by Greg Ritter
I must have been heads down in work earlier this week to miss all the notices about the kick-off of HigherEd BlogCon, a month-long, asynchronous online conference focusing on the use of weblogs in higher education. But I got tipped off by Kate Boardman of the University of Teesside to a Blackboard case study presented as part of HigherEd BlogCon. The presentation, titled "How the integrated use of blogs and Blackboard can improve a university public relations class," is from Ric Jensen at Northwestern State University in Louisiana.
by Greg Ritter
Rod Murray, a self-described "longtime Blackboarder" and Director of Application & Web Services at Thomas Jefferson University, wrote recently to let us know about Rod’s Pulse Podcast, an education-oriented podcast he launched last month. ("Pulse" is TJU’s local brand for their Blackboard implementation.)
Rod conducted some interviews at BbWorld ’06, that are now up on his blog, including
- An interview about the Blackboard Content System with Blackboard’s own Peter Van Tienen. Peter is Director of Solutions Engineering here at Blackboard. Before joining Blackboard, he was Director of Academic Technology at Seneca College in Toronto.
- An interview with Wes Barnes, a systems engineer with Anystream, about Anystream’s product, Apreso Classroom. With Apreso Classroom, instructors can capture multimedia lectures and quickly publish them online. Anystream is a member of the Blackboard Developer Network and has integrated Apreso Classroom’s publishing capability with the Blackboard Learning System.
If you’re doing cool stuff related to Blackboard, you can write us and let us know, too.
by Greg Ritter
Bryan Alexander, Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Arts, recently published a terrific article titled, "Web 2.0: A New Way of Innovation for Teaching and Learning" in the most recent issue of Educause Review. There’s no disagreeing with Alexander; it’s pretty clear that the last couple of years have seen the rise of new, socially-oriented technologies that have changed how people interact over the web, and that it has great potential for teaching and learning. And, of course, Blackboard recently announced our forthcoming Web 2.0 initiative, Blackboard Beyond. The opportunity represented by these technologies collectively referred to as Web 2.0 revolves around putting more of the authority (in the most literal sense of the word, as in "the ability to author") in the hands of users, but doing so in a way that helps automate making some of the social and conceptual connections.
by Greg Ritter
Blackboard staff aren’t the only folk at BbWorld ’06 with a
blog. Here are some other people blogging from Bb World.
As a long-time Blackboarder, I’ve known Paul and Kate for
years, mostly through our conferences. Since I’m holding down the fort in the DC
offices, I’ll miss getting to hang out with them at BbWorld this year. And I’ll
miss getting to meet some of the the new blogging faces
on the scene in ’06:
- Malcolm Murray of Durham University in the
UK isn’t a new face to Blackboard, but I think this is the first year he has
blogged from the conference. His blog, Playing With Building
Blocks, is actually all about developing for Blackboard.
- Ryan is a TEFL/TESOL teacher who came all
the way from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to attend BbWorld ’06. He has a dedicated BbWorld’06 blog set up
to complement his TEFL
Interactive blog.
- Kevin Roebuck of Sun Microsystems
mentioned being at BbWorld ’06 on his
blog (and has some good comments about the performance optimization work
Blackboard and Sun have been collaborating on), but it doesn’t look like he’s
blogging from the conference . . . yet. Maybe we can draw him out with a
mention.
- Kevin Creamer from University of Richmond
(where I used to teach!) has a few notes on his blog, Pandaemonium, and
I’m looking forward to more.
I’m sure there are some other people blogging at BbWorld
that I have just not been able to track down yet. If you or someone you know is
blogging the conference, let us
know.
by Greg Ritter
It’s official. Blackboard and WebCT are one as of today — ahead of the previously announced schedule, I might add. From the press release:
The combination of
Blackboard and WebCT establishes one of the most innovative global software
companies serving the education industry. Currently, more than 3,700 world-wide
higher education, K-12, corporate, government and commercial academic
institutions enhance their learning environments with solutions offered by the
two organizations. The transaction brings together two of the industry’s premier
software brands and most widely used technologies for creating, managing and
delivering course content and materials online.
Welcome to all our new colleagues joining from WebCT! It’s
an exciting time!