Developers+

At the BlackboardTV Channel on YouTube, there is a new playlist called "Blackboard User Groups" in which we’ve begun to archive videos created by members of the dozens of independently run Blackboard user groups located around the world.

Members share ideas and best practices, get questions answered by peers and collaborate on e-Learning projects.  Groups typically meet on a semi-regular basis in person and online through Blackboard Connections, an online hub for the global Blackboard user community.  Many user groups also host regular regional conferences.  And now there’s an archive for videos on YouTube!

This video is by Terry Patterson, the director of distance learning for South Arkansas Community College in El Dorado and the leader of ArBUG — Arkansas’ Blackboard User Group.  (Check out the SouthArk Blackboard Blog for students.)  In his video, Terry invites all Blackboard users in Arkansas to contact him to learn more about ArBUG:

Please let me know if you have a video about your Blackboard user group, and I’ll add it to the playlist for members of your group and others to see.

Don’t live in Arkansas but want to join a Blackboard user group?  Check the list of current user groups or you can always start a new one in your area.

I want to share with you something that I think will be of great benefit.  At Blackboard, we know this can be a challenging time of year, to say the least—maintenance, testing, upgrades, etc.—and naturally this can be very stressful.  Well, we’ve been working on creating a wiki site for you that hopefully will make whatever activities you’re endeavoring upon as seamless as possible.

We call this our “Back to School” initiative, and the wiki site associated with this effort (available within the Behind the Blackboard site) is designed to address the issues you are currently facing.  We have all kinds of wonderful information housed there and I hope you’ll have a look at this great resource.

Housed on the Back to School wiki, you’ll find useful tools and information:

Maintenance Center
You’ll find information here regarding maintenance, installation and supported technologies.  The Maintenance Center also includes known issue reports, release documentation, information on support server and client configurations, as well as links to download hot fixes and service packs.

Best Practices
Don’t reinvent the wheel!  In this area you’ll find information based on the lessons learned and successful experiences of others that you can use immediately.  You’ll find documentation featuring recommended upgrade paths, and upgrade and maintenance checklists among other things.

Of the dozens of e-Learning events, conferences and user group meetings I travel to each year, one conference I really look forward to is the annual Sakai Conference.  Surprised?

You shouldn’t be – many Sakai members and conference attendees use Blackboard products and services.

When I’m with clients at the Sakai conference, we talk about how their institutions want to share data and content between their respective mission-critical Blackboard implementations and their pilot Sakai instances.  Blackboard clients want this integration, and this is why we decided to develop it.

A couple of weeks ago at the Sakai conference in Paris, John Fontaine and I talked with many of our clients about John’s recent blog post on the Learning Environment Connector.  The Learning Environment Connector is a new technology in the process of being developed by Blackboard and a team from Syracuse University to enable connections between the Blackboard Academic Suite and other course management systems.

Steve Wozniak, a Silicon Valley icon and philanthropist for the past three decades, helped shape the computing industry with his design of Apple Computer’s first line of products and influenced the popular Macintosh.  For his achievements with Apple, Wozniak was awarded the National Medal of Technology by the President of the United States in 1985, the highest honor bestowed on leading innovators in the United States.

In 2000, Wozniak was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame and received the prestigious Heinz Award for "single-handedly designing the first personal computer and for then redirecting his lifelong passion for mathematics and electronics toward lighting the fires of excitement for education in grade school students and their teachers."

Making significant investments of both his time and resources into education, Wozniak “adopted" the Los Gatos School District in California, providing students and teachers with hands-on teaching and donations of state-of-the-art technology equipment.  He also founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the founding sponsor of the Tech Museum, Silicon Valley Ballet and Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose.  Wozniak’s autobiography, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon, was published in 2006.

Blackboard interviewed Wozniak before his keynote address at BbWorld ’08.

1. What interests you most about attending BbWorld ’08, where 2,000 members of the e-Learning community are gathering this week?

One of my personal goals in personal computers was to influence education, both via content and management.  Early on, this became a recognized value of Apple, too.  The Blackboard systems, frankly, are something that I admire.  Teachers at all levels are my favorite people in the world.  Anyone close to me would tell you that.  Being among this combination of technologists and educators will be an important time for me.

When I was 10 years old, I told my father that I would be an engineer, like him, and secondly I would be a teacher.  I did achieve both of these goals.

2. During DevCon 2008 and BbWorld ’08, many Blackboard users will be presenting to their peers during break-out sessions.  You present to many groups.  Is presenting difficult for you, ever a bit scary?

Sometimes presentations are very hard.  Those are times when a topic is not one that just rolls off my lips and brain.  Such topics may be outside of my primary field.  One time the topic was so difficult for me to contribute well on that I took a friend along to share the podium with me.

Every single presentation is scary to me.  I am worried that I won’t be appreciated, that my speech won’t be entertaining or informative or stimulating enough.  It’s part of putting yourself on the line.  When you present before a group, you are accountable and being judged.  When friends or family or associates are with me, they can have an enjoyable time, however.

I don’t get butterfly feelings in my stomach, but I’m very much a nervous wreck the night before any speech, and I have to be alone to finalize my ideas on paper.  I try to gain a sense of the event and people, to know better what items I say, and in what way, will go over well.  I often awaken a few times during the night to jot notes down.  I often have a wakeup call as early as 4 AM to look over my notes and re-write them one last time, getting the flow in my head, like rehearsing.

Then, I forget any possibility of failure because it’s like jumping into cold water.  You have already leapt and can’t stop from landing in the water, so you have succeeded, at least in jumping!

I am always looking for someone else that has a similar problem or situation as me.  For example, in the last month:

• The seatbelt warning light and beeping would not go off in my new car, even after I put my seatbelt on.  Searching some list_servs, I found someone with a similar problem, who shared instructions to solve the problem without having to return to the car dealership or re-wiring the entire electrical component of my car.
• I wanted to learn how to make pumpkin soup and found thousands of recipes online.
• When looking for the perfect hotel for my upcoming honeymoon, I naturally used TripAdvisor to see ratings and read reviews of different hotels.

There are many creative ways Blackboard clients have found peers who are experiencing similar situations to theirs, but none of these connections have been made through any formal, easy process.  At your last user group meeting, I hope you exchanged business cards with everyone.  And maybe you’ve joined the ASU list_serv to find information and ask or answer questions.

Well, I now am pleased to be able to let you know Blackboard has created a better way for users at different institutions to find one another.  We have a new feature for you on Behind the Blackboard called CommunityLINK.

On CommunityLINK you can create and manage a profile that will be shared with Blackboard and, if you would like, other members of the Blackboard client community.  Find and connect with peers based on common attributes, or search for other Blackboard users who may be doing things that you are considering or beginning to implement.  I strongly encourage you to use CommunityLINK to create your own profile to start searching for other users.

By the way, that pumpkin soup recipe I used?  Right here.