What are the benefits/constraints that these open environments may bring in your context?

I teach mostly adults and teachers in a continuing education setting so I’m not constrained by fear of accidentally seeing a swear word or inadvertently stumbling into a porn site (although of course we do try to avoid this!).  As our bread and butter is evening courses held once a week, any way we can encourage the group to get to know each other better brings advantages and encourage people to keep attending until the end of the semester and then to sign up for follow-on courses.  Blogging has already started to be used to this end as well as a way of reviewing lessons and to keep those who missed class up to date.

As our evening classes are attended partly for social reasons, I think the use of social networking software between lessons will be welcomed by participants.  We’ve just introduced Moodle which I love but I find it rather big and heavy for most of our needs.

One of the main challenges with introducing anything new is getting the teachers on board.