Buzz came up to Amherst today and, after lunch, attended a Science Education Online meeting. We saw presentations of a couple of new classes and then we were asked to talk a bit about the revisions we're implementing in our class. We've made a variety of minor adjustments, but the biggest changes is that we're trying out WebCT Vista. WebCT really sucks. I kinda knew it sucked before I really tried to use it, but having used it for a few days, now, I can describe its suckage in some detail. I created a presentation (taking a page from Tom) with nothing but graphics.
I chose a picture of concertina wire to describe how WebCT creates obstacles between students and instructors and among students and instructors. It's very hard to build an environment that can be co-created by students and instructors. If you had a university like WebCT, there would be only one door, and when you came inside, you would only be able to see the doors for the individual classrooms where your class was meeting. Students would come in to the room gagged and to let them speak, you'd have to selectively remove their gags. All of the chalk would be kept in a locked box. It's a very disempowering environment.
I chose a picture of a hammer to illustrate how when all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. Web browsers are great for browsing the web, but they suck for a lot of things -- for most of the things you have to do when building a website, for example. It would be much easier to use sftp to upload a bunch of files, rather than having to deal with a clunky web interface. It's like the worst of the 'point-and-grunt' interfaces: select a check-box next to things and then poke a graphic someplace else to say where you want it to go, to reorder lists. Ugh. Even worse, they violate a bunch basic web-standards, by using frames and meaningless URLs (ie with only a session reference). This means that when you click links you don't necessarily get a meaningful history, because you're loading frames rather than browsing pages. Pages won't print if you select "Print" from the menu -- you have to click an element inside the page to navigate to a page that will let you print. You can't share URLs with people. It's horrible.
I chose a picture of a maze, to illustrate how there's only one entrance and when you get in, you can go forward or back and then you can go left, or right, etc. When you eventually get someplace, you can't bookmark the place or build cross links to other places. You can create documents called "Assignments" that have a list of cross-links on the left to integrate a set of disparate resources, but you can't actually link words in text. In other words, you can describe the syllabus on the right and have a link called "1.0 Syllabus" on the left, but you can't have text on the right actually linked to the syllabus. This makes it really easy to generate confusion, unless you're extremely careful about labelling. A guy was showing a class built in WebCT earlier in the day that was supremely confusing in exactly this way.
Finally, I chose this picture by 
emptyhighway that illustrates my experience using WebCT
You can't get there from here. You can sometimes see where you're trying to get, but even if you could get there, the door's locked. It's a crude, clunky environment that often leaves you feeling locked away from other people and anything else you care about. Students and faculty can't browse each other's classes to share ideas or collaborate. You are locked away from other levels of abstraction where you could have real power over the interface (e.g., hacking the xml files that are being used to generate the pages).
The talk was relatively well-received, but nobody is actually going to change what they do because of it. I get a bit frustrated, in that I say these things over and over again at these meetings and people nod, as though they understand, but they don't actually change their behavior. It's very discouraging.
StevenBrewer