Scott Leslie of EdTechPost emailed me about Derek Morrison of Auricle who is looking at the weblog as the model for a new type of virtual learning environment. Morrison states that he's "not going to put them forward (yet) as full-blown Learning Management Systems."

Why not? Many of the full blown content management/weblog systems--such as Drupal--mainly only need some teacherly administrative tools to be comparably "full-blown" from a teacher's perspective. Add in a testing and grading module, and a good CMS can generally serve the same purposes as Blackboard and Web CT. In my experience, however, Derek is right about the scaling. Implementing and managing 1000 Drupal sites might be a little difficult, although Adrian's installation system will go a long ways toward building the necessary functionality into Drupal for setting up multiple sites simultaneously.

Nice mention for Drupal in Stephen Downes' informative piece about creating an online discussion component for conferences.

Designing for Civil Society carries the full text of "Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism" by Dan Bashaw & Mike Gifford. Now I am concerned about this review, for Drupal is listed as a blogging tool, somehow different from Postnuke as a "Slash Forums/Portals" tool. As most people who have worked with Drupal know, it can serve all of the functions attributed to PostNuke in this review (and then some). I also felt that it was strange that since the article was written for DoWire - Democracies Online Newswire, that no mention of DeanSpace is included in the text of the article.

Created for a weblog and Drupal workshop at Colby College

Introductions and definitions of blogging

• George Siemens' The Art of Blogging - Part 1 and The Art of Blogging - Part 2
• Megnut's What We're Doing When We Blog

My short definition

See this drupal node.

It's always in reflection that you see the real objection. Last weekend when Pat objected to my post, Will Blogs Grow Management Wings, I sort of missed the point. I incorrectly assumed that he was objecting to me not including Manila in the list of content management tools, as an alternative to the weblogs that I had listed. Obviously, Manila does not fit my conclusion since it is not open source.