KF mentioned an academic-blog brouhaha that I’d completely missed, and shortly afterwards I noticed a good thread on the same at Jill Walker’s blog, with a particularly helpful comment by Espen.
I’ve been thinking about this stuff lately while doing an Ed Uni staff development course on e-tutoring; I’ll be e-tutoring myself later in the year yet haven’t actually done it before in a formal course of my own, so it’s been useful. The main eye-opener has been experiencing WebCT 4 from a student’s point of view; the university is upgrading to WebCT Vista this year, but it still feels less inspiring than some of the bulletin board and blog interfaces I’ve long been used to. One of the best online learning and teaching environments I’ve experienced has nothing to do with “mainstream” e-learning at all, but with a few modifications it conceivably could. (Virge, fancy a new career?)
Might be time to sort through some offsite writings on this stuff and recycle them here.