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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:

• Works about the global Blackboard community of users created by BbTV producers
• Instructional videos produced by Blackboard users, with tips for teaching and learning online
• Thought-provoking or witty clips about education and technology
• Cool videos we stumble across and just plain like

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.

Hi, my name is Greg, and I’m a blog addict.

I admit it. I check the feeds of the blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader before I hop in the shower in the mornings. At lunchtime, you’ll find me sitting at my desk, sandwich in hand, scrolling through the morning’s posts and spamming my colleagues with forwarded tidbits that I’ve gleaned from my mid-day dose. And usually at some point in the late afternoon, as the meetings and decisions and deliverables wear me down, stepping away from it all to check the blogs again usually nets me some new idea that gives me a rush, reminds me why I love the field of educational technology, and energizes me enough to get me through the rest of the day.

So this time around, I’ve decided to share a list of some of the educational technology blogs that make up part of my daily fix. What follows, in no particular order, are twenty of the best education blogs as judged by . . . well, me. It’s a totally subjective list and it’s by no means exhaustive, but all of these authors post regularly and all of them have introduced me to great new ideas at one point or another. But if you should get hooked yourself, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

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.

Earlier this year my colleague Craig Chanoff posted to EducateInnovate about measuring all aspects of our clients’ experiences.  This is a big challenge and many of you have asked how we’re going to do this.

One of the first steps we took was to ask a group of our clients from around the world to help us, and with these clients we formed the Client Experience Advisory Group.  I asked the members of this group, representatives from K-12, Higher Education and Professional Education institutions to tell us about their experiences as clients – the good, the bad and the painfully ugly.  They didn’t hold back.

To the Advisory Group feedback, I added the feedback from Client Support tickets and from Blackboard staff members to get a comprehensive list of areas in which Blackboard needs to work to improve the Client Experience.  It was a long and detailed list.  So, to figure out where Blackboard should start working, I asked the Advisory Group to prioritize the items in the list.  It took a couple of meetings, but together we organized the list into core areas and priorities within them, and defined a baseline set of metrics that we may use to measure progress in each of the areas.

Hello, it’s Kerry Jo again.  As you might guess, planning for BbWorld ’08 in Las Vegas is ramping up rapidly.  We’re all busy bees here at Blackboard – brainstorming, putting together project plans and forming committees.

But I like to remind myself that this is a user event. We need you to make it happen!

With that thought in mind, I’d like to invite you to participate in making BbWorld ’08 an event to remember.  We’re looking for a large and varied group of volunteers to help us with the following:

1. Help us develop themes and areas of focus for BbWorld ’08.

2. Actively recruit speakers for the Call for Proposals: Have you seen a great speaker at a regional user event?  Have you attended a session delivered by a Blackboard client at another education conference?  Do you feel that speaker could inform other Blackboard clients?  Ask them to submit a proposal!

3. Review and rate submitted proposals in your area of expertise to help decide what should be included in the program. Collaborate with others on the committee with similar expertise to help choose the best program content.

4. Be a sounding board and an active participant for ideas ranging from post-conference networking to live conference blogging.

While there has always been a client program committee, we’d like to get even more of you involved this year!  I hope to have at least 30 participants, and could see having up to 50 committee members in total!  Our goal is to bring new clients into the process and improve the program with more client input.

Additionally, I hope that by including more clients in the process there will be less strain on any particular program committee member’s time.  I don’t anticipate participation to take more than a few hours of your time over the next few months.  You and your program committee colleagues will be featured prominently in the program and at the event as leaders in the user community.  And I hope it will be an opportunity for you to meet your professional development goals by taking a leadership role in this event.

Does this sound interesting to you?  Feel like participating?  Please e-mail me at BbWorld@blackboard.com.

And don’t forget that the Call for Proposals is open now for both BbWorld and the Developers Conference!  I encourage everyone (regardless of your interest in the Program Committee) to submit a proposal for BbWorld!  Get your session in before March 7, 2008.

See you in Vegas!