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Greetings from Australasia!

We’re here in Cairns, Queensland for this year’s BbSummit 2010. To spice things up, Blackboard Connect™ and Blackboard Mobile™ have teamed up to deliver a number of useful, informative sessions for this year’s participants. As both platforms work to provide students more mobility, it seems to be a natural pairing to demonstrate and share ways educators can better engage students through the combined use of our mobile content management and rapid communication systems.

As we recover from last week’s BbWorld 2010 whirlwind, we’d like to take a moment to highlight a great accomplishment as Blackboard was recently featured on the Dominican Republic’s presidential blog. At this year’s Virtual Educa conference, held at Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo (UASD), Blackboard’s International President, Juan Lucca, hosted a workshop for attendees on “How to Achieve the Campus of the 21^st century: Mobile Technology and Education of Today with Blackboard Connect and Blackboard Mobile” (“Cómo lograr el campus del siglo XXI: tecnología móvil y educación de hoy con Blackboard Connect y Blackboard Mobile”). In leading the discussion, Lucca spoke on the importance of providing “equitable access to secondary and higher education” to students of Latin American countries by “reducing socio-economic and ethnic inequities,” while focusing on the most important goals in education. More importantly, Lucca said, as mobile computing steadily gains prominence within educational space, Latin American institutions can overcome significant challenges to best serve and meet the increasingly digital needs of students by utilizing tools such as Blackboard Connect and Blackboard Mobile.

To read more from President Fernandez, check out his official web site and blog.

 

In our second installment of the Blackboard Connect social media integration feature spotlight, we turn to Dundee, MI who uses Blackboard Connect, in conjunction with their Facebook page, to respond to severe weather.

The Village of Dundee, Michigan is about 30 minutes away from Ann Arbor and has a population of about 4,000 residents. The community launched a Facebook page in November of last year, and it has already been “liked” by more than 1,400 fans.

It’s increasingly evident the important role social media plays in everyday life. From the mundane to the catastrophic, events are being reported by peers minute-by-minute, as they happen. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “one-third (35 percent) of American adult Internet-users have a profile on an online social network site.”

Sites like Facebook and Twitter present new avenues to connect and exchange information, so it’s no surprise more users are logging on every day. That growing audience is one reason social media is quickly becoming a mainstream platform for forward-looking school administrators and government officials that want to establish relationships and maintain open conversations with community members.

By Randall Alberts, Georgia State University

Communicating with students can often be a challenge — especially when you’re sending a critical message that needs to go out NOW. So how do you communicate with the campus in a timely manner? If you find yourself repeatedly faced with this question, then you should sit in on our presentation at BbWorld 2010, Campus Crisis Communications Plans in the Age of the Clery Act. This presentation will focus on a tale of two colleges and how they each use the Blackboard Connect system to help inform their campuses.

The Blackboard Connect system allows Georgia State University and the State College of Florida to communicate to students, staff and faculty via phone calls, text messages and e-mail. Situations ranging from weather incidents, like a tornado or hurricane, or other urgent events require time-sensitive messages. The key is being able to reach a large number of people in a very short period of time.