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Opinion
The Pilgrimage to a New Collaborative Learning Environment
7/17/2007
A move to a new CLE is more like a pilgrimage than people may think. To be sure, a CLE migration isn't as laden with the moral and political imperatives that motivated the pilgrims, but moral issues are not as absent as people are led to suppose when a CLE is seen merely as a tool. The country and immigration metaphors help to highlight these issues.
As many schools have found out, choosing a CLE isn't like going down to the local hardware store and choosing one tool over another based on price and functionality alone. While CLEs are tools, they are tools that are created and embedded within much larger social organizations. Once one begins to use these tools, one becomes bound to the social organizations that use, manufacture, and support these tools. By using the tools, universities are entering (whether implicitly or explicitly) into a social compact that may or may not be aligned with a university's long-term interests, values, and culture.
To fathom the full implications of this compact, and to read its fine print, CLE strategy can't be described as a choice about shovels or any other simple tool. If CLE advocates want faculty to consider the full import of these compacts, richer and more powerful metaphors need to be introduced. These metaphors can expand and enrich CLE conversations. Used successfully they can help reveal the moral and social issues which might not otherwise be expressed during CLE decision making.
Luke Fernandez is an assistant manager of program and technology development and an adjunct instructor in information systems and technologies at Weber State University (UT).
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