Two fingered salute

They stood facing each other across a muddy ploughed field. It had rained heavily the night before. On the one side, flying their colourful banners, the pride of French medieval nobility: at least 30,000 men in shining armour, armed to the teeth and ready for an overwhelming victory. On the other side, the army of Henry V - less than 8,000 English and Welsh soldiers, weakened and bedraggled from weeks of forced marching, dysentery and hunger. The French looked like they had just stepped out of a Louis Vuitton boutique, and their opponents looked like crap. Yet over the course of a few hours, Henry's small dishevelled army systematically took their enemies to pieces with the result that the French dead were piled up in walls, and their noble families, sometimes three complete generations, were slaughtered like cattle. The French snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, losing over 5000 dead, while Henry's army sustained around 200 dead. The year was 1415, and the battle took place just outside the tiny French village of Azincourt. The Battle of Agincourt radically altered the course of European history, and Henry V regained the crown of France through his determination, will to succeed and the sheer pugnacity of his ‘happy few’, his ‘band of brothers’.

The French should never have met the English and Welsh in open battle. From previous heavy defeats at Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), they had reason to fear the longbow of the English and Welsh archers, who each could accurately fire a dozen or more armour piercing bodkin arrows a minute. In the reloading stakes the French cross-bows were no match. Legend has it the French feared the archers so much that they threatened to cut off the two fingers on the drawing hands of every one of them if they were captured. At the end of the battle when the hundreds of Frenchmen (those who were fortunate enough to be spared because they were rich enough to attract a ransom) were paraded through the ranks of archers, the archers showed them their two fingers – the V sign that has since become the British gesture of defiance.

The reasons why Henry V won against overwhelming odds?

1) The French had no effective leadership, but the English and Welsh had a strong and determined leader in King Henry V.
2) The English and Welsh were more flexible and manoeuvrable than the French, who came at them in a way that bunched them together and tripped them over so that many simply drowned in the mud.
3) The English and Welsh archers did not wear the heavy plate armour that encumbered the French men-of-war. The French got bogged down in the muddy field and once they were down in the mud, the archers moved in swiftly to dispatch them with their poleaxes and knives.
4) The awesome fire power of the English and Welsh long bows was a significant factor. It did for the first and only French cavalry charge that was meant to destroy the archers.
5) The English and Welsh had very little left to lose and nowhere to go but forward.

Anyone with a modicum of insight will see that there are several parallels here with the battle between the institutional VLE and Edupunk style ‘do-it-yourselves’ personal web tools. The shiny, expensive and cumbersome VLE dominates the battlefield that is education, and is supposedly the killer application that all colleges and universities have bought into. The colour of the banner doesn’t matter, because whatever the brand, the VLE has essentially a common architecture and purpose: it is there to restrict access, deliver homogenous content and control the activities of its users. It lumbers ever forward into confined spaces, tripping itself over as it goes, and is slow to adapt to new requirements. Whilst its champions think it is invincible, they don’t seem to realise that it is becoming bogged down in a morass of apathy, resistance to use and lack of response to change.

The personal web by contrast, moves along lightly at the pace of its users, being directed as changes and personal needs dictate. It has an awesome array of choices, and is responsive to the needs of communities of practice as well as the individual. It is cheap, and not very attractive (at least in corporate terms) when compared to the institutional VLE, but it is a damned sight more effective when it comes to supporting learning. The institutional VLE is led by the entire institution and is therefore slow to respond to change, whilst the personal web is led by one user. The personal web has one more key advantage – it is owned by the individual who created it.

All things considered, it is inevitable that the personal web will win in a straight fight against the institutional VLE. The VLE has had its day and will meet its demise, even though its supporters cannot see it coming. The personal web is on the rise. For me and many, many others, we’re showing our two fingers to the institutional VLE.

Responses to this post and related posts:

VL-istically speaking (Matt Lingard)
It's not dead ...yet (James Clay)
Not dead yet (Mark Notess)
The VLE/PLE debate (Lyndsay Jordan)
Dead personal (Steve Wheeler)
USpace (University of Sheffield)
Virtual Learning Environments (Dan Kennedy)
Is your VLE really a Virtual Learning Environment? (Paul Vaughan)
Social media is killing the LMS star (Bryan Alexander)
The VLE debate (Dan Stucke)
Move to a more agile VLE (Jez Cope)

Image source (From the movie Kes)


Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.