asset or liability?

in addition to these blogs that i'm requiring my students to keep, we're also making use of a "blackboard" course-content-management-system web site, and a wiki. each of these is hosted in different places, has different access controls, and -- i'm hopeful -- provides something useful to the students.

while getting all of this set up, though, it occurs to me just how complex all of this is, and causes me to wonder if the pedagogical value of these tools actually outweighs whatever confusion might arise from all this technological complexity. and, as if almost in answer to my own question, i just now had to go back and edit the links i included above because when i first wrote them, they were in wiki format (enclosed in double brackets) rather than regular html format (a href, and all of that).

this, in turn, caused me to remember how dr. dunlap (from whom i took all of my statistics -- back in the last century!) showed up to class with a stack of notes (which i don't think he ever looked at) and a piece of chalk.

i wonder if that was the better approach.