Why not Campus Online?

In the last post, I talked about how I saw Web 2.0 tools as useful for education...However, in the case of the classes that I am taking now, someone might say why not use IE's campus online (Blackboard). IE's campus online has proven to be a very useful tool for supporting the educational experience at IE.

However, Web 2.0 tools such as this blog can be better tools than Blackboard due to the following reasons:

• Blogs are typically open and therefore would mean the involvement of many other individuals from all around and with different backgrounds in the student's learning process rather than relying on just the class or the IE community at large through the IE communities
• Blogs allow for greater personalization so that the blog reflects the person who writes it
• Blogs allow for the usage of a multitude of different media and therefore allowing students to express their learning and opinions in different forms
• Blogs are open to interaction with other Web 2.0 tools therefore again enriching the possibilities of what the student can do with the blog. An example of that would be the possibilities to link a blog to RSS feeds or media from the web
• Finally, blogs are owned by their author and therefore are a product of theirs and can be used to market or present this person's views

These are just some of the reasons that I find the most important for choosing the usage of blogs rather than Campus Online (Blackboard)!