{"id":2474,"date":"2013-03-27T16:39:33","date_gmt":"2013-03-28T00:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=2474"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:03:24","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:03:24","slug":"2474","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2013\/03\/2474\/","title":{"rendered":"The illusion of the LMS\/cloud-based\/self-hosted solution"},"content":{"rendered":"

It happened all of a sudden. The feed from one POT Cert Class participant just wasn’t coming into the Pedagogy First aggregated blog<\/a>. I spent hours trying to figure out why not – the feed finder screen would just go blank on only her feed. I Googled, I pounded, I went through what there is of FeedWordpress documentation. Mostly I wished I were Alan Levine <\/a>\u00a0or Tim Owens<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I have mentioned before<\/a> that technologies known for doing some really cool things are becoming unreasonably complicated. This particular technological problem rests on a self-hosted installation of the software WordPress (built and maintained by a wonderful community<\/a>) and the FeedWordpress plugin (built and maintained by a wonderful coding person<\/a>). When one gets updated, it often doesn’t play nice with the other. And I can’t fix it. I say again unto you, I am not a coder. I find code, I steal code, I envy code, but I do not code.<\/p>\n

I finally asked that a new blog be created for this participant, and it seems to be feeding. For now. Of course, the other one had fed too, all of the first semester. Given my own significant limitations, we will not be able to do this again this way next year.<\/p>\n

The recipe at the moment is this. Start with recent adventures with self-hosted Moodle<\/a>, add this new self-hosted WordPress crisis, mix with a dash of cloud failure (Google abandoning Reader<\/a>, Posterous closing shop<\/a>, and SeesmicWeb being bought and killed<\/a> by the inferior HootSuite ). Stir and cook with a big dollop of my recent participation<\/a> in reviewing a publisher-created program for grading student essays, and you have the kind of disillusionment you get by realizing you have already been devoured by the whale but didn’t know it.<\/p>\n

\"hydra\"The monsters (big proprietary systems, cloud-based sites, self-hosting) appeared to be separate, but were actually all parts of the same beast.<\/p>\n

Self-hosting, a domain of ones own, the path of ds106<\/a> \u00a0and the noble D’Arcy Norman<\/a> – this has been the antidote to the bullying tactics of the LMS and publisher-created content. I have held it up as the way to avoid both big proprietary monsters and the vagaries of the disappearing web apps and fly-by-night cloud offerings. I have scoffed (quietly) at those who said they could not run their own blog, it was too hard. While I have not been guilty of encouraging anyone to run their own Moodle installation, I have persisted in doing it myself as a bulwark against Moodlling ignorance and exterally-run systems.<\/p>\n

All this begins to seem like folly, a folly based on desire. An example: I want nested discussion forums where students can post multimedia, so I have Moodle. I find out today that (cloud-based) Schoology has nested forums<\/a>! Yay! No! Wait! They are touted around the web as a “start up” of four years or so who use proprietary code (cue John Williams’ Empire Strikes Back music). I will have a free class, but never be able to access it otherwise, years down the line.<\/p>\n

Fact is, none of these options are perfect, or even sufficient. The big LMS systems (including Moodle) upgrade and you can’t restore old courses and actually view student work – they say you can, but in fact it doesn’t work. I have all my courses backed up as Moodle .zip files, but now they’ve changed<\/a> to .mbz.\u00a0 Out in the cloud, I can export my Posterous<\/a> as they close down, but when I import it into WordPress<\/a> a bunch of stuff is wrong or missing or ugly. These things weren’t built to be transferrable, or to cater to the archiving tendencies of the mere customer. Whether proprietary and exorbitantly priced, or open source and impossible to run without an IT degreee,\u00a0 none of the options have a sense of history, only a blindered vision of a future fulfilled by profits, market share, or geeky street cred.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I am dissembling now to be running a class encouraging faculty to plunge into explorations of web tools and new technologies. I cannot in good conscience suggest anyone build a course around any of them. My colleague Todd Conaway<\/a> \u00a0says that it’s better to learn from creating, to meet the challenge of the occasional failure, to engage the technologies and learn from them even if they’re transient. I know that is true. But if you spend too much time in the belly of the beast (whether self-hosted, cloud-based, or LMSed) , things start to smell fishy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It happened all of a sudden. The feed from one POT Cert Class participant just wasn’t coming into the Pedagogy First aggregated blog. I spent hours trying to figure out why not – the feed finder screen would just go blank on only her feed. I Googled, I pounded, I went through what there is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,6,10,21,22,24,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cmslms","category-musings","category-online-teaching","category-educational-technology","category-the-web","category-web-20","category-wordpress"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2474"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9860,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2474\/revisions\/9860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}