Blackboard Blogs is the site of several Blackboard community blogs (listed below) about education, technology and campus commerce.
Members of the global Blackboard community (users, partners, employees) are invited to contribute to these blogs. If you'd like to participate, please email us.
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Newbie. Freshman. First-timer. Whatever the name for it, there is always a first time for everyone and everything. Are you a first-time BbWorld attendee? Are you wondering how best to take advantage of all the resources and opportunitites at BbWorld? How can you make the most of it?
Here are some tips for first-time BbWorld attendees:
Choice, diversity and experimentation are core values of educational communities. We see this reflected in the continual experimentation with alternative course management systems at colleges and universities around the world. Many schools have a Sakai or Moodle instance running alongside their Blackboard service. While supportive of faculty members who want to experiment, this can create a problem for students who get lost in a fog of different systems. To solve this problem, some institutions elect to choose a single course management solution on campus. But that approach won’t work for everyone.
At Blackboard we’re expanding your teaching and learning technology choices. We’re opening up the Blackboard Academic Suite and enabling connections to different course management systems through a new technology called The Learning Environment Connector, which is being developed as part of Project NG, Blackboard’s multi-year, multi-release project to deliver a next generation teaching and learning solution. And while we believe that our course management system is the best solution for most instructors, we want you to have the ability to experiment, and to have the teaching and learning choice that you need.
Imagine a world where students go to a single URL and connect to their course regardless of which course management system it is hosted on. Dashboards consolidate information for users from these many systems. Administrators easily access accounts and information across these systems; thus simplifying helpdesk operations. The Learning Environment Connector makes this world possible.
To demonstrate the power of this technology we’re working to build a connector to Sakai. We have partnered with a university that uses Sakai and Blackboard and shares our vision. When complete, the Blackboard Sakai connector will be available as open source to the education community.
Over the past several months, there have been many articles highlighting the growth in popularity of open source software solutions in education.
Here at Blackboard, we also feel that open source plays an important role in education. The recent incorporation of a non-profit organization called OSCELOT (the Open Source Community for Educational Learning Objects and Tools) by a group of passionate members of Blackboard’s developer community reflects this trend.
OSCELOT’s mission is to promote the development and sharing of open-source plugins and extensions for learning environments, including Blackboard Building Blocks and Blackboard PowerLinks, that allow Blackboard users and our partners to customize, enhance, integrate and extend our core LMS products using our open API architecture.
By pairing open source plugins with Blackboard’s commercially supported teaching and learning platform, we’ve seen rapid uptake of educational tools and platform enhancements that everyone can benefit from.
To date, there are over 70 projects hosted on OSCELOT’s site and over 150 known free or open-source plugins contributed by the community, which can be used today with Blackboard solutions to address a wide variety of teaching, learning and institutional priorities.
Continue reading "The Important Role of Open Source Software in Education" »
Kansas State University Professor Michael Wesch, well-known within the YouTube community for the series of innovative videos he created in collaboration with his media and anthropology students, as part of their digital enthography of YouTube project (read their blog), posted an intriguing new video last month titled "Twitter and World Simulation":
I really look forward to Prof. Wesch's upcoming DevCon 2008 keynote address -- next month in Las Vegas. I know that reads like a plug for the conference. And, well, yeah, it is, sure. But I really am excited to hear Prof. Wesch speak in person -- I'm traveling to the conference a day early, to ensure I won't be trapped in an airport three states away while waiting for a connecting flight that for some reason never arrives.
Until DevCon, over on the BlackboardTV Channel on YouTube, there’s a playlist that may interest you, The Future Is Now. We’ve collected a series of interesting videos -- recommended by Blackboard users and found by BlackboardTV crew members -- that visualize the use of technology in teaching and learning, including more videos by Prof. Wesch and his students.
Many Blackboard team members are involved with the planning for BbWorld ’08, our annual e-Learning conference for members of the global Blackboard user community, so BlackboardTV recorded a series of short videos in which some of the planners just sit and discus a few things about the conference that they look forward to, and extend an invitation to join them in Las Vegas, July 15–17.
Here’s a message from Blackboard's senior vice president of Product Development, Jessica Finnefrock, who, in her office, has the most comfortable arm chair I may have ever sat in:
(The music at the end? From one of my favorite songs: "Big Butter and Egg Man" recorded in 1926 by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five.)
You can find Jessica's video invitation and more BbWorld clips at the BlackboardTV Channel on YouTube.
At BbWorld '07 in Boston, Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen announced we were going to help our clients connect with their students on their level and in a way that gets them the information they want, when and how they want it.
Today we took a big step toward that goal with the launch of Blackboard Sync, which combines Facebook with our Blackboard software.
Now, when a student is logged onto Facebook, they can use Blackboard Sync to receive a notification that there's an update or other information has been posted on Blackboard about their courses. Receiving course information and updates through Facebook will help students be more in touch with their academic studies on a day-to-day basis. The idea behind Blackboard Sync is to make academic information available to students wherever they are—and we know a lot of them are on Facebook.
Continue reading "Facebook + Blackboard = Blackboard Sync" »
Earlier this year, I received a random e-mail from a student at Carnegie Mellon University named Ed.
Now, I have to admit that as the manager of Blackboard’s developer community, I receive quite a number of random e-mails, which range from students asking me how they can enroll in their courses to professors who can’t remember their passwords. I don’t quite know how some of these folks find my name, but I do know that I can attribute the particular message I'd like to tell you about here to EduGarage.
Ed's email began: "I am a junior at Carnegie Mellon University . . ." He continued: “CMU utilizes the Blackboard Learning System . . . one of our ideas for our group project was [to create] a widget of sorts . . . I have been researching your site and EduGarage . . . I thought you might know someone who could be of assistance.”
A few months later, which I’m sure included many long nights of coding by Ed and his peers, I found myself at CMU this past Friday, admiring the handiwork of Ed and his team – a completed Blackboard Building Block that displays such information as course announcements, calendar items and new course content alerts inside of a Yahoo dashboard widget.
Good day, all. For those of you who haven't met me yet, I am the Blackboarder in charge of Blackboard's developer community. The members of this group are those individuals who are out there finding innovative ways to extend and enhance Blackboard’s core product functionality by using Blackboard Building Blocks and Blackboard PowerLinks plugin technologies.
Through interacting with this community, I often find that similar institutions face similar challenges and have similar wants and needs for extending and customizing their learning environments. Part of my job is to find ways of connecting developers at these institutions and make meaningful and collaborative projects happen.
Many of these projects are often released as free and open source tools through OSCELOT, our affiliated open source community of educational tool developers. You might recognize the Sign-up tool, the Podcasting tool, or the Who’s Online tool by name; each of these is a product of this community.
This past week, I found myself at the University of Southampton for the 2008 Open Repositories Conference.
This entry was written by Blackboard User Experience Architect Rob Fay (right in photo), a member of Blackboard's Product Development group.
Of all the courses I took in undergraduate and graduate school, only one of my classes used Blackboard software for limited course management functions. The instructor for that course chose to post her syllabus online; she posted the weekly assignments and readings to the space, and she encouraged the use of the discussion board. That instructor didn’t enable many features the system had to offer, but her effort was a start. And as a student, I didn’t know the full breadth of what Blackboard software had to offer anyway.
Nonetheless, I was excited that that instructor decided to use Blackboard software for her course management needs. Why?
Well, after all, the class focused on human-computer interaction methodologies. Why teach a course on system interface design and not leverage educational technologies?
Interestingly, we had a group assignment to apply traditional user-centered design methods and research to critique a chosen Web-based system. One group decided to critique the Blackboard system we were using.
Fast forward a few years.
Now I work with the User Experience ("UX") team in Blackboard’s Product Development group. It is my team's responsibility to critique Blackboard products and to make them easier and more enjoyable to use. "User Experience" is a somewhat nebulous concept, but our team follows Peter Morville's "User Experience Honeycomb" model (Morville, 2004) by striving to make our products accessible, credible, desirable, findable, usable, useful, and valuable.
To achieve such high standards, we must get you – Blackboard users – involved in the design process. So, how do we do it? And how can you help?
BlackboardTV (or "BbTV") is a new, multimedia initiative to help e-Learning innovators -- designers, instructors, students -- visualize online teaching and learning.
Look for BbTV crew members filming during BbWorld Commerce '08 in Phoenix (March 9-12), and at DevCon '08 and BbWorld '08 in Las Vegas (July 14-15 and July 15-18, respectively). We've archived a wealth of video resources at the BlackboardTV Channel on YouTube, and each Saturday we'll post a video here on EducateInnovate, such as:
For our first recommendation, it seems appropriate to post a brief (1:35) informational video created by McDaniel College and posted originally to YouTube, demonstrating how to add a YouTube clip to your Blackboard environment:
McDaniel College, a private, four-year liberal arts college with 1,600 students, is located in Westminster, MD, about 30 miles northwest of Baltimore. Thanks, McDaniel, for sharing your knowledge and helping us in the Blackboard community visualize e-Learning!
We invite you to share with BbTV suggestions for videos that should be featured here on EducateInnovate. No clip is too short; no video, too funny! Send your videos to us, or links to clips you like, at BbTV@blackboard.com.
Hello World! I have been waiting for this day to arrive for a long time. Why? Because after months of hard work by a dedicated team, today is the day we’re launching EduGarage TM. EduGarage is the new website developed specifically for developers and is the latest release from the Blackboard Beyond Initiative TM.
EduGarage is the home of the Blackboard Developer Network, a community of more than 2000 developers who create and share tools, applications and services for teaching and learning through Blackboard Building Blocks (R), Blackboard PowerLinks TM and Blackboard Language Packs. Now there is one central website for this community to interact and collaborate.
The website is based on the feedback of the developer community. Members said they wanted:
Welcome to EduGarage, a website and a community for everyone that developers can access and add to the content and communication, and then share all of that knowledge and experience with the rest of the education world.
Please visit the site. If you have questions, drop us a line at edugarage@blackboard.com.
If you are in Seattle for the Educause 2007 Conference please stop by the Blackboard booth, see a demo and enter to win a new iPod nano.
