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Steeped in technology throughout my career, I came to Blackboard eager to marry my creative and technological sides together into one Technical Product Marketing Manager. As the new guy here on the team, I’ve been trying to come up with some interesting ways to promote Blackboard Learn’s open technology. Since I know first impressions are often the strongest impressions, I wanted to make this post count. When I was thinking of Blackboard as an open platform, I couldn’t shake the idea of the Japanese character for “open.” Here’s the character 開. On its own, pronounced ‘kai’. When breaking down the character into its separate parts, what looks like three distinct characters is actually two. I wanted to focus on the 門 character in particular, pronounced ‘mongamae’. Here’s your free Japanese lesson for the day: this part of the character is called the “radical.” So what’s a radical? It’s a common sub-element found in different Japanese characters. Radicals give the reader a clue as to the origin of the entire character and they help give the reader an idea of the character’s meaning. How does this all relate to Blackboard Learn? The 門 radical in English means ‘gate’. Do you see the gate? When I was thinking of Blackboard’s open technology, the first idea that sprang into my mind was that the Learn platform is effectively a “gateway for developers.” The Open Database, with support for open standards and open APIs, is truly a gateway for developer innovation and creativity. In the coming weeks I will continue to explore this idea of the Blackboard Learn platform as a “gateway for developers.” If you’re reading this and have an idea for how Blackboard can help develop this gateway, please email me at chris.borales@blackboard.com.