Thanks for the query, Matt!
At least in this town, collaboration from one university to another and across systems seems, at least for the moment, to be foreclosed by institutional competition. My idea was to let a thousand (or at least a few) flowers bloom on my own campus, and on that I think I've succeeded: that we have more than one system available for people of different needs and that we find a way, institutionally, to support people using more than one system and moving from one to another depending on their needs.
The other open question, for me, is how we might learn from the competition, and I'm keen to see how the compelling parts of the Moodle interface might be adapted by Dotlrn to our purposes. How is it that Moodle has generated such an enthusiastic user base? How might we do so?
On the question of Dotlrn development: now that much of the work on the "reliability release" of 2.1 has been done, some of us are hoping we can pay more attention to making Dotlrn more user-friendly and to do so, at least in part, by revving up these forums with more discussions of what people would like to see in it, and in this way, build a consensus for new feature lists, revising the Roadmap, etc. Do you (does anyone?) have enthusiastic users that might enjoy being encouraged to take part in discussing their use of Dotlrn towards the end of improving it?
