Higher Ed

Don’t you just love the "Mac vs. PC" ads that have been running on TV for the past year?  Apprently so do the video creators at Wallstrip!

Wallstrip is a daily web video show, sponsored by TheStreet.com, which mixes "stock culture" (or finance information and trends from Wall Street) with pop culture.  In the series "Wallstrips Take On…," the site recently posted a humorous take on Blackboard in a video homage to the series of Mac ads currently airing on US television. 

Watch the video here.  It’s quirky and very clever.  Enjoy.

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.

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?

So you see another blog post from Karen and you think, "More news on Scholar or Beyond.  Cool."  Or at least I imagine that you think that.  But today, you couldn’t be more wrong.  I’ve got a new job.  On Friday, I became the new VP, Product Strategy for Blackboard.

I’m happy to say I’m still managing the Blackboard Beyond Initiative, but now I’ll also be working to set product directions across the board.  Not that we at Blackboard haven’t been doing product strategy all along.  We just decided that it was time to break it out as a separate organization given the expansion of our product portfolio.

Last week I attended the three-day, annual CardTech SecureTech conference in San Francisco, where the latest in identification and payment card technology was on display.  When it comes to campus card technology, the name of the game is clearly "contactless.”

You are no doubt familiar with the brown magnetic stripe on the back of your credit card.  (If you’re like me, you avoid carrying cash at all costs in lieu of using a bank debit card for convenience.)  And you’re probably equally familiar with paying for purchases by swiping your card through a point of sale register; for instance, when you check out at your local grocery store.

Those registers are designed to “read” the data—essentially your credit card number—anytime you swipe your card.  But in order for that to happen, that magnetic stripe on the card must actually come in contact with a tiny read head that sits inside the register.

Now consider the idea of contactless transactions.