Scary, real scary

I was shocked to read on James Farmer's blog that his university adminstration has banned him from using weblogs and wikis and required him to use a standard CMS. This is awful for two reasons:

1) How is a university supposed to be able to progress in knowledge if they do not allow faculty to research and experiment with new innovations?
2) Anytime you standardize something, quality is lost.

I think blockbuster CMS systems like Blackboard and WebCT provide a great service, but anytime you standardize a system, you lose the quality that comes from being able to adapt to unique instructional and learning needs. That's why for my classes, I'm using more weblogs and wikis, and hope to use a portal system like Xoops, Drupal, or Plone in the future. You may not like the technologies I have chosen, but then you don't have to use them. They work for me, for what I am trying to do in my classes. Blackboard doesn't. Standardization can impede adaptability and quality, and it's a real tragedy when institutions don't realize that.