You pinpoint some great issues around eportfolios and portability/durability (and these are some of the same issues plaguing OER, in my opinion).

However, grouping Drupal, and Mambo in with Blackboard is highly inaccurate. It’s not the tool; it’s the export format. With an open source tool and some programming chops, you can create an export format to hold your content. If you know where you want this to go, you can support a variety of different formats (export as html; export in wp format; export as structured xml; etc).

So, the choice should be about the tool that supports the learning most effectively. If clean export is your goal, that can be coded as an add-on to virtually any system.

WRT your “reality-infected” comment over at the House of Groom (which I read, and maybe even responded to) wp provides a solid starting point, but some of what you are looking to do is more easily achieved within Drupal (and when I say more easily achieved, I mean less code and more functionality). At the end of the day, you need to go with the tool you feel comfortable with, but having used both WP and Drupal extensively, and read a bit about your needs from your blog, I worry that you are confining yourself to a WP based solution because it’s what you know, as opposed to what you need.

Cheers,

Bill

Although I just left a “reality-infected” comment over at Jim Groom’s site, saying college-hosted WordPress MU wasn’t a bad compromise — partially because you can at least export to a hosted service at the end of the day.

Stuff like Moodle and Bb, where there is no “real-world” analogue is the most perfidious stuff. I think I’d also put Drupal/Mambo solutions in that category, because if you wanted to port that somewhere, where would you bring it?

But you’re absolutely right that one of the biggest problems with enterprise solutions is that they often become worthless the minute you leave the institution.

I still have my self-hosted blog archives from five years ago when I was in high school, and I think I’ll still have my current blog posts from college ten years from now. The stuff on Moodle from last year is long forgotten.