"Are Daedalus and Commonspace Dead?"
Conversations
This e-mail message was originally posted by Patricia LaCoste and is now copied in its original form from the acw-l archives.
I have used both. Last spring I was at UW-Milwaukee where the classrooms have both; I am now where they have neither, so I'm not sure about any updates--someone else please correct me if my information is outdated. I know people tend to think of them as competing, but I'm not convinced. They do different things well:
Commonspace's ability to split the screen into related columns is strong for commenting (both peer and teacher). It will also take both text and audio comments. A little limited in that you can only connect to one column (at least in the version I used), so that a peer responder can't link hir comments to both the author's and another peer's at the same time. I don't recall anything in Daedalus that does this.
Daedalus's integrated system is stronger for invention and independent writing, I think. The interchange and the invent modules worked well for idea generation and the ability to post assignments was helpful. I didn't think that Daedalus did as well for peer response.
I never used Commonspace's online conferencing feature, which is, I think, the main point of comparison between the two. I was not going to require that my students buy this program for the class and the university didn't have licensing. In fact, everything I did with both these programs stayed in the classroom.
A couple of technical notes. Daedalus is technically solid--never had a problem. Commonspace is jumpy. Students get confused by cursor movement and clicking in columns. The program also had a tendency to crash, particularly when the students were most confused and were clicking a lot.
Hope this helps.
Patricia
vol. 4 Iss. 1 Fall 1999