Laura Gekeler Speaks Her Mind

His interview by the Chronicle contains these 7 habits for highly effective professors.

 ”It would be very similar to what the generic recommendation is inside the book. The first habit is to be proactive, to take responsibility, and take a lot of initiative. The second habit is to begin with the end in mind, because all things are created twice—first in the mind, and then in fact. And the third one is to put first things first. It makes your security come from within, rather than from without. Once you’ve achieved this independence, you can work on the habits of interdependence—think “win-win”; seek first to understand, then be understood; and synergize. The seventh habit is to sharpen the saw. Exercise yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, in your relationships … and then spiritually recommit yourself to make a difference, to live in total integrity.”

Wow…

Yes, learn those languages, but don’t be afraid to boldly go where you’ve never eaten before!

The assets however, are still… where?

Okay, okay, when I blogged back on Sept. 20th about this interesting idea, I knew I was sliding into rumor-mongering. And I was a little uncomfortable posting lest such a label 'stick' to me. I don't want that. Yet the idea of Google buying Blackboard has such delicious overtones to it, I keep looking for others who might think so too. Tanya Carlson over at Motley Fool apparently thinks so…she explains why in her post yesterday, "Are Google and Blackboard an Item?"

The 'feature' is called hostname verification. It's on by default. You'll find it under > Environments > Servers > 1 of your servers > SSL tab > bottom of the page under 'Advanced'

Whatever you do, DON'T touch that button. Your environment may never be the same…

I'm sure it renders man-in-the-middle attacks moot, BUT…

It originally bit us because we added Wimba Voice Tools – fully encrypted. Wimba, at the time, about 18 months ago now, was using a wildcard cert in their data center. This 'feature' above does not like notredamevoice.wimba.com referred to as *.wimba.com . Wimba, to their credit, moved Notre Dame's instance and purchased a specific cert.

Today this 'feature' bites again…

This time even after it was changed from "NONE" back to its default as you see above, it has prevented our SP3 from starting up properly after the upgrade. The workaround includes removing the hostname verification param in your config.xml file and disabling schema validation in webct.sh  STARTUP_OPTIONS with this parameter

-Dweblogic.configuration.schemaValidationEnabled=false

I may write more about it later after I figure out what else needs to be done to get schema validation to work again…

By the way, has anyone had to edit the config.xml header since Oracle purchased Weblogic? The xsd files would not be hosted in the same place, would they?

Previous header:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<domain xmlns="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/920/domain" xmlns:sec="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90/security" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:wls="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90/security/wls" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90/security http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90/security.xsd http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/920/domain http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/920/domain.xsd http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90/security/wls http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90/security/wls.xsd">

Potential new header?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<domain xmlns="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/920/domain" xmlns:sec="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90/security" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:wls="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90/security/wls" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90/security http://www.oracle.com/technology/weblogic/90/security.xsd http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/920/domain http://www.oracle.com/technology/weblogic/920/domain.xsd http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90/security/wls http://www.oracle.com/technology/weblogic/90/security/wls.xsd">

Two things happen which seem uncontrollable:

1). The Registrar’s Office deprovisions user IDs when a student graduates. If the student then is admitted in a graduate program, a new sourcedID is assigned to them even though the User ID is re-enabled. Now the student has undergraduate data in Blackboard Vista which will be decoupled from the User ID by changing the person account SourcedID inside Blackboard Vista to correspond with the new sourcedID in the Student Information System.

2). Every so often an Instructor will accidentally edit a previous coursesite (section level). We keep 4 years worth on the server and keep them available to Instructors for reference. If the coursesite is accidentally edited, the student data for that semester becomes suspect.

I’m thinking about doing section level backups directly after final exams each semester. This involves investment in additional infrastructure and storage, but not so onerous as to make it prohibitive. Again, however, there is a problem. A backup file of a crosslisted section does not have a file name which would facilitate restoring that content if it were ever needed.

Our current data retention policy doesn’t explicitly mention student data, but it is implied that we are saving it, along with everything else, for 4 years.

And… is certified for RHEL 5. Blackboard Vista 8, as far as I know, seemed to have skipped certification on RHEL 4.

“I’m walkin’ on sunshine” the conference theme song… While we’re waiting on Les, sadly a much diminished audience, we’re being regaled by photographs of ourselves from the huge screens at the front of the room. I recognize so many folks I’ve been able to spend time with this conference.

Ray Henderson does the introduction and recaps the conference.

1st Seth Godin’s Tribes theme as relates to the coming together as the ANGEL tribe, the Vista tribe, the classic tribe but above these the passions that unite us, education, teaching and learning. … the image of the Great Blackboard Nation.

Ray feels he’s been getting encouragement on the direction he’s leading, that it’s the right one…

Now for the Les Holt introduction, the weekend anchor of the NBC news …

He’s topic is non-traditional ways of learning.

(Never took a communications course …)

Digital tools are creating new opportunities for both journalism and education. Called journalism “the recording of the first drafts of history.”

Today we can no longer tell ourselves that events in another city or country doesn’t effect us. We consume news now with the understanding that all things are connected.

On a daily basis news covered by journalists effects our students, and what we hope as educators, they will do with that news. Students are connecting with information in new and different ways.

As we look back in time, we can see how much television has changed how we apprehend events around the world (video clip shown). [Wish the clip were on the internet...I'd link to it].

“Democratization of journalism” means that the consumers are more and more becoming the first line reporters and contributors.

We have access to a media library of fair, accurate, and detailed archives of historical events for our educational purposes. We can infuse our education with visual representation of how people at that moment understood and responded to the events.

Excellent closing keynote and introduction to the NBC Learn materials Blackboard has just licensed.

Q&A entertained a question about Les’ kids who are 3 years apart and their use of technology. 1st child used cellphone and called friends. 2nd son texts and IMs, does not use phone for ‘calls’. Our students use of technology and their expectations of it is changing rapidly.

BbWorld09 016, originally uploaded by BlackboardTV.

Will Ray Henderson be the saving grace of the Blackboard support model? Time will tell. Even for angels….