Pedagogically neutral? No

I do not know what happened just then, but I suddenly saw a little fissure in my (relative) complacency about choice of VLE. Ah yes, I know what it was... I was transcribing something a student had said to me in a recent interview.

[I] don't really put anything into blackboard, it's more what I get out, out of it

Well now, I am not about to bash corporate VLE's. Of course, it's the way that we use the tools that matters most. But part of 'networked learning' ought to be the establishment of links, of all shapes and sizes and levels and types of activity.... but it struck me that they ought not to be one-way streets. In the perception of this student, a discussion list was alien to the overall thrust of blackboard. How can the whole enterprise of being a student @university be re-branded and re-engineered so that the statement above can be inverted to read:

[I - or, better, we] really put loads into blackboard, it's more what I put in, into it

Compendium 3 CMAP 5

Comparing Compendium and CMAP

• Both offer collaborative visualisation 1-1
• Both have a web-publish option 2-2
• Both are open source 3-3
• Compendium would require admin rights to install at CU unless we wrote a NAL app for it. CMAP is already available on every workstation in the Uni via Networked Apps. 3-4
  
• Compendium stores stuff either on your hard disk or via a MySQL database where CMAP uses a client/server attitude - i.e. sharing is better in CMAP. 3-5

Verdict: I could have gone on but, for my money, while Compendium is nicer to use than CMAP, at my institution, CMAP has the support and architecture where it counts, and it can (with a little coercion - apols to Joe) even be used for Compendium-type stuff.