Blackboard Blogs

Greenhouse Grant for Virtual Worlds Winner

We have a winner – it’s the community. Actually, the team who received the award was Ball State University’s Cinema Arts Project. You can read about it in our press release about the project.  It’s a cool project for a number of reasons, but what I find most interesting is the fact that the end product of what they create will help hundreds of Blackboard institutions connect to virtual worlds.

Is Your Course Exemplary?

When visiting user groups and talking with other groups in the Blackboard community, I meet a lot of faculty members.  As we talk, often our conversation revolves around their online courses.  I'll ask,

"How do you know if your online course is working?"

Often, if they don't say "Well, 'cause I can log in," they mention that, as faculty members, they receive little to no feedback on what's working and what needs improvement in their online courses.

That's one of the reasons we created the Blackboard Greenhouse Exemplary Course Program -- to provide faculty members with examples of exemplary courses and, more importantly, to give them detailed peer feedback on their courses.

What Makes an Engaging Course?

Yesterday The Washington Post had an interesting article about how college professors are getting more creative in the way they're designing courses to engage their students.  The article explored how one professor is teaching philosophy with help from episodes of "Star Trek" and another is teaching physics by exploring the physics in the world of Harry Potter.  While the article doesn't mention Blackboard or the Blackboard Greenhouse Exemplary Course Program specifically, the information included in the article covers many of the very points that our Blackboard Exemplary Course Rubric is designed to do.

The freely available Blackboard Greenhouse Exemplary Course Rubric is designed to help instructors create well-constructed courses that engage students in different ways and at different levels.  To learn more about the Rubric and download a copy for free, visit the Communities Web site.  You might also want to check out some tips for building an engaging course from experts interviewed by The Washington Post.

New Blackboard Greenhouse Grant for Virtual Worlds Deadline: November 5

We got quite a bit of interest from people who wanted to submit proposals for the Blackboard Greenhouse Grant for Virtual Worlds, but had difficulty meeting our September 24 deadline.  In order to make sure teams have the time to put forth first-rate proposals, we’ve decided to extend the deadline to November 5, 2007.

With this six-week extension, we encourage faculty members, JAVA developers, system administrators and instructional designers who have an interest in developing connections between Blackboard and virtual worlds -- such as Second Life, Active Worlds, Entropia and Croquet -- to get creative in planning your projects.

If you want to find out more information about the grant, please visit www.blackboard.com/greenhouse to download the submission form, see slides from the August Webinar and hear audio from the in-world meeting.

We look forward to receiving your submissions.

Greenhouse Grant Session in Second Life Sept 20

I know I generally try to reflect on an issue or provide commentary on some cool technology I've run across.  This is a departure in some ways: a shameless plug for Blackboard's Greenhouse Grant for Virtual Worlds.  We'll be hosting a meeting in Second Life on Thursday September 20 at 3PM EDT (which is 12PM in-world) and a follow up meeting at 8PM (5PM in-world).

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the Greenhouse Grant for Virtual Worlds: a $25,000 grant for Blackboard users who develop initiatives that promote the integration of virtual worlds into teaching and learning. We'll be discussing the goals and expectations of the grant, and providing more logistical details about the overall process. If you’re interested in attending, we’ll be meeting at The Ginny Business Center: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ginny/218/67/23.

Look forward to seeing you in world.

Adrian

Notes from the Second Life Community Convention

I just got back, earlier this week, from the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC) in Chicago: it really opened my eyes to some of the more interesting things happening in the Second Life education community. And, by and large, the overall feeling I got from people there (face-to-face and in-world) was a tremendous feeling of collegiality, energy, and optimism for the future of this technology in how we teach and learn.

 

Getting Inside Second Life

Last month the Blackboard Greenhouse Program announced the new Blackboard Greenhouse Grant for Virtual Worlds, with the expressed goal of fostering “greater educational innovation in virtual worlds such as Active Worlds, There and Second Life.”

If you’re not collaborating with colleagues to submit an application for that $25,000 grant, but just want to learn more about virtual worlds online – what they are, where to find them, what people do in them, why people are talking about them – I recommend an informal series of articles about Second Life published online this year by MIT’s Technology Review.

In the most recent article, published earlier this week, Erica Naone interviews John Zdanowski, the CFO of Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life. In the interview, Zdanowski discusses the real-world value of “Linden dollars” – the monetary currency of Second Life – and machinations of that virtual world’s “in-world” economy.

A virtual world may be the location to beta-test that idea for a business you’ve been developing and play it against the “virtual hand” of the in-world market – calling all prospectors, budding entrepreneurs and arm-chair economists!

Greenhouse Winners and the Grant for Virtual Worlds

BbWorld is one of those events where so much happens that it becomes information overload for blog purposes: what do I want to write about first?  I think one of the highlights for me – and a good place to start – was the Blackboard Greenhouse Program. We finally announced our Greenhouse winners and our new Virtual Worlds grant.

More on the Greenhouse Winners

We had a chance to glimpse the winners of the Greenhouse Communities of Practice a couple of weeks ago. This week, we’ll be looking at the Exemplary Course Award Winners. Today we’ll look at the winners of the Exemplary Non-Course (i.e. professional development or other use of Blackboard outside the classroom) and Online Course (80% or greater online) categories.

Greenhouse Highlights Amarillo

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.

Greenhouse Winners

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.