First a couple basic points about Filamentality:
1. As you probably already know from this week's lecture, Filamentality is a combination of two words: Filament (as in filaments from the web) and one's own Mentality. Personally I think this is a bit a weird word, and since I never hear anyone referring to the filaments of the world wide web, it's a little confusing.
2. On the websites created using Filamentality, there can be no graphics, sounds or fancy fonts. They say it's because they wouldn't be able to regulate the appropriateness of the graphics. But that argument doesn't totally make sense to me, because someone could be writing or linking to very inappropriate stuff...
Now onto more thoughts about filamentality. I thought this article (editorial, really) did a good job of laying out filamentality's pros and cons. As the article mentions, filamentality is great for those who want a very simple and user friendly way to be able to create simple web pages. As well, it's free! On the con side are the facts that the filamentality sites only stay posted for a year (unless you repost) and also that you can't really do any designing of your website.
Another pro that is not mentioned in the article is the fact that you don't need a hosting site for your webpage, as the folks at AT&T provide it. This could be a big deal if you wanted to get a site up immediately and didn't want to wait for your IT people to get a new web page loaded onto the school's website.
If I were the TL, I would probably recommend Filamentality to teachers who were not very technologically savvy, but who wanted to be able to create simple webpages for class assignments (or who needed to get sites up immediately). Personally, after having just learned Dreamweaver (for my technology project), I think I might be frustrated by the lack of design control in Filamentality.
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Natalie,
This lack of design control is a very important issue. I am running into this with my Collaborative Technology Project for this class. My partner and I are designing lessons using webquests but the (free) webquest program we are using doesn’t allow different fonts or colors or unique placement of images. You can only post one picture per page and it has to go in the top center of the page only. The design limitations are so strict it makes even the most stimulating lesson plan look dull. Having experienced how frustrating this is I can say that this is a big con for Filamentality. We are getting a much more positive response from our use of buILder through the SOS for Information Literacy site.
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