The Electric Lyceum has an interesting post, put up on May 23, on blogs for course management. It says,
“Elizabeth Lane Lawley, assistant professor at the department of information technology at Rochester Institute of Technology, has begun an experiment using Moving Type as a course management system for her "Introduction to Multimedia" class. Already, her early efforts demonstrate the unique advantages blogs hold over conventional course management systems. But her work also uncovers what commercial course management systems offer that blogs lack.’
It adds:
“Laura Gibbs, in her blog post "Blackboard, Students and Publishing on the Web," pretty much captured the differences between a blog-based online learning experience and one provided by the traditional vendors when she said "Blackboard lets faculty members share documents with students, but it does nothing to promote web publishing by students."
Laura Gibbs post was done over a year ago but the issues are still very relevant. Kathleen Gilroy has been exploring this issue on her blog. Also, the Sloan School at MIT has begun to allow professors to place class notes in a blog using a recently added capability within their open source e-learning system, .LRN. Originating at MIT, .LRN is getting widespread global adoption by universities, government agencies, and several corporations with close to a million current users. It now provides support for blogs with full RSS capability, blogger API support, and formatted text entry. Cesar Brea, .LRN board member, discusses what they are doing in this post. It will be interesting to see what happens with this new capability.
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