No, I am not on Blackboard’s payroll. Shame on you!

But did you notice this?

This photo is Jeff Longland, long time technical administrator of WebCT /  Blackboard over at Western Ontario University. Just a few weeks ago he took a new job with University of Vancouver (also a Blackboard client).

This year as a client he was recognized as contributing to the Blackboard company by spearheading innovative way for clients to assist in prioritizing the bug fixes of products which they use.

I was a part of the user group (BbSwat) where we first prioritized which fixes were important to us and then presented our aggregated results to Blackboard. Because of Jeff’s persuasiveness, because of the technology he found to make it easy (uservoice), Blackboard is now using it for all of their bug fix releases and is exploring ways to ask clients to help prioritize enhancements as well.

This photo was taken by Phil O’Hara of Dalhousie University and posted in Facebook. Phil is part of Dalhousie’s Integrated Learning Online effort. He shot this photo of Blackboard’s Ray Henderson during a KeyNote in which Ray is discussing the promises he made a year ago when he stepped in from VP of Angel to President of Blackboard’s Learn group. Ray constructed a report card style report and gave us some responses from clients like us as to how he has come along on his goals of the last year. He also did a blog post “My Freshman Year at Blackboard Concludes“.

Cynically we watched and waited this last year. Cynically I listening to the keynote up to this point, and then something like optimisim crept in as this slide came up. I fantasized that clients would be sitting in this keynote voting on Ray’s report card. That any minute now a side screen would flash a number to text with our cellphones for each of the categories in turn and we the people would say “Satisfactory” or “Needs Improvement” or “Above Expectations” to how Blackboard under Ray’s leadership has progressed in this last year.

It didn’t happen exactly like that. BUT. The feedback Ray did have from clients like us was very very good.

So a couple days later… this photo is the room of the Blackboard listening session. Happens every year. Last year’s was sort of a free-for-all with a lot of clients coming up to the microphone and railing about their support problems or other expectations that hadn’t been met. This year when Blackboard clients took the microphone many of them said positive things. Some overwhelmingly so. Support is better. Timeliness is better. Attention to release cycles vis a vis the academic calendar is better.

So…

This is me. I’m, embarassingly enough, sharing my ‘fantasy’ at that listening session about clients being polled live for Ray’s report card. Since I was sitting down front and took the microphone right in front of Ray Henderson, Michael Chasen, and the Blackboard cohort, I didn’t see what happened after I suggested maybe next year clients do get to vote LIVE in real-time on Blackboard’s progress.

What happened was a standing ovation. The whole crowd said with me: We want to vote, we want to provide direction, for how Blackboard is doing. We want you to be brave enough and confident enough in meeting customer expectation, that you, Blackboard, do that.

It could happen. Just this week I received an email from Ben Wang of Blackboard making certain they heard me right.

So we’ll see next year at Bbworld 2011 in Las Vegas.

This is "Dr. Chuck," or
Dr. Charles Severance, of the IMS Global Learning Consortium. He is the leading voice of the leading organization in interoperability for systems handling teaching, learning, and course data.

He was at Blackboard’s Developer’s Conference this year (sniff…I was not), as well as Blackboard’s general user conference where I met him.

The IMS Global Learning Consortium is THE standards organization, working out standards which, when adopted by the leading vendors, make interoperability a shoo in.

A few years back Blackboard became an IMS Global Consortium key sponsor, and participant, and assigned one of their top developers, John Fontaine, to a new role, that of "Senior Director of Technology Evangelism." Frankly, even though I know John and like him alot, I figured it was a marketing job….that his primary role was one of improving Blackboard’s image and making Blackboard seem like a good guy.

So, it was with some surprise that I found Dr. Chuck speaking the last day of the conference. (The program said John Fontaine was speaking on Blackboard’s work with IMS Global and support of standards. John ended up having to be somewhere else.).

You’ll see the link above for Dr. Chuck goes to his blog, where he echoes Blackboard’s announcement of support for the interoperability standard for course content (think of the tool you need to migrate courses from one LMS to another!).

Last year (and the year before) Sungard, a leading provider of Student Information Systems, was not present at the Blackboard conference.

Rumors abounded about the defunct, stalled, or otherwise unhealthy relationship between the two vendors.

Integration between the two largest providers of higher ed. systems (LMS/SIS), an integration formerly provided free and out of the box for CE/Vista customers anyway (give thanks to WebCT for that legacy arrangement) – was going to be a paid for professional service by Blackboard for which the client would be paying support in perpetuity. Slick, huh?

(Of course, such an integration would be later provided for Peoplesoft, Datatel and other SIS’s as well).

The Sungard folks have a message broker architecture which provides real-time messaging when enrollments change, sending those changes to the LMS as they happen. It has not been clear whether the paid-for integration and support would include that method.

Flash Forward: July 2010. Sungard is present at Blackboard. A new roadmap agreed upon by both vendors was unveiled. Around fourth quarter this year/ first quarter next year, a new integration framework will be delivered as part of the base Bb Learn Course Delivery product and provided for FREE. It will handle both batch and event driven LDI transactions. Look for relationships and products with the other big SIS vendors to follow.

There were innuendos of something more than great synergy between the companies as we stood and chatted. It was one of those encounters that left one with one of those, “hmmm…” responses. I guess I know now.

Carol’s now sold another company to Blackboard.

I’m not complaining. Notre Dame uses Wimba and uses Blackboard. And there are enhancements we’ve noted which Wimba, as a smaller company, hasn’t been responsive to.

I am so looking forward to better integration between these two systems (read: GradeBook). But what of those schools who use Wimba with Moodle? Or Wimba with Sakai? Or Wimba with ..OH NO: Wimba with Desire 2 Learn???

Ray? Carol? Michael? Talk to us. What’s the plan?

You knew that already, right?

But did you know the gap between the IT Professional of the last 20 years and the rest of the culture is closing?

Yeah. I’m pretty sure.

Here are the signs:

A non-IT friend of mine recommended that I watch the BBC sitcom “The IT Crowd.” She loves it. And she was right, so do I.

The New York Times is doing a series called “Your Brain on Computers.”

Their story, “Hooked on Gadgets, And Paying a Mental Price” was so long the first person in our IT Shop to note it and pass it on also said, “Caveat: This story may be too long for serious multi-taskers.”

And when I went to the interactive section where NYTimers did a panorama of Kord Campbell’s workspace, his 4 monitor, two laptop, one iPad and iPhone too, didn’t strike me as weird or excessive. Just the photo here. It might still be overkill to most of the American public …

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I’m worried. About my brain. About my writing style. I write this way, for pete’s sake, so that someone somewhere might take the time to read it. But I’m finding that I read this way too. If it’s not snappy and to the point: Fuggitaboutit.

Take where I am as I write this, just as an example. I’m at home relaxing on the couch. I’m facing a 42″ screen. On my right is my husband (profession: Network Admin). He’s using that 42″ screen to play COD (“Call of Duty” in case you’re the last person on the planet who doesn’t know that) on our XBox. To my left is one of our twins, Zach. He’s got a laptop too. His belongs to Dad’s employer and is a Mac. He’s at onemorelevel.com playing Monster Evolution. There are kittens lounging across the room on the back of an oak rocker. The other twin is yelling from the shower to make certain his brother hasn’t taken over his DSi game while he’s obliging his parents by cleaning up.

I may sound really hip to you. But I’m not. I think all of this is disturbing. I have to say weird things as a mother, like, “close the lid and look at me when I’m talking, thank you” or “when you’re talking to real people Zach, you look them in the eye.”

I am CERTAIN there was a time when children actually learned that from the example of all those people around them.

We had horrible thunder storms this past month. One knocked so many trees down in our neighborhood it took the power company 5 days to get our electricity back. During that time my children acted as though Rome were burning (and *I* can imagine what Rome burning might have been like). The first 4 hours were cool. FOUR HOURS. After that the only things from their lips were litanies of all the things they can not do without electricity. (Meanwhile I was remembering my rural childhood where we always filled the bathtubs, sinks and buckets when storms loomed so that we’d have water to flush toilets).

Without electricity 10 year olds can’t: watch tv, watch a DVD, play on Xbox, play on Wii, risk playing too much DSi since the batteries can’t be charged… the microwave is out… there’s nothing to do but sit around in the dark.

Their mother is thankful for city water and for a newer gas hot water heater whose pilot light and ignition system are not electronic. I am taking a shower, using my gas stove, still washing dishes (albeit by hand), still cooking on my gas stove, and getting all my laundry done in 2 hours instead of 2 days by using the local laundromat. What an incredible difference in perception.

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Back to our brains. That’s where I started when I began this illegitimately long blog post. The full article (and I do mean ‘full’) is over here at the NY Times.

It’s frightening to this particular IT PRofessional AND Mom of 10 year old twins.

But no, that’s not what I meant.

Both the Confluence wiki and Moodle have Microsoft plug-ins that allow a user to open, edit and save directly back to the wiki or Moodle room, any Microsoft doc or spreadsheet! (Obviously you must have Microsoft’s Office Suite installed on your local desktop).

Office Add-in for Moodle

Confluence Office Connector

Thanks to Roger Goodson’s blog for putting me on to this.

Blackboard as a platform.

Blackboard as glue.

Blackboard as the framework.

This ain’t haiku.

• Proprietary companies are building more integrations with their interesting tools than ever before. And they are being better assisted by better documentation of Blackboard’s well-designed ‘hooks’.
• John Fontaine’s lengthening and paid position as Blackboard “Senior Director of Technology Evangelism”… what IS that? Well, as I’ve observed, he goes around the world to conferences espousing technical architectures that are designed to play together well. He especially is interested in standards. The IMS Global Consortium, for example. The standard known as LIS 2.0. John is persuasive. I think he’s making dents… and not just in his forehead.
• And goodness, Ray Henderson, former leader of ANGEL, is still with Blackboard, and seemingly still listened to one year later. So if you thought this was a gratuitous position contracted as part of the acquisition -you would be wrong.

As Blackboard’s adopted products, Vista and CE, near their end of lives, many institutions are again evaluating what’s next.

Stay with Blackboard on their next generation product? Maybe even re-define what “it” is? Do you really have to replace “it” with a monolithic “system” or are the technologies that enable learning chosen one at a time as best fit for your institution and then glued together by a central authentication system and/or portal?

I wrote about Notre Dame’s evaluation process oh… what was that? About 3 years ago now. I had a series on “Switchers” using the old Tarenton cigarette motto “I’d rather fight than switch.” (Moved my blog after that and all those graphic links broke…sniff).

Well, switch we did. Many of us. A few of us were caught having just switched to ANGEL only to have ANGEL purchased by Blackboard. Some of us switched to Desire2Learn, and I hear they’re going strong. Many of us, like Notre Dame, chose the devil we know over the devil we don’t know.

This year, at BbWorld ’10, the Blackboard conference, several of us are inviting you to join us in a panel panel discussion around how to determine what it is your institution needs and how to find it.

I have to say Blackboard Learn 9.x may prove to be a better option today then it was just a couple years ago. Why? … That posting is for another day.

His first blog, “On Beginning” contains this list of “My First Focus Areas at Blackboard“

1. Product Support. Improve it, of course. What I mean by that is: What do I have to do to get a problem resolved and how long does it take? Am I talking to the right people? I think that’s what Henderson means by that. One year later… are we seeing it?

2. Innovations. Since I’m on Blackboard Vista and will be unless or until the NG product Blackboard Learn 9.x has parity with features already in Bb Vista, I can’t speak to whether this goal is being realized. The latest release of Blackboard Learn 9 does not yet have parity, or so I’m told. Social networking and mobile apps seem to be the innovation categories getting the most buzz. What about implementing standards for course import/export and for data sharing between systems (with an SIS, for example)? How’s the innovative implementation on those fronts coming along?

3. Openness. I’m waiting for Michael Feldstein to report his thoughts on one year progress in this area. His definition of “openness” is a good starting point on what Ray Henderson is attempting to accomplish in this area. In July 2009 Blackboard (Ray Henderson from the stage actually) did announce the publication of the Blackboard Learn’s database schema), although that doesn’t make Feldstein’s list here it’s an obvious one.

4. Transparency. I think there has been change in this area in the last year. But not enough. Take the recent partnership announcement between Blackboard / SunGard  for instance. I don’t yet have visibility into whether that means anything real to me, the customer. I don’t know what the direction is either… Practically speaking, will I have to pay a service engagement for integration between their systems?

5. The Greater Good. No report to give here on Ray’s progress on improving access to education, or sharing best practices to leverage global expertise in online learning or using technology to improve the way people teach and learn around the world. Maybe someone else has ideas?