Can’t expand on the truth of that any. But I do wonder – does anyone know of any smaller LMS players that might have something like this? I have been busy with other stuff recently and haven’t had any chance to look around.

* the ’southern way’ basically means ‘you poor pitiful thing’ :)

One that gives each user a blog, as well as course blogs, teacher blogs, group blogs, etc. Give users the ability to publish one entry to multiple sources. Give each blog the ability to be seen by the outside world with a short, simple url (but keep the ability to hide it behind the LMS password system for users that are still learning or need to limit access for whatever reason.

– will probably not be coming anytime soon from the major LMS players because these are *user* concerns, and not *institutional* concerns. BB/LMS systems are more concerned about selling to the the institution, not the user.

I agree with you completely — being stuck in an LMS shell without any contact with the outside world, and with no ability to keep up with topics or classmates once the course ends, really inhibits learning and socialization (not to mention motivation).

I attended a Blackboard beta testing meeting yesterday, and some of the attendees brought up Blackboard’s Scholar social bookmarking application. Although it does not have all of the functionality that you discussed in your post, I think it is a step in the right direction. If enough schools and educators embrace it, perhaps BB will be encouraged to integrate more social learning applications into their LMS… and their competitors will, as well.