Why the CMS is usually the wrong tool for teaching and learning If the CMS is that marginal, can’t it be used for teaching?
That is, shouldn’t we consider the field of education to be a niche, which might be well served by our analogical radio? Unfortunately, this margin and that niche don’t map well onto each other, to the extent that education extends beyond single classes and connects with the world. For example, consider the first generation of digital teaching practices, from roughly 1980 until 2000, internet and Hypercard through the Web. We developed a series of technology-based practices with pedagogical benefits, from hypertext to improved reference access via digital documents to engaging a virtual audience for composition. CMSes offer versions of most of these, but in a truncated way. Students can publish links to external objects, but can’t link back in. (In fact, a Blackboard class is a fine place to control access to content for one concerned about “deep linking”) An instructor can assign a reading group consisting of students in one’s class, but no one else. These virtual classes are like mus
