Developers+

I’m David Andrews, the launch lead for the first release of Blackboard’s Project NG, and I’d like to introduce you to a new series of blog posts by Blackboard team members about our series of Next Generation releases.

My job is to make sure everybody — from the global community of Blackboard users to the broader e-Learning community to Blackboard itself — is ready for the first release of Project NG.  I’ve been working in the software space for awhile now, and have been at Blackboard for about a year and a half.  Over that period I’ve been involved in a lot of cool stuff, but Project NG stands out for me as the most exciting work.

There are many great aspects to Project NG, including:

• A combination of the best of Blackboard and WebCT features and functionality
• A new, powerfully simple user experience
• A new level of flexibility and openness

We’re committed to getting information about these releases to our clients as early and quickly as possible, and this series of blog posts is part of that effort.

Beginning today and continuing through the first release of Project NG, several Blackboard colleagues and I (including Stephanie Cupp, George Kroner, John Fontaine and John Dennett — product experts intimately familiar with Project NG) will give you a behind-the-scenes look into the initiative, the thinking behind its developments and an insider’s perspective to what it all means for users.

For example, we’ll blog about our philosophy behind, and approach to, user experience.  We’ll discuss openness and the thinking behind the new Learning Environment Connector that connects Blackboard software and Sakai, which John Fontaine and Jan Day discussed in earlier posts.

These entries will be marked at the outset of each by a Project NG graphic, posted directly to the Blackboard Next Generation Blog and cross-posted when relevant to other community blogs collected here at Blackboard Blogs.

If you ever have a question or comment about one of our posts, please tell us.  I encourage you to send your questions, feedback and comments to us at BlogFeedback@blackboard.com.

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.

If you missed Dr. Michael Wesch’s excellent keynote address Monday during Blackboard’s DevCon 2008, or attended that session and want to review some of the information he shared (because he discussed a tremendous amount of useful information, very quickly, about the recent history of digital technology and its innovative uses in the classroom), here’s an hour-long video of a similar presentation he gave in June at the University of Manitoba:

The Chronicle’s The Wired Campus posted a short article earlier today, which may interest BbWorld ’08 conference attendees, about Steve Wozniak and his keynote address yesterday.  The piece includes a two-minute video interview with Woz in the main hall, following his speech . . . and a great, quick shot of him in helmet speeding away on his Segway.

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!