To speak to one part of Andy’s question, a major advantage of using a self-hosted solution as opposed to a web app is that you maintain more control over your data. I had about four months’ worth of reflections & accomplishments in my Quillpill “diary”, but the company apparently disappeared at some point in the last 6-8 months. All that is gone now, and all that’s left of http://www.quillpill.com is a parked page at their former domain.

I’m not suggesting such an event is likely to happen with one of the bigger companies like Microsoft or Google, but it is entirely possible with the smaller web startups. This is one reason I haven’t made the jump to working entirely in the cloud. Rather, I’m mainly interested in combination web apps with desktop companions that synchronize and make information ubiquitously accessible, but also secure in the sense that if, say, Evernote’s servers blew up tomorrow, I still have all my information stored locally. I’m a big fan of apps like XMind, Evernote, Dropbox, and Live Sync for this reason

What Doug proposes, while not a true desktop-web sync-able solution, I think is an improvement over using a web app because WordPress backups are easily created, either manually or automatically via plugins.

So long as we educate users (staff AND students) as to what to do, I can think of no better way to allow people to quickly and easily show off what they’ve been doing! :-)

In fact, I’d *much* prefer such an ‘open’ system rather than going down the closed, Learning Platform route. I’m not sure my colleagues would agree, however…