Weblogg-ed Vol.2: Using Weblogs in Education Will Richardson points to a response by Seb Fiedler to Liz Lawley's experiments with MT as a CMS for one of her courses. I found Seb's point about mastering easily transferable tools (Examples include MovableType, Manila, Typepad... ) to be very similar to my own thinking.

I would rather spend my time mastering skills for the use of personal Webpublishing technologies than working my way through one of the industry packages that I will never be able to afford for any small scale project I might be interested in. Personal Webpublishing is about the empowerment of the individual and small teams... what do you personally get from mastering WebCT, BlackBoard, etc.? Will they travel with you? Will you be able to use them for your own interests once you have left your R1 institution?