Setting up a virtual learning environment

Central Saint Martin's Action Research As part of my Certificate in Higher Education I am undertaking an ' Action Research' project. The aim is to find useful web tools to help students record project research. The first is Furl: This is essentially a super book mark tool - it allows users and groups to record all the web sites they visit simply by pressing a button on the web browser. It is better than a book mark as you can categorise each web page you furl, and you can access it from any computer. Also you can use the bookmarks very easily on web pages, and you can export the web url's as references for academic reports. Finally furl saves a copy of the page you furl - so even if the page is deleted, you still have a copy of it making it very valuable for academic work. My archive can be see at: http://www.furl.net/members/kpflude Try filtering by topic to see how it works. If you look at www.lostindustry.org.uk/links.htm And look towards the bottom under the heading Recent Links using Furl You will see how the web site automatically updates the web page with the 50 latest sites relevant to Industry in Southwark. The idea is that students wil use furl to build up a shared database of useful sites for the course. The other tool I am thinking of using is pbwiki. This is an example of a wiki - a small wiki can be set up for free and I am hoping that students will be able to use the wiki to create truly collaborative documents. Have a look at: http://thegarret.pbwiki.com/ActionReseachProposal Course Tutor, Geoffrey Makstutis, suggested the following other VLE's http://www.atutor.ca/ http://www.dokeos.com/ http://www.interactlms.org/ http://www.moodle.org/ http://siteatschool.sourceforge.net/ I've already investigated moodle -which looks better than blackboard.