My post on Web 2.0 Explorer comparing Wiki and the traditional course management system has received some excellent comments and posts on other blogs. Infocult and NITLE picked up the post, and Bryan Alexander (author of Infocult) commented that my reasons for choosing wiki and objections to Blackboard, are quite handy.

Back on Web 2.0 Explorer, commenter LittleGuy wrote, “BB is way too expensive to justify given the alternatives of wikis and Moodle…Our college quit BB due to a $50,000 increase.” Another commenter, Leturno, disagreed with me and said, “a similar analysis would be to say school districts use prefab classrooms fully stocked with classroom materials, desks and staffed by an instructor and this costs thousands, where the New York Times has all the news worth reading and can be available for pennies in comparison and it’s neatly organized. Why do we need to spend money on classrooms? Isn’t the New York Times cheaper and better?”

This is an odd argument because it isn’t really an accurate comparison. If you compare Blackboard to the classroom, you’d really have to compare it to an empty classroom with no books, desks, or teacher because it doesn’t come with those things. Neither does the wiki, but the wiki is much easier to fill with valuable educational content than Blackboard. Most teachers I know and have worked with don’t use most of the features in course management systems because they’re too complicated or narrowly specific in how they work.