of the test to check that the bringing-in has produced the effect of learning.
The learning management system absorbs the features of traditional pedagogies by combining some now-widely available cloud-platform software features. Its top-level division of content is the course, within which content is organized as a list that mimics the traditional syllabus, step after step, week by relentless week. Each item in the list is a live link and the teacher may not release the week’s content beneath that link until they are ready.
This overall orientation is what internet theorists have called Web 1.0—a delivery mechanism for content hosted on servers—in contrast to Web 2.0, the social, interactive web (O'Reilly 2005). Organized around this syllabus-like directory, the delivery model is hub-and spoke. The top-level technical architecture of all major LMS platforms today in this respect aligns with transmission pedagogy, widely criticized for a century and longer by progressive educators from Dewey to Montessori to Freire and educational psychologists from Vygotsky to Piaget to Bruner (Kalantzis and Cope 2008-2022).
Beneath the teacher-created directory (the syllabus) are stitched together a number of the technical features of cloud platforms. Mostly these are legacy tools taken from Web 1.0, rarely Web 2.0, let alone the more recently conceptualized Web 3.0 of artificial intelligence and the semantic web (Cope, Kalantzis and Magee 2011, Cope and Kalantzis 2022). These tools come to the student as teacher announcements, video lectures, PDF or e-text content, discussion boards, select response tests, the ability to upload assignments, and a gradebook.
Taking these tools and functions one by one, announcements are traditional teacher instructions. “This week you must read this text or watch this video.” “Study for the quiz later this week or the exam next week.” And such like, scripted directly from didactic classroom discourse.