WebCT Attempts to Outdo BlackBoard on Blogging System!

This just in :)

Today Mark Hallam from WebCT spoke at the Annual Teaching & Learning Forum held at the University of Western Australia. Mark previewed a number of WebCT’s next steps including ePortfolio tools and blogs. However, on close questioning, Mark admitted that WebCT’s blogs aren’t really blogs at all because…

1. They are locked behind WebCT’s password protection.
2. They cannot be made publicly visible (there is a complex workaround whereby students could copy there WebCT-blog entries to their ePortfolio and then allow anonymous access via a guest password, but WebCT cannot bypass the password stage).
3. Comments can only be made by internal WebCT users using the same installation of WebCT.
4. The “blogs” don’t have RSS feeds.

Mark actually admitted that blogs are already doing everything that bloggers want, and that WebCT was not providing a blogging tool, but rather a tool which usurped the name for something “blog-like” because that’s what many universities are asking for….< []

Ah, and so it begins…………………….