In Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille's heel?, John Kruper calls into question the extent to which weblogs can act as course management systems, concluding wih the question "Will blogs grow class management wings?" Kruper seems not to think so. And, in my opinion, Kruper gets it right. Weblogs, as many people know them, are not going to be subsitutes for course management systems.

If we are looking for a solution as to how we can use weblogs effectively in the classrooms and eliminate the need for proprietary course management system, I want to segue from Kruper's observation about the importance of course management administrative tools. I think it's important that we begin to recognize a difference between the popular weblog applications that many people use--MovableType, Blogger, Bloxsom, Live Journal, etc.--and open source content management systems--Drupal, PostNuke, and Plone, to name a few. The distinction is important because a weblog is a simple web publishing system. Granted, many now have sophisticated content management capabilities built in, such as comment boards, categorization of posts, rss feeds, and various user permissions. But a weblog site built on MT or Live Journal is a weblog site, and I imagine we'll find it difficult to configure it as an effective course management system, even given some of the administrative tools that Kruper describes.

Meanwhile, the more sophisticated course management systems typically can be configured to be a weblog, but they can also be other things. For example, as explained in Drupal's About page:

By enabling and configuring individual modules, an administrator can design a unique site, one which can be used for a combination of knowledge management, web publishing and community interaction purposes. So that you can better understand the many possibilities, the following list of features have been organized by common web platform characteristics. . . ..

Because open source cms's--content management systems, not course managment systems--are extremely flexible and contain many component modules not available with popular weblog software, as well as architectures which can make them better suited as development platforms, these are more likely candidates as replacements for Blackboard and WebCT. In fact, since I'm a writing teacher who doesn't really need grading or testing modules (I don't give tests and don't give out many grades during the semester), I've found that Drupal can mimic the functionality of Blackboard in pretty much every way that I need except for the automatic registration process for students (unfortunately, the registrar doesn't let me tie into their system :).

Both Terra Williams and I are now on our third semester of teaching with open source cms's here at FSU, and we both agree that we would not go back to Blackboard as long as we have Drupal to use (feel free to visit my current class). But I'm not sure that I would choose to run a course site on Blogger or MT instead of Blackboard. No matter how you look at it, a course managment system is a specialized, pre-configured content management system, but a weblog is not a course management system or a robust content management system.

So from my perspective, if teachers want to use weblogs as course management systems, they should consider

• Choosing an exisiting open source content management system that has a weblog component. Most can be configured to have a Slashdot-like home page that allows community posting and interaction. Some do have some plug-in course administration tools. But I only know of two--Drupal and Nucleus--that enable users to have personal weblog space. However, from my experience with PostNuke, even the former is preferable to Blackboard.
• Working with existing open source course management projects to incorporate weblog modules.
• Or, as Kruper mentions, wait until "commercial course management systems shove blogs inside the courses alongside their documents and folders."

Thanks to Randy of Carving Code for the link.