Blogs, Wikis or Discussion Boards?

So has the arrival of blogs, wikis and discussion boards in education made any real difference to the learning?

In my opinion the advanced of collaborative learning through these mediums has truely brought learning into the 21st century. They have made distance learning a real posibility and also easier to implement as a few years ago anything like this would have had to have been custom built, nowadays it is all freely available on the internet or now comes as standard in any VLE.

They allow for instant publishing, sharing, and collaboration among multiple
students in a format that can be used in a many settings and for a variety of subjects (Weller, 2003).

Educators have also found a variety of creative applications for the wiki format based on a constructivist foundation including: quick informational website publishing, collaborative website posting, student assignments with peer review capabilities, problem solving, focused discussions, interdisciplinary projects, community building among students, collaboration practice, and more (Synteta, 2002).

Although email, which is considered the original social software has largely become redundant as newer forms of discussion boards are becoming increasingly common, adoption of the newer tools has not been as widespread.

Blogs are a very useful tool for reflection, for example see this youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI they also an excellent way of producing an electronic journal of the students studies

Wikis, while hated by some areas of academia, are a great benefit when it comes to sharing definitions of data. a youtube video explaining what a wiki is can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY . Wikis can also be used as a method of coordination between groups of students.

These tools have truely sounded the arrival of e-learning!