Professional Education

With the first days of spring under our belts, we in DC’s Blackboard office are looking forward to more warm days and sunny skies.

But I’ll be honest – my sights are set to a slightly warmer climate – Las Vegas in July.

Over 200 of you have already registered for BbWorld ’08.  And I’m working hard with the Client Program Committee to select the most interesting client sessions!  While you’re waiting for us to make the program announcement, how will you get your BbWorld fix?

130 of us have joined the BbWorld ’08 Facebook Group!

It’s a great place to connect with your “conference friends” all over the world – and to get special BbWorld updates. 

What kind of updates, you might ask?  Well…just the other day, I asked a question in the group’s discussion board:

If you were to ask Steve Wozniak, technology industry visionary and co-founder of Apple Computer a question – what would you ask?

Why, I wonder why KJ would ask this question?  Does she know Steve Wozniak?  Is she having lunch with him next week and need conversation topics?  Or could it be because Steve Wozniak is the opening keynote speaker at BbWorld ’08?  Why yes, that’s it!! 

So seriously – what would you ask Steve?  Check out the Facebook group and leave me your comments in the discussion board.  We’ll pass your thoughts along to Mr. Wozniak as he plans his BbWorld keynote. 

So in the meantime, check out BbWorld ’08 and the Blackboard Developers Conference at www.bbworld08.com to find all the information you need to register for both events.  And come on, Facebook with us!  You can always play a little Scrabulous while you’re at it!

Welcome to the first of our blog entries on the world of training.  Why blog?

Well, we have a variety of reasons for you to tune in regularly: first and foremost, to connect with peers in a meaningful way, and read about cutting-edge information on pedagogy and best practices in training and be able to answer these questions:

• What are my colleagues and peers doing?
• What new training resources are available to me?
• How can I leverage this training knowledge at my own institution or organization?

What won’t you see in this blog series?

For starters, you won’t read a lot of posts written by me.  You can breathe that sigh of relief now.  The Blackboard Training blog series will be an online forum for our Certified Trainers, training program participants, industry experts, and our very own Blackboard trainers to participate and share their knowledge and experiences.   

Interested in participating?  Excited to begin?  Start by bookmarking the Blackboard Training Blog page and get involved as we begin our grand adventure in blogging!  Next, mark your calendars – Thursdays will be our main posting day, so every Thursday you’ll find new content here.

Want to share your training experiences, tips and success stories here?  You can contact me, the Blackboard Training blog coordinator extraordinaire, at kristen.cooper@blackboard.com.

Don’t miss this opportunity to connect with the training community!

A short post today, to share one of the several thought-provoking and creatively produced videos by Mike Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology, Kansas State University, who with others is compiling an ethnography of YouTube (details can be found here).

Also, I recommend the Digital Ethnography blog kept by KSU faculty members and students.

On the Digitial Ethnography Channel on YouTube, Prof. Wesch describes his video (embedded below), titled "Information R/evolution":

This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.

Please let me know what other clips you’d like to see added to the video archives assembled by BlackboardTV.  I can be reached at BbTV@blackboard.com.

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.