first post from Korea
Ecto isn’t shy; they make the claim that they are “the first true online networked personal learning environment.†The better question, of course, is, ‘Who’s the best?’ - and that will be determined by who keeps up with the rapid change of technology and who keeps adding ways to deliver the capabilities that users want and need. Ecto has two things in their favour.
First, they have a clarity about online learning that is unique. The Ecto Whitepaper, written by Ecto CEO Truls Henriksen and Stephen Becker, offers the best practical overview of the current educational situation and the requirements of online learning; it’s 9 pages that are worth reading.
Second, they are creating their system based on a fine undertsanding of the process of learning. I know of no other learning environment developers who would say this:
Ecto is grounded in constructivist learning theory. If instructors wish to empower their students to take control of their learning experience through exploration and discovery, Ecto is an ideal environment. Although Ecto can easily support a more traditional approach, what emerges with Ecto is a collaborative learning environment. The context in which the user is accessing the content determines if they are instructing or learning. In Ecto, anyone can explore, create, and share learning activities.
That’s a good start but it is a bit facile. If Ecto is constructivist, what will it offer in the way of tools to help mediate, what ways will it help teachers understand a student’s ‘zone of proximal development’? For instance, I’d like to see a capability in the Ecto blog to create in-line tags so that various language structures could be easily located and connected for evaluation and analysis by both student and teacher. I’m happy Ecto is ‘grounded in constructivist learning theory’, now, how are they going to realize that?
Ecto sees the educational environment at a critical point: new learning methods that are student-centred and project-based will be just more hot air without effective technical support and teachers will be left behind by students carrying cellphones and iPods and plugged into MySpace and Facebook. Some schools have turned in desperation to the closed fortress of computer-aided applications such as Blackboard but old-fashioned IT simply can’t keep up with the many integrated offerings from the open world of social network software. So the time is right and, in the Whitepaper, Ecto humorously asks, “Is there a networked learning environment in the house? Anyone…anyone?â€
They answer the question with their own system, which anyone can join for free. Apparently Ecto will charge on a monthly basis for ‘premium services’ and they are already promising more features such as “unlimited voice, web, and desktop video conferencing fully integrated into your group so that your members can connect, communicate and collaborate synchronously and asynchronously.†One wonders if the new features will come at a price.
Like Elgg and others, Ecto remains closed to advertising, which I believe is a mistake because it limits the ‘free’ option to the first tier of system capability and it forces interested teachers to start on the long and arduous journey of trying to get more money for technology from the school budget.
Nevertheless Ecto has interesting capabilities. You can join and establish a digital identity, similar to all social networking systems; you can start a group, which can be open or closed; blogging is a snap and picture handling is intuitive; there are practical features such as attendance and lesson management. I loved the idea that everything can be tagged for easy retrieval, although when I tested the tagging of various items in the Library, it didn’t work.
Ecto is taking a stand, making claims and, more importantly, making interesting technology based on clear ideas of the environment and current software capabilities. I imagine they are out looking for investment and I would encourage them to open up their system to some type of Google-like ads so that non-institutional learning content developers can plan to use Ecto.