apcampbell

Cleve Miller makes a keen obervation in response to James’ recent post on the future of online learning environments:

The problem is that the concept of management is one of the all-time great things we humans have come up with. I know that in the post the word “management” is referred to in the context of current learning management systems and their limitations, but unfortunately the edublogosphere has picked up the meme “management = bad” from this post and I think it’s a mistake for educators to think that way. - Read more

I’m glad Cleve pointed this out. We should take care not to equate the term ‘management’ with top down, centralized, authoritarian learning mangagement systems, as I seem to have done in my last post. After all, one of the great things about the use of blogs is that it helps us manage our own learning processes and the resulting knowledge that is created. We become our own managers, our own authorities, our own bosses, and our own evaluators. For a democratic society to function well, people need this faculty of self-management more than ever so as to stop depending so heavily on the authorities and institutions of society to make decisions for them.