Company

   The Innovation Pavillion at Bb World’06 has over 70 booths and my personal favorite is the Blackboard Building Blocks booth.  At the Building Blocks booth we’ve got a couple of demo stations and a Networking Lounge to encourage folks to sit and stay a while, check email and connect with fellow clients.  Our ploys for attracting visitors worked and it has been non-stop demo action:

• Malcolm Murray (Durham University) stopped by to show off his Building Blocks Blog
• Mark O’Neill (Dartmouth) also spent some time in the booth talking with Paul Erickson (University of Nebraska – Lincoln) about the Podcast Building Block project from the Open Source Building Blocks developer community. 
• No Bb World would be complete without having the team at USF stop by to demo their latest Building Blocks (which they promise to share with the Blackboard community when their pilot is complete). 
• Wayne Twitchell (Grinnell College) stopped by to say Hi and ended up doing a bunch of demos.  He has done some very cool stuff with the Blackboard Community System.  He and Glen Parker (USF) are going to collaborate to see if they can create some Building Blocks to share.
• Matt Elton (VLE Genius) flew in from Manchester at the last minute to network at Bb World ’06.
• Clients from the Netherlands, UK, Australia, and all over the US stopped by to say hello, ask questions, and see demos of various free and open source Building Blocks.  Bob Alcorn talked non-stop for hours answering technical questions about APIs, Blackboard software, standards and everything in between.

If you’re here at Bb World ’06 please stop by the booth and say hello!