Steeped in technology throughout my career, I came to Blackboard eager to marry my creative and technological sides together into one Technical Product Marketing Manager. As the new guy here on the team, I’ve been trying to come up with some interesting ways to promote Blackboard Learn’s open technology. Since I know first impressions are often the strongest impressions, I wanted to make this post count.

Being my first DevCon, I was eager to soak it all in, then report from the front lines. I arrived early Sunday and made my way down to Oscelot Open Source Day. There is something energizing about a bunch of developers coding in a room – this is really where ideas become reality. It wasn’t just coding that I was witnessing, it was a fervent group of some of the best and brightest minds in the Blackboard development community interacting and developing solutions. Blackboard’s Developers Conference (DevCon) kicked off yesterday and the only thing hotter than the Vegas summer was the morning keynote session. John Fontaine started the conference by talking about the past decade of Blackboard Building BlocksTM development and encouraging the developer community with stories about new developments and exciting things happening with the Learn platform. John called Ray Henderson, president of Blackboard Learn, to talk about the future of the industry and how the development community fits into Blackboard’s strategy. Ray commented on the importance of community in the software landscape when he said, “People are looking even more to community and not products,” and with events like DevCon and community engagement programs like TechBUG happening Tuesday evening, Blackboard is continually providing outlets to help empower the Blackboard LearnTM platform.

I recently sat down with George Kroner and Mark O’Neil, two of our technical developers, to go deep into Open Standards. At the end of December, Blackboard announced and delivered support for both Common Cartridge and LTI standards, securing endorsement from IMS Global and the industry at large. If you’re still trying to figure out what Open Standards mean, I recommend that you start with Julie Kelleher’s blog post, “Open Standards for Newbies.” For a more in-depth, in-person lesson on Open Standards join us at DevCon in July where our Open Standards experts will be on hand delivering a number of sessions devoted to Open Standards and how they will help shape the future of your learning management system. If you can’t wait till DevCon, check out our conversation below…