There’s a thoughtful article about learning platforms by Martin Owen over at Futurelab’s Flux blog.

In it he discusses the issues that VLE’s are incredibly constraining and set up neo-Fordist practices of education.

At worst the Learning Platform mentality is about tracking, delivery, assessment, recording… it is a production line, sausage machine vision of education. There is a paradox here. Just as we are waking up to Web 2.0 – the do-it-yourself-but-with-a-lot-of-others web we propose a highly constrained system for school.

I couldn’t agree more, and that’s how Omnium arose in the first place, as a way to explore the looser, creative collaborations that were already happening online amongst designers a decade ago. What we found was the the existing tools (I’ll come out and say it WebCT and Blackboard - and I must admit, Moodle too) are about course management more than the experience of learning. Omnium has always been about learning and process.