Who will own the new VLE?
Sharing practice, problems and alternative solutions

Chris Jones, Gráinne Conole
Institute of Educational Technology
Open University

This paper reports considerations being made by those responsible for introducing staff at a large distance university to the possibilities for developing new practices around the introduction of a new institution wide VLE. How can new or emergent practices be codified into sharable representations and shared by a large and dispersed workforce? The paper considers some current solutions such as patterns, learning design and the use of toolkits by applying a framing concept of boundary objects to understand some of the problems involved in sharing emerging practices.

Keywords: Virtual Learning Environment, learning design, boundary objects, patterns, toolkits, pedagogical vocabularies