Three observations:

1. I found that quotation to be spot-on as well and have been meaning to blog in response ever since I read it. Best laid plans, etc. I’ve also been thinking a lot about how we should be teaching our students to manage those data flows–teaching them augmentation strategies and encouraging them to develop their own (and report back!). Given that “managing data flows” is at least potentially another word for “teaching and learning,” there should be some interesting, ah, outcomes available to those zany and zealous enough to try….

2. I confess that I’ve found it interesting myself that more schools haven’t tried starting with a Bluehost experiment and then scaling away. (Hint: I know one school where I might be seeding me some rain clouds soon–keep an eye on central Texas, friends.) We’re still out there presenting what we’ve done. Folks are still interested. But the uptake is slow. I’ve talked with various members of the DTLT team about why the conceptual leap seems so hard, and while we’ve all had our theories, it’s not clear why such a low-cost and comparatively low-risk approach to generating innovation hasn’t caught on more widely. Personally, I suspect that the cocoon of Enterprise IT, nested inside (or is it outside?) the many cocoon layers of Higher Education, has so normalized things like Blackboard and SingleSignOn and so forth that it would be like imagining that students would actually *buy their own textbooks* rather than rent them from a centralized textbook supplier. Oh, wait, students already buy their own textbooks? Obviously that’s a cumbersome and fraught and insecure process. (OK, enough sarcasm; you all get my point.)

3. Here’s the biggest question of all, one that I ask with more wonder than bitterness: why doesn’t UMW itself learn from what UMW has done? There’s just as much demand for turnkey singlesignon walledgarden allsingingalldancing documentdelivery at UMW as there is anywhere else. Why hasn’t UMW taken its own success to heart? (UMW is far from alone in that failure–it’s probably the rule rather than the exception–but it’s still disappointing.)

We’d like to take all the credit, but there is this little nugget that keeps calling out to us, a blueprint if you will. And while invoking George Siemens, your laying out the picture so clearly here made our work so much easier —so thank you!

I’m reminded of something George Siemens said at a symposium on distributed tool strategies: that schools should be in the business of managing data flows rather than in supporting an end to end user experience. We can only dream what might result if the energy going into the campus-wide LMS’s would go into creating flexible and easy to use “syndication buses” or to addressing pragmatic instructor challenges to using the “small pieces” approach — things like student management tools, gradebooks etc. And what about providing the service of institutional archiving and data backups to mitigate the risks of using third party tools?

Words of wisdom, Lloyd, words….of….wisdom!