Blackboard Blogs

From Christopher Columbus to Globalized Higher Education

(This entry is part of a series by Gordon Freedman, Blackboard's VP of education strategy, in which he reflects on technology and education as he travels around the world to meet with innovative education leaders and researchers, government leaders, and members of the Blackboard community who are experimenting in e-Learning and changing the education landscape.)

When the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development (www.OECD.org) chose Santo Domingo for its site for the 2nd Global Education Forum, it struck me as unusual.

But when I recalled it was from these waters that Christopher Columbus searched in vain for a passage to India, it began to make sense.  The city’s safe harbor, first entered by the great European explorer in 1492, has been the site of centuries of global intrigue and then national independence in the mid 1800’s.  The Dominican Republic, all these years later, became the gracious host to this international gathering that looked for the new gold standard in today’s global village – education.   

It is hard to argue with an island nation that was the initial point of discovery for Europeans coming to the Americas as a venue for a global education conference in the 21st century.  In our fully globalized society today, education has clearly become the one similar resource by which all nations will measure themselves going forward.  And the OECD, a champion of economic development based on investments in the human potential of nations, is one of the very strongest organizational voices in the international arena.  It is dedicated to large-scale education improvement in both developed nation members and in its developing nation partners.

Being Global in the Information Age

(This entry is part of a series by Gordon Freedman, Blackboard's VP of education strategy, in which he reflects on technology and education as he travels around the world to meet with innovative education leaders and researchers, government leaders, and Blackboard clients who are experimenting in e-Learning and changing the education landscape.)

Unfortunately, being global in the information age seems to require way too much travel.  For those of us coming into consciousness about our carbon footprint, staying out of the skies is a good thing.  When the chance arose to participate in a global higher education conference in my hometown, I was overjoyed.

Monterey, California is an unusual place by Western U.S. standards.  As early as 1542, Spanish explorer Juan Cabrillo was dispatched from New Spain, now Mexico, to map the California coastline.  He was followed 60 years later by Sebastián Vizcaíno, who named Monterey and Carmel.  In subsequent years, Monterey, in succession, was a Spanish, Mexican and then U.S. town.  In 1846, it became California’s original state capital, the site of the first brick structure in California, adjacent to the Spanish style Custom’s House and the State’s first theater.

With this fitting European, Latin American and North American setting, the Monterey Institute of International Studies, www.miis.edu, and its new affiliate, the internationally minded Middlebury College, held the first Connect-Ed international education conference, www.connectedconference.org.  With attendees from 24 nations and Monterey’s own higher education institutions – the Defense Language Institute*, the Naval Post Graduate School* and California State University Monterey Bay* – the conference became a soul-searching experience, to find out what the heart of higher education should be in the globalized world.

The New Education Agenda

(This entry is part of a series by Gordon Freedman, Blackboard's VP of education strategy, in which he reflects on technology and education as he travels around the world to meet with innovative education leaders and researchers, government leaders, and Blackboard clients who are experimenting in e-Learning and changing the education landscape.)

E-Learning is part of a larger set of changes in higher education globally, both in practice and in policy formation.  In this entry, “The New Education Agenda,” I aim to examine these changes from a traditional education point of view, and toward an education point of view that is more flexible, transportable, and interactive.

One can argue that the first level of technology revolution is simply to automate or translate what existed in a previous form into newer technologies.  The next level is often described as a departure, where more efficiency is brought to the previous form, but the functions are similar.  The final level, the level of innovation, is where the original objectives are met and, hopefully, substantially exceeded, but the means, or technology, is no longer the same.

E-Learning, in the first instance, was very much the conversion of distance or correspondence courses translated into Web-based courses or the extension of class-based materials onto the World Wide Web.  It was a matter of taking text and graphics and adding minimal functionality and moving these online.

Today’s e-Learning is in the second phase, that of efficiency and expediency, where what was done in the traditional classroom is expanded into e-Learning formats that either, one, extend the classroom; two, create a blended model of courses a student attends physically while studying, collaborating, and building projects online; or, three, move to fully online distance education courses.  These are the three common online modalities.

However, we are now on the border of the third level, that of innovation and departure from previous forms.  How will this final level materialize and in what ways?

Reflections on eLearning Lisboa 2007

(This journal covers my travels, meetings, and reflections about technology and education around the world with education and government leaders, education researchers and innovators, and Blackboard clients experimenting with changing the education landscape.)

Lisboa, Portugal | October 15, 2007

It was 10 a.m. in the ancient capital of Portugal.  Several kilometers from the place on the river where Vasco de Gama and others launched their voyages of discovery centuries ago, eLearning Lisboa 2007 was about to launch.  In a modern glass and steel structure, the Congress Center, a conference with well over 1,000 people attending from Portugal and across Europe came to life.  This was the fourth major European Union conference on education.

eLearning Lisboa 2007 was planned as Portugal takes over the presidency of the European Union.  Across the EU, there are a handful of important initiatives that allow the European members to coordinate and integrate discussions about innovation in education.  E-Learning is seen as a part of the important process of bringing together learning standards and processes, using technology as a lever for social change.

"K-20" Collaboration Is the New Wave in Education Reform

Last Thursday at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference, held in Seattle, WA, well over 100 higher education CIOs and e-Learning experts gathered to learn about and discuss a topic not frequently addressed during higher education IT conferences: a continuum of education from kindergarten through college, or “K-20” collaboration.

Although conversations about K-20 collaboration (being referred to as the “education pipeline”) were previously unusual for such gatherings, when Blackboard announced the “Blackboard K-20 Connection” on Thursday, the meeting room at EDUCAUSE was filled to capacity.  The Blackboard K-20 Connection is a new initiative designed to foster collaboration between higher education and K-12 institutions worldwide.

On the same day last week, K-20 collaboration was being discussed in Tucson, AZ, where 250 people from across that state had gathered for the Arizona Summit on 21st Century Skills, a meeting sponsored by Governor Napolitano’s P-20 Council, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and hosted by the University of Arizona, College of Education. 

And the discussions continue this week, as 300 IT and e-Learning specialists will gather November 1–2, in Somerset, KY, for Kentucky Convergence 2007 to discuss their craft, and the benefits and positive impact of K-20 collaboration.

What exactly is K-20, and why has it become the hot topic of conversation amongst educators?

Dropping the "e" from e-Learning: Further Thoughts on BbWorld '07

The Quiet Anniversary

BbWorld ’07 marked the first 10 years of Blackboard as a company, and more importantly the first decade of course management systems being used across campuses, in schools, and by organizations and government agencies.  Learning using electronic technology certainly occurred before 1997, but only became systematic and widespread 10 years ago.

Many important accomplishments in the education technology have occurred during those 10 years, and last week the rooms and hallways of the Hynes Convention Center were filled with quiet pride.  It was apparent to me that the education technology pioneers, experimentalists and entrepreneurs in attendance had established themselves on their campuses around the world.  They and the use of education technologies are no longer considered odd; they are firmly part of the education strategy.

We are on the cusp of further industry advancements in which the traditionalists (the place-based people), those who cannot or will not employ technology to extend, deepen, and make more relevant curriculum, disciplines and community online, are becoming the odd ones out.  Unless traditionalists join technology proponents, they are on the verge of becoming the black box technology people we once were seen as.

BbWorld '07 Memories

BbWorld ’07 in Boston was a memorable event for me and, I think, historical when viewed in a larger context.  In this post, the first of a two-part series, I’ll share a few key memories:

With 2,500 hundred educators, technologists, vendors and staff in attendance, the annual Blackboard users conference held last week bubbled with activity.  The gathering was particularly striking to me because e-Learning experts met and talked in person (exchanging business cards), and attended sessions designed to cover the best uses of the Internet and computers to teach and learn, train, build community, and measure and report outcomes across every sector of education.

Conference attendees included representatives from K-12 schools (some where kindergarteners logon to Blackboard software) to university systems comprised of hundreds of thousands of users with 24x7 access to Blackboard systems, to government agencies that train personnel in war zones.  All these users met in Boston to discuss similar goals: accelerating learning, opening access, accounting for progress and improving quality.

Welcome to the Future - Singapore, Education and Change

Singapore is located near the equator in Asia, south of Viet Nam and at the end of the Malay Peninsula.  If you fly from the U.S. westward in a grand arc, you will pass Tokyo and Hong Kong on your way.  From British Colonial times until recently, this small island nation was distinguished by its mixed population, very representative of the greater region, and its strategic location to international sea travel and now air travel.  Today, Singapore is distinguished because English is the common language and, more importantly, because the combination of technology and education is a way of life.

Singapore sees itself as a hub for the rest of the world.  When I recently visited, an article in the newspaper reported Vietnamese families travel to Singapore for shopping holidays.  Singapore is rapidly becoming the mall to world.  Yet, there is nothing of the mall-like behavior seen elsewhere in its school children, college attendees or life-long learners.  Singapore is an education miracle.  There are several reasons for this, including several stages of national development and reflection, and now a thorough embrace of technology, change and flexibility.

"Are You Ready to Net?"

Welcome to “R2N–Web 2.0”—shorthand for an interesting and lively video on the Web about Web 2.0 and the modern college campus.

I was fortunate enough to be asked by Casey Green of CampusComputing.net to participate in a four-person panel on what Web 2.0 means to the academy.  Here’s a link to the Ready2Net Webcast titled “Web 2.0 Comes to Campus” (hosted by Cal State Monterey Bay).

The panel Casey hosted included: Mark Armstrong, VP of development at Oracle; Jim Ptraszynski, senior director for world-wide education strategy at Microsoft; Jim Edmunds, president of Ingeniux, a Web-based content management solution; and me, VP education strategy at Blackboard.

Is Web 2.0 a bunch of techno-babble or is it real?

Stepping Up the Ed Tech Dialogue - Secretary Spellings' National Round Up

I was recently invited to attend one of the education technology roundtables Education Secretary Spellings is holding across the country.  This one was in California where I reside, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, a stones throw from Google, Apple, Yahoo!, HP, Sun, etc.  It was refreshing to be part of a conversation designed to open the dialogue on education technology.

Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun, was promoting the new open source project he launched called Curikki.  He is fired up about technology and education.  Pat Suppes, the emeritus Stanford professor who has been instructing gifted students online in a rigorous assessment environment for years (EPGY), argued for increasingly sophisticated assessment models.

But what became clear in the course of the two-hour session is that the Secretary, who was accompanied by FCC Chairman Martin, is searching for what comes next for NCLB.

Putting Education Technology and Technology in Education in Perspective

I might be the outlier in the education technology community, but I greeted the US Department of Education’s “Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products” research study prepared for Congress as a great success for the technology community.   It might also be the case that as a former working journalist and a TV news producer that I know what is necessary to generate a headline and to stir up a bit of controversy. 

The US Department of Education contracted with two great organizations (Mathematica Research Policy, Inc and SRI International) to study 33 districts, totaling 132 schools, and 439 teachers. They ultimately ended up with a student sample of 9424 students to test 16 reading and math products (1st and 4th grade reading; 6th grade math, and Algebra).  What they learned was that statistically there was very little difference between classroom instruction and the products tested.  Bravo!

Higher Ed Summit

Addressing the deficiencies of higher education in light of the pressures of globalization and the information economy are driving many very pointed recommendations for higher education reform. While US colleges and universities are carrying on their role in research and scholarship, their ability to attract, retain and graduate new students is being challenged by college student mobility, low high school graduation rates, high school dropouts, and ill prepared high school students across all demographics.