Guest blogger Trent M. Kays has a very interesting post on Prof Hacker about using Posterous and Tinychat as a replacement for a traditional CMS. Posterous, he says, he is similar to blogger but more conveniently allows privacy control. It also allows for forum-type discussions (with sign-in required), though I'm not sure if this is similar to Angel's discussion forums. I'm going to check it out, I think.
I have been using a course mother-blog with sidebar links to individual student blogs for a number of semesters and have been pretty satisfied with that "mode." The privacy issue, though, was one factor that sent me to MyCompLab this semester. (I had offered to have students set up password-protected blogs in blogger; only one student took me up on it, but I found it quite a clunky solution.) The possibility of incorporating discussion forums with a blog attracts me, particularly for 102, though I'm not sure how well these discussion forums match the functionality of Angel's. And then there's the advantage of MCL's built-in writing, grammar, research support.
It makes me dizzy how many factors go into the decision! (Here's a post I did last fall that tries to sum it up.)
It seems that we are using a variety of platforms for exchanging drafts and feedback: blogs, Angel, MCL, email. I'd be interested to see how they compare, both from our perspective and students'. Any ideas how we might go about getting some info together?
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