Journal (plugin)

I want my students to develop their independent learning skills and having done a bit of research the Moodle journal tool looks useful and I have seen some good examples of it in practice. However, our moodle adminstrator is not keen and says I should be using the assignment tool. Journal was disabled on our system but he has  reactivated it.  He seems to think Journal will be fully withdrawn as a function soon. We are about to update to moodle 2.2 I think.  I would be very grateful for any thoughts or ideas on this from anyone who has used journal.