Hello, Melissa Chotiner here.

The Educate Innovate blog has been getting great feedback and we always invite you to send your comments and questions to blogfeedback@blackboard.com.  Brain Baute at

Elon University recently wrote to comment on our article about using Blackboard for Online Student Elections and his experience with online voting. 

"… we considered using Blackboard for our student elections a few years ago.  We ended up building our own online voting system because Blackboard couldn’t handle one type of election we have, which requires students to vote for up to 5 candidates from a pool of 10 candidates.  Other than that limitation it would have been a great solution.  And I’d love to hear how other schools are using Blackboard for voting and in other creative ways."

I’m  happy to post your ideas and feedback – please send them in.

  Hello – This is Melissa Chotiner, one of the behind-the-scenes blog team members at Blackboard – by day I’m the PR Manager. I’m writing to share some information I picked up on the show floor of Bb World this year.

While manning the Bb World “Connect with Blackboard” booth (a meeting place where clients can share their stories of innovation with Blackboard and learn about Blackboard Connections and the Blackboard Idea Exchange) on the exhibit floor, I had a chance to catch up with John McFadden, the CIO from Loyola College in Maryland.

John was telling me about what he thought was the “Tipping Point” for use of Blackboard technology solutions at Loyola. (Malcolm Gladwell had delivered the keynote address at the conference that morning). Online student elections, when students started using Blackboard software to hold their student elections – that was what he considered the Tipping Point.

Continuing with our theme of talking with the winners of the Greenhouse Awards, I wanted to highlight the Amarillo Independent School District.  One of the cool things about their winning, was the fact that this was a K-12 entry.  Last year, the awards were open to just Higher Ed, but as you can see, K-12 districts can also show tremendous strength when it comes to building a community of practice.

For those of you keeping an eye out, we announced our winners for the 2006 Greenhouse Awards at BbWorld last week.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Greenhouse Awards, they are three sets of awards designed to highlight client innovation. Over the next few posts, I will highlight each of the awards, showcasing the winners.

Today I’ll highlight Seton Hall and Paul Fisher, Director of the Teaching, Learning and Technology Center at Seton Hall.

The more I dig into the concept, history and evolution of copyright, the more fascinating I find the topic (and the more confusing it sometimes gets).  It doesn’t help that the body of law surrounding copyright and interpretations by the courts on copyright is always changing.  One thing is clear — the digital world is changing the way we as consumers of digital content can access, store and use it. 

Recently Greg Ritter pointed me to an excellent presentation on copyright history and evolution by Lawrence Lessig that he delivered at the 2002 O’Reilly Open Source Convention – yes it is a recording from 2002 but it is still current in its content.  I recommend watching this presentation because: