And the winners are....

Competition 1: Portmanmania
As promised, for taking part "all shall have prizes", and so prizes go to Liz, Brian, Helen R, Mary, Abbi and Juliun...er and me (that's a bit strange isn't it) - these were the least SHU/Bb/technology related prizes I could find but with the strongest "thanks for coming" crackerjack symbolism:
Special merit prizes go to the creators of surridium (Liz) and shamedropmanteau (Abbi) - twinkle, twinkle little tea lights...

And the grand prize for scoring 40 points and displaying an unhealthy obsession with slaming words of the English language together so hard that bits fall off and they stick together ...of course goes to Liz (or possibly Librian ???- I'm still not sure - oh what the hell, you guys work it out). Anyway having already bought what was a reasonable prize for this, I spotted this at the airport and knew that it was too too perfect...is it a ball? is it a money box?:

No.....it's portmanpig! enjoy!

Competition 2 - "If I were designing Bb NG I would...."
The prize of a winner appreciation event (as voted for in the in-blog poll) goes to Brian (probably to be held in Sept, in 6715, complete with crepe paper and warm wine, probably then to move on the dev cat for after party and to be followed by a 7.30 am presentation by Brian on designing Bb NG)

Prizes for best suggestions for Competition 2 go to Brian and Helen L who each get a Bb 10 year glowing cup...question is - is it half full or half empty???

and finally....for the shameless developers joke (which btw I still need someone to explain to me) and therefore declaring himself a closet-developer a special dev.con.related.prize goes to... Brian.
Congratulations to all our winners (...sorry no awards ceremony as we are too thin on the ground for that but please do come and collect your prizes the next time you are in and/or around).

Spidey Sense

One of the stranger sessions I went to, presented by a man dressed as Spiderman, hood and all.

There was a lot of comic sans, and Wonderwoman, Mr Fantastic, Dr Doom, the Hulk and Aunt May all made an appearance. The (somewhat muffled) premise was to identify key characteristics in both e-learning support staff and the staff they are supporting, and suggest how those can be matched up most effectively.

Safe Assign

Greg Ritter did a session on this which I went to. Having spent the last year studiously avoiding TII, I did fid that I didn't know what questions to ask, but this is what I did find out:

Assignments will be more or less identical to ordinary BB assignments, and you will be able to access reports via the gb.
Work will be submitted to the institution db, and optionally to the Global db.
Draft submissions are possible, but it wasn't clear whether you could do draft only.
Staff can submit work directly without going via an assignment.
Reports take minutes rather than hours to generate.
Reports use lots of AJAXy stuff to make them easier to use.

Developers Conference

I got quite a lot out of this, despite not being someone who talks code (at least not that kind of code).

There were a lot of sessions run by Blackboard, and I went to those rather than any client sessions, including a couple on managing the system, and some best practice ones. They were pretty interesting, and I think will be useful.

Having said that, the hat count was way too high. Malcolm reckons it will be sandals next year...

Louise's highs and lows

Overall I think it has been a good conference (or two conferences - in fact, I've just thought, overlapping the end of BbWorld and the start of devcon makes it actually a portmaneau conference!! bloomin'el...they're everywhere). I agree with Paul that you had to look a little harder than usual for the gems but I have still come back with loads of ideas...

Highs

• It is impossible to place anything at the highest point on the lists of conference highs than Michael Chasen - he is just a class act and vfm everytime
• kadoo - I really liked it, its potential is huge...and to a lesser extent (cos we already knew a bit about it) Expo - at last, two new kids on the "could be used for e-portfolios" block
• catching up with lots and lots of Bb people I haven't seen in a while either cos they work for someone else (like Dan) or have been promoted into some new incomprehensible role (Paul G, Demetra) and also I really enjoyed the steering group re-union and Michael Crock's enthusiastic response to e-agenda
• the portmanteau competition - great fun, completely absorbing all my early morning attention - thanks everyone rfor joining in esp for surridium (it will live on forever) and Shamedropmanteau (thanks to Abbi, it may have missed the competition deadline but is so special it is worth an extra mention here)
• safeassign and App Pack 3 - actual big announcements that mean something now
• our exec workshop session - response was completely unexpected, very flattering and a bit overwhelming. I thought people would just think of it as an amusing anecdote not much else.
• gasps from the 7.30 participants when we did before and after portal screenshots - as I've said before, you do forget - esp when we were asked by Bb staff if we'd be interested in working with them to redevelop their training site cos ours looks so much better than theirs

Lows

• unavoidably...it has to be the WebCT factor - not the ex-WebCT staff, it's the WebCT clients - they have spent years being superior about choosing the more "selective" small Canadian product that is harder to use than everything else (ergo their staff are smarter than ours) and claiming greater pedagogical integrity (which has still never been validated) now they don't know how to feel. Especially their "names" who have been used to being treated like royalty at these events and are now the same size fish as the rest of us. They really really do need to get over it and on with it.
• not spending much time with presidium (esp Andrew - I'd got some AP knowledge card games for us to play) and others - we started out by trying to pace ourselves so as not to repeat Dallas but we ended up being so tired we never shifted gear.
• not enjoying the party as much as we would have liked because of the spectre of the 7.30 session looming - never again!!...fortunately that is what Kerry Jo said too
• the photo thing esp the spinning atop Malcolm Murray's forehead, enough already!!!
• American Airlines.... another one off my list.

one final word that Mary and I encountered at the airport, like it was a tribute to the whole trip , enjoy!:

croissan'wich!!!

I survived the developers' conference

I realise that I have been a little critical of the developers conference participants but you do have to see it to believe it. On the other hand, I would say that it has been much, much more useful to me than I expected it to be - it achieved my objectives and really did give me some things to think about. On the last day I decided to skip the keynote - Bob Alcorn on Bb System Architecture (I've seen a bit of this sort of thing before and it is one of those things where I have no clue what it is about but feel reassured that he can speak about it so confidently). Mary may post about this later, as she did go to it, but I liked her suggested subtitle for the session "How the Bb Community System ate WebCT".

Highlights for me of the sessions I attended were the UofSFlorida presentation on the building block they had used to transfer grades from the Bb gradebook into Banner (their student management system) The presenter, Glen Parker talked about systems/programming/dba stuff that I will pass straight over to Colin but what was really great were the insights he gave into how they developed their academic administrative processes to accommodate the necessary changes, dealing with exceptions, registrar engagement, business logic requirements and their emphasis on ensuring the tool was easy for academic staff to use. Interestingly in 06/07 when use of the tool by all 2,500 staff was required the levels of satisfaction were 77% satisfied or v satisified with 4% dissatisfied - which was pretty impressive. It reassured me (big time) that our proposed Bb-SI integration was definitely doable and that the benefits we anticipate are realistic...it also confirmed the unavoidable truth that the technology won't be the problem but the processes on the other hand....they might be pretty challenging. Some interesting numbers, during a grading session (approx 2 wks) SF transfer approx 200,000 grades - broadly equivalent to us, possibly slightly higher in fact. They used a queuing system through a SSH tunnel directly into the Banner database (no I don't really know what that means either but thought it sounded very impressive) and Banner was able to receive approx 600 per second with no performance issues and the Bb system could send the grades a fast as Banner could get them....and probably faster still. It was really really good, more info at: http://presentation.glenparker.net/

I went to a dreadful listening session about "Virtual Worlds and Bb" - "tell us what you would like to see Bb do with or in SL and other virtual worlds" - OK so I'm not at all convinced that is a valid question and puts me in mind of Andy Ramsden's idea of running walk-in Bb support for students within SL (as if students comfortable with SL would really need help with how to post to a Bb discussion board) or the completely farcical SLoodle, the mother of all technology-related portmanteaus and roughly translated as "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" but having heard some of the discussion at the session, I am absolutely certain these are not the people to ask about this....

And finally, to show that I really am down with the tech-team and have embraced this community as kindred spirits..I decided to round it all off with a session by Volker....I am fearless!!! I even have photographic evidence - I did get a bit scared when he started taking his clothes off...but that is a whole other story. Actually it was interesting, and pretty safe territory really - they were talking about how the KB Behind the Bb has been transferred into a wiki, why, how it will work, what next for development etc etc. We need to keep our eye on that cos it isn't just about dev.net and there is scope for it to do a lot more than it ever did in the past.

appreciating the developers community

When I was talking to Jessica Finnefrock earlier in the day, she was saying how excited her team were to get to attend the event (lots of her team are system architects, programmers etc) as they very rarely get to meet the clients (get out of the basement or see daylight - my words not hers). There was a guy who was clearly so thrilled with his complimentary baseball cap he wore it all the time.

The client appreciation event for the developers conference was an evening of F1 go-kart racing, the blurb from the program reads:
Developers, Start Your Engines!
Get ready for an evening filled with an extraordinary combination of competition and camaraderie, adrenaline, excitement and fun! Enjoy an evening of networking at one of Boston's most unique venues - F-1 Boston. Suit up for a little friendly competition around the race track or relax as a spectator. Either way, you'll have a blast at F-1 Boston! We look forward to a fun evening on the fast track with you.

Need I say more??? Well yes, actually, cos it gets better. I had to do the housekeeping notice at the start of our session, you know the "the buses are leaving at.." stuff, with the extra-special line of "We will be leaving for the venue promptly at 5.30 with a police escort, please be on-time there will only be one run". Coool!!! So, no dancing for the developers conference and a missed opportunity of hearing MC shout out "if you like writing code in your bedroom raise your hands and make some noise"...let me hear you shout "....." I leave you to fill in that bit.

So Mary and I decided to have our own "walk by the river, leisurely drinks, Cheescake Factory, no longer having any presentations to worry about" appreciation event.

talking in code...and then not

aka "we're not in Kansas anymore"

Right well, the developers conference is definitely a whole new experience for me. I am at this event for two reasons (and I keep reminding myself about these to avoid meltdown) - we are presenting on the portal to share with sys admin types the quick wins they can get from creative development strategies and I thought it would be good for my own professional development to get a better understanding of the issues/experiences of the Mary/Colin branch of e-learning at SHU. So please accept the above sentence as the disclaimer for all that follows.

The afternoon had three sessions - what to attend in the second and third slots were taken care of. Session 2 a presentation from Bb about what you can extract from Bb gradebook (eg for seperate backup, migration to SI etc) which is a hot topic for us, there was also a bit of how to do it but as you can imagine I just sang a song in my head at that point. Session 3 was us - I think we were the "light relief" had about 25 or 30 people at the session, we had to declare up front there will be no code and we will talk conceptually....but they were quite engaged, made some notes, laughed at the jokes plus, thankfully Ian from Deakin was in there too (he was doing the same as me, so I didn't feel quite so odd).

However, I was really struggling to find something for the first session - best of a bad bunch was "Using Web Services to Delivery Library Resources in Bb Software", in my defence, I did understand all the words in the title and I'd had some success in the main conference with sessions run by people from North Carolina. The guy presenting was their Bb Systems Administrator, he was nice enough and a reasonably good speaker but very quickly started talking about ASP.NET, JSPActionScript3.0, MXML, Adobe Flex, JSON.NET and a lot of other stuff like that.

There were two or three things that were interesting to me - he said that as the Bb Systems Administrator he had 3 big clients that he had to support and make sure their needs are addressed in delivering Bb (and in this order) - IT infrastructure and services, distance learning multimedia development team and the library...how weird, did anyone else expect to see a different list? Also the thing he had designed was to embed a list of relevant library journals and databases within Bb courses as a flash image - good idea, of course, but it looked...er...like it had been developed by someone trying to meet the needs of IT infrastructure, multimedia and library - not at all pretty. We are very, very lucky to have Mary and Colin and don't let us ever forget it. At one point he did refer to when he had "assumed the Blackboard position" which distracted me for a while, maybe an idea for a photo competition... OK, so that was all in about the first 10 minutes of the 50 minute session, he then went on to show and talk through all the lines of code...he was, quite literally, talking in code...I checked my email. At one point I turned to look at Malcolm Murray from Durham who was "highly amused" by my somewhat anguished state. To sum up the session at one point he said "you need to tell the flash animation how to get the variables" and most of the other people in the room seemed pretty comfortable with those sorts of conversations ;-)

closing session

by this point Mary has already gone over to the darkside...so it just me and Paul for the closer. Peter Segall thanked us all for coming, did a very flat presentation about how great everything was (well compared to MC that is pretty unavoidable). There is a really weird thing at Bb events where Bb staff attending keynotes etc just stand around the walls of the room - despite there being aobut 400 spare seats - what's that all about?

Part of the close was to announce/launch etc BbWorld08 - which will be in Vegas - cue slideshow of flashy pictures of Vegas (think CSI open credits) with an Elvis "Viva Las Vegas" soundtrack at full volume....hmmm...this is the sort of thing that always makes me become "terribly, terribly British" but best of all was seeing Paul Grist trying to look interested and melt into the wall all at the same time. btw finally caught up with Melissa on the way out of the closing session (she says hi everyone) - it was really weird I saw her going into the first keynote and out of the close but nothing in the middle...hmmm.

OK, so that is the end of BbWorld for another year and Mary and I are now attendees at the developers conference BbDevCon07 aka the darkside, on the "bright side" at least it comes with hats...at the very least :-)

Educating Students on Academic Integrity....

...Via a Bb Online Competition - session from Dalhousie University.

This session was actually pretty interesting - quite a lot to take away. To start with, just as an aside, the presenter explained how he uses the technology in his classroom - he teaches a class of 250 students. His sessions get a face to face attendance of approx 60 students, with around 100-120 following it live and remotely (via wimba and impatica combo). Each student in the room or online gets 1 attendance point for the session. Those students that can't make the synchronous session have 1 week to "make it up" asynchronously and get the attendance point. The points allegedly count towards the overall grade but as the grading is out of 1000, and there are only 24 sessions, maximum attendance would rack up a massive 2.5% grade bump!...but it seems to work and a lot more student-centred than uninanny.

OK, onto the session itself - they have an Academic Integrity Week (2nd wk of 2nd semester) within which they run a Plagiarism Challenge Competition that is designed like a knock out sports tournament. Structure is basically:
Day 1 am - orientation, warm-up/practice game based on institutional treasure hunt
Day 1 pm - round 1 quiz general questions around academic integrity
Day 2 am - round 2, pm - round 3 both of these are about general citation approaches
Day 3 am - round 4 APA referencing techniques
Day 3 pm - round 5 MLA referencing techniques
Day 4 all day - quarter finals
Day 5 am - semis, pm final
(days 4 and 5 reuse mixtures of questions from banks used earlier in the week)

With very minimal marketing and promotion they got approx 1000 site visits, 685 students participated first day, 228 completed all 5 rounds, 80 were advanced to 1/4s, 40 to semis and then top 10 to final (so all in the final would get a prize...more on this in a minute). Once the final is live, the contents of the final is also open for free participation - approx 40 people completed the open version just for fun. Interestingly there was a version of the competition also available to grad students and staff - about 30 had a go.

Quick note on the prizes:
Undergrad - 1st prize C$500 off tuition fee, 2nd and 3rd C$250 gift vouchers for bookstore, next 5 (hence all 10 in the final) C$100 on their dalcard (catering/printing etc)
Grad and Faculty - 1st prize C$100 bookstore vouchers, 2nd prize lunch for 2 at Uni Club, 3rd/4th edu-branded laptop bag and coupons for staff development events.

All this and more available at http://ilores.ucis.dal.ca/clt/info07/

Also of possible interest if you are interested in plagiarism (be warned - 107 pages! that's what you call a comprehensive report)
http://plagiarism.dal.ca/Files/2004June16_Final_Report_ad_hoc_committee_of_plagiarism.pdf

Overall it was a very interesting session and I'm sure there are elements that we could think about for academic integrity and/or digital fluency.

feeling appreciated...

Wednesday evening was the client appreciation party...strangely it was in one of the large halls within the convention centre so suffered from the sort of identity crisis you see when the school hall is transformed for a disco with crepe paper and home-made posters, the band was OK but to start with (with only the most enthusiastic people "groovin their thang", it felt a bit "dad-dancing at a wedding"). Some very interesting freebies/souvenirs that money couldn't buy. We didn't stay that long (only an hour longer than the party was supposed to last) and were definitely not up for the private, after-party, Bb staff event! I think we were seriously feeling the pressure of the 7.30 presentation. OK, so not quite the wild night that seemed to unravel when Liz, Helen R, Angie and Alison P. hit Nice but it was pretty good...and certainly got better as the alcohol flowed. Highlights for me were:

• Mary being slightly freaked out when she discovered that Ira Strauss from Embry-Riddle had heard of her
• getting the chance to share the Simon Fitzpatrick story again with Steve Gilfus and also sharing with him Liz's excellent gilford (Gilfus word) "jetferenced"
• meeting Criag Charnoff properly - we haven't really "connected" since he sent me an email after San Diego to apologise for offending me, which was odd cos he hadn't, I'd just been messing with Aaron's head.
• Country getting very excited about his very own pack of SHU Bb Support Centre post-it notes.
• catching up with Mary Goode (Bb Head of HR) who is just a really, really nice person who likes my hair (hmmmm)
• getting some really nice feedback on the exec workshop session Paul and I did - loads of people came up to us to say nice things
• giving KJ even more of a hard time about the 7.30 start (she just laughed...which, of course, she does a lot) - it is always pretty impressive, I think, just how enthusiastic and unphased she is by the whole thing. Having spent 10 months planning the event and trying to get all the programme planning, marketing, logisitics etc etc sorted and designing a really complicated schedule for 2,500 attendees, she still seems to really enjoy the event itself
• talking to Paul Grist about....you know, I can't remember what it was we were talking about... but I am sure it was very serious, high level stuff (it generally is with Paul) I suppose there is a pretty good chance that it was about assignment handler....
• gathering souvenirs...esp when we realised that, whilst trying to look inconspicuous, Mary's bag was actually glowing!!
• as if the big picture of me thing hasn't gone on long enough I discover that there is a very big picture of me by the elevator in the Bb HQ that most of the Bb staff see everyday (that explains a lot of the funny looks I've been getting)...Craig Charnoff messing with my mind on many levels by telling me this, then saying "you know you're much shorter in real life aren't you, in DC your head is about three feet high, I thought you must play in the NBA!"

What's this - a party highlights thing without a mention of the MC himself, MC, that can't be right....well no of course not. If his keynote style doesn't give you a bit of a clue just think what happens when he is MCing the disco and dancing competition and trying to inject some energy and enthusiasm into the party. Couple of things that are always funny include his "calling to the dancefloor" strategy - highlights being:

• "all Bb employees to the dancefloor, make some noise...or you're fired!"
• "all WebCT Vista clients to the dancefloor, c'mon, work out those frustrations!"
• "if you have an open support ticket, c'mon raise your hands and make some noise!"
• all ex-Bb employees who are now CEOs of other companies to the dancefloor!"
• "if your name is Volker to the dancefloor!"

not to mention the special moment when he does that chanting thing - "raise yours hands in the air, let me hear you shout 'o-oh', 'o-oh', let me hear you shout 'Black-board', 'Black-board', wave your glowsticks in the air and shout 'o-oh', 'o-oh', 'Black-board', 'Black-board', 'Black-board', 'Black-board'...." and yes, they did all do it...does anyone think they could make something like that work at ALT? er...no...probably not. btw - no the souvenirs in Mary's bag were not glowsticks something way more special than that ;-)

The Value of First Impressions

The Value of First Impressions: Our Applicant Portal
Ira Strauss: Becky Vasquez; Embry Riddle Aeronautical University

In order to improve the numbers of applicants that convert to students it ws decided they should have an applicant portal. This was a strategic initiative supported by president, and they produced their first iteration within 2 - 3 months. Part of the reasoning was that student are increasingly technically adept, and expect information to be available on-line, and also an idea that the university's bility to live up to these expectations could influence the selection process.

Applicants are given both BB access and an institutional email address as soon as they accept a place, typically up to 11 months before they atually enrol.

The main focus is around organisations, and discussin boards. These are very popular, with both staff and applicants, as they give staff an opportunity to identify areas where applicants clearly need more guidance/information.

The project team: admissions, financial aid, marketing, athletics, library, student activities (intramurals, housing), IT (multiple teams)
Considerations:
Licensing and Costs
Bandwidth (asp client)
Account generation
IT Support
Admissions continued engagement – need to be engaged for ever.
Overwhelming applicants with information – need to chunk the information, time released
Terminology and usability – avoid jargon
Not a CRM system – not the process which will attract students to your university

Future of Blackboard Solutions

This session was Karen Gage and Jessica Finnefrock talking about what's coming.

The main bit of information was around the new gradebook, which I think is coming in App pack 4. This will allow in cell editing, freezing of panes, and something called smart views which essentially allow you to create any view of the gradebook you might want, so sorting by groups and much more...It will also have a grade audit trail, so you'll be able to go and see when a grade was changed.

Other stuff was around an instructor dashboard, giving them access to a lot more information about what's going on in their courses.

It's going to look a lot more modern, and should be a lot faster to use. You'll be able to customise your preferred way of accessing some information, and it will retain that information, and you'll be able to do a lot more on a single screen rather than having to go through mutiple screens for each action.

The other thing they are looking at is enhanced workflows. I think this only applied to the content system, but they are talking about you being able ot create your own workflows for managing certain processes. You'll also be able to add assignments, html snippets, discussion topics, gradebook items to the content system. That's sometime in the future, but App Pack 3 should have improvements to the search function, and metadata options

Whose portal is it anyway?

OK, so Mary and I did our ridiculously early session this morning. A small but select (and clearly dedicated) audience who started with the comment "we've got up really early to come to this, you'd better make it worth our while"...no pressure there then.

Approx 25 participants and it was quite good cos there were a lot of questions, most of which we could answer (with the possible exception of the question on identity management from Tony Lewis at Salford, that we decided to "cryptically dodge". The thing is, we tend to forget just how much we have done with the portal compared to most places, how much easier the cross-institutional conversations are this year than they were at the start and just how "unlike Bb" it appears - there were gasps in the room as we did the before and after from the 05/06 version to the 06/07 version which was just plain strange. Anyway, another one out of the way, so only the scary technical one remains.

New competition

I've been promising (threatening) a new competition for a while now, and with Liz on hols I thought there might be a chance for someone else to win a fabulous prize!...Please don't be put off by the challenge you do not need to know Bb inside out to play. There has been a lot of talk about Project NG (ie the next generation of Bb which incorporates a lot more ajax and dhtml ie is more googley/web2.0), so the competition is:

"If I were designing Bb NG I would......" (please complete this sentence in 15 words or less, ie 15 extra words) .

The scoring is as follows:
- a sensible feature/enhancement suggestion 1 point
- a humourous suggestion (as judged by a panel of experts) 2 points
- a suggestion that incorporates any of our new portantabulary in a way that makes sense in context 3 points.

Plus an overall star prize for the very, very best suggestion....enjoy....

Got to go get ready for session now, but will be on later to share with you the client appreciation party extravaganza and other sessions I've been to.

There is always an exception that proves the rule

The program is divided into strands - enabling learning, connnect with your community, managing your system and measuring outcomes. Mostly the things I go to are in the first two strands, but last session of the afternoon I found myself in a "managing your system" (normally very definitely Mary's domain) session from North Carolina State (a WebCT institution). The session was entitled Support by Numbers: Using LMS Data to Prioritize Help Desk Activity (by which they really mean, using system data and other reporting to inform the staff development activities and materials that they offer at particular times of the year). They use a combination of Remedy data and WebCT internal reporting, but in a lot of ways the method of data collection wasn't the key feature - we gather our data somewhat differently but there were certainly some great ideas of how to make more of the data than just system performance and technical upgrade scheduling, also they were very realistic about where the numbers helped and where they didn't (eg limitation of complexity, granularity etc and recognising that with all the info in the world staff development is still difficult). One thing about their data collection that was interesting was the immediacy - what were people doing yesterday, how is that different from last week. Also they schedule most of their upgrade work to synchronise with the college football schedule as there is no-one online then...clever. I liked their comments about the challenges of balancing day-to-day operational activities with stepping back to look at the strategic whole. Their slides are available online at http://vista.ncsu.edu/bbworld07 if you are interested but I also have more notes and a handout.

Funny moment when they realised they couldn't show us some of the reports they run live because the list of report names contained some allocated by help-desk staff with snappy titles like "Most annoying users", "Most common asker of same question again and again" :-)

Outcome-tastic

Yes, once again, I am online at a ridiculously early hour of the morning - anyone would think that I had got in very late last night and having woke up briefly whilst it was still dark decided that the best way to avoid over-sleeping and missing our presentation completely is to get up, drink coffee, take caffeine tablets, put the air-con of "freezing" and just keep on typing. Quite a long post, sorry, but outcomes are important...or might be if I understood them...

Yesterday afternoon I decided to apply another "how to choose sessions" maxim. In general, at this conference, I find the client sessions very variable (as evidenced in earlier posts) but I do really like the set pieces (keynotes etc) and the company sessions (not so much the sales pitches, but when they do briefings, demos and listening sessions etc). So I decided to try a Bb presentation on the Outcomes System. I know that might seem strange, but I'm nothing if not resilient. I have seen somewhere in the region of 10-12 presentations on the Bb Outcomes System in the past and despite concentrating really, really hard I still don't entirely get it (or should that be "I still don't at all get it"?) but I will not be beaten...I will just keep putting myself through it until I can look at it without wrinkling my forehead and can describe it to someone else in a couple of short sentences with a straight face.

So the session was entitled "IT Leading the Way to Institutional Effectiveness" pluses for the session were:
- not David Yaskin talking about it (don't get me wrong, I really like David, but he went to the Michael Chasen school of well-paced public speaking and tends to talk about the outcomes system at approx 100 miles an hour which does not aid my comprehension issues)
- guy from Global Services doing presentation (so hopefully not too US-centric)
- abstract used language familiar to me - "research question", "gather and track pertinent data"
minuses were:
- Paul already in the session (scheduling malfunction) - is it worth both of us hearing it?
- sitting too far into the room to leave discretely.
Decided that with Outcomes there is strength in numbers and I thought that being able to talk to someone else about it might help me get the hang of it afterall, so I stay.

Soooo, Kendell Rice (presenter) started talking through some very, very basic management evaluation stuff (plan, do, assess, revise) and the importance of keeping vision statements up to date. Interestingly, Kendell is from the deep south (don't know where, but I'm sure of it) and if he doesn't want to stay at Bb, there is a career awaiting him as a TV evangelist. So the session was quite surreal - I was expected declarations of damnation for anyone in the room who did not effectively assess their academic outcomes - he was a nice enough guy but made as much sense on Outcomes as everyone else I've ever heard. "There are only two things you can ever evaluate - quality or quantity".

btw - the Outcomes expert in the UK is Demetra so next plan is to ask her to explain it to me with concrete UK-HE examples of where it might be applied. However, if Demetra is not available it won't be too much of a problem as Mary and I have discovered an interesting stand it. Paul does an absolutely uncanny impression of Demetra...in fact Mary and I were so impressed by it, it took a full 36 hours for us to process just how good it is...definitely one for the Xmas party.

OK, back to Kendell. Many of you will know that the example that David Yaskin always used to explain the Outcomes system was the analysis of the critical thinking skills of engineering students on a scale of 1-4 (I have long suspected that it is this very example that makes it so hard for me to grasp), Kendell had a better one, I tried to explain it to Mary last night (and failed) but luckily for you'all I wrote it down verbatum:
"This can be used to assess the outcomes of Improvement Initiatives, for example the IT Improvement Initiative, which is (to clarify) the initiative within which the IT department initiated a continuous quality improvement initiative to drive forward improvements in areas of functional interest to them" ...boom boom!! bring back the engineers!

Toughest staff development session you'll ever run...

OK then, so that is 1 down, 2 to go....

Paul and I had about 60 people in our session this morning and on the whole they all seemed to enjoy the "show and share" approach we took, ie just a title powerpoint (in case anyone was in the wrong room and hoping for something on webct vista disaster recovery for very small institutions) and then a walk through the Bb site and the blog from the workshop. We finished with approx 5 minutes to spare...which was a good job really...as we then spent 15 minutes dealing out business cards. I got rid of 46 cards altogether (I usually expect to shift 10-15) loads of people asking if we would share structure, content, survey questions....sure, why not...what a lot of friends we made!! Bizarre what captures people's interest....

Not expect quite such a crowd for the portal session in the morning (after all 7.30am on the morning after the party doesn't feel like a prime slot)

Rolling out the BB Content System: a planning story

This was presented by the Maricopa Community College District, and outlined how they were trying to implement the Content System. They make our problems pale into insignificance: 277000 students, lots of staff (I got a bit confused here), 9 separate colleges, students who may be taking courses at more than one of the colleges at the same time....

So pretty big, and pretty disparate. What was interesting was how many of their conclusions fitted with waht we have seen. For example: staff don't really want to share content. They might want to reuse it to some degree, but they don't really want to share. You can't just launch the content system on an unsuspecting public: you need to identify what you want to use it for. The library already had a solution for e-reserves. In their case, they identified enabling staff to reuse content which they delivered multiple times, some sharing if they wanted, and the ability to easily access their content from off-site. They also felt is was important to have something whch would add value for students, so they are using portfolios.

They'd identified some quite interesting models for their file structure. They identified content as either "My Content", belonging to an individual and "Institution Content" belonging to a group in some way. Within the My Content area they encouraged staff to use a folder structure of workspace; courses; shared and common. Common content is content that is available to anyone. Not sure it would work for us, but the interesting thing is this idea of creating a common vocabulary for using the CS.

So quite interesting, and quite a lot I could identify with even though very different institution (s)

The Blackboard Reference Architecture for Performance and Scalability (aka Mary's Revenge)

OK, I'm not actually going to blog this in full, partly because I'm pretty sure no-one would thank me for it, but also because there were a fair number of words that I didn't understand.

However, what I am going to say is that 7.2 allows you to cluster as well as loadbalance, and they favour the use of LDOMs over containers ;-) They reinforced my belief that you really really want to know what you are doiing with Oracle RAC before you start using it with BB.

***Pay attention now***
7.4 will shift much of the gradebook processing client-side. This should make it more efficient in that one client is only likely to be working with one GB at a time. However, it seems to me that there is also a potential risk in that peculiarities on the client side may cause problems.
***done now***

Any that's about all I will inflict on you.

"I'm going to talk about that at a higher level"

This is a quote from the second keynote The Road Ahead - 2007 Blackboard Keynote and bearing in mind that is coming from Michael Chasen we know that is going to be no mean feat!

Michael was excited to be here, to see us all, to celebrate 10 years of Bb, to welcome the huge "joint" Bb/WebCT community, to share the Bb roadmap etc etc etc, basically he was pretty excited. Started with the launch of the new iBoard not yet publically/commercially available but will be given away as a prize in tomorrow night's dance competition....if only Liz was here :-)

The grand unveiling of new stuff was a bit flat, on account of having been given a sneak preview at steering committee. Big headlines are...App Pack 3 released yesterday (Mary and I are thinking we may skip 7.2 and go straight to 7.3) and that Bb has purchased safeassign, this is now freely available for all enterprise clients and hosted as part of BbBeyond which means it will facilitate cross institutional comparisons. safeassign is a bit like Turnitin (we'd been looking at it anyway, but whenever Stuart tried to contact them, they said they weren't taking any new clients...now we know why) but better integrated into Bb and, of course, free rather than not. We'll have a good look at it when we get back.

There was a whole lot of other "coming soon" stuff too but all of them had the "conceptual image, subject to change" disclaimer on the slides so, speaking from experience, are not worth bothering about.

There was one point when MC had been on the same, punctuation-free sentence for several minutes and we thought that if he didn't breath soon, he would keel over - as always the Chasen experience doesn't disappoint!

Second session - applying lessons learned

Session title - The View from Here - Our Online Professional Development Plan to Support a Vista Migration, U of British Columbia

OK so a big institution (check, 46,000 students), one that I have heard of (check) and an international client to boot (check, sort of). The abstract said: "two key objectives: engaging the teaching and learning community in a diverse professional development program, and weaving pedagogical approaches into technology training". Well that all sounds good, doesn't it? What could possible go wrong? Well the start really... and yes, I know, there is a pretty big clue in the title. The presenter started with the good old "get an idea of the people in the room" raise your hands exercise:

How many of you in the room are currently going through vista migration (about 2/3s of the room), how many of you are CE or Vista users (lots of hands), how many of you are traditional Bb learning system users (er...that will be just me then), all that remained was for someone to make the rally cry "grab your torches and pitchforks, we have an intruder in our midst".

Anyway, my shoulders are pretty broad and it isn't the first time I have tried to rise above the great divide and look for transferability of professional development activity - it shouldn't matter, should it? Well, of course, the answer is no, unless the presenters end up not talking about professional development at all, but instead decide to focus on the relative merits of batch migration as compared to course by course migration as compared to wipe the slate and start again.

OK so recap, not a small institution, not titles claiming overarching "pedagogy" and not WebCT clients, OK ...got that. So the next session I decide to attend is "Effective Interactive Discussion Board Strategies, or 'Old Dogs Learn New Tricks' " Embry-Riddle.
So, pretty proud of myself with this one, Embry-Riddle - 34,000 students, big Bb client, early adopter, home of experts Shirley Waterhouse and Becky Vasquez, focused advice on techniques to motivate staff to use online discussion within the curriculum. Now this will get the conference back on track for me, for definite. Soooo sitting in the room the Bb guy says "can I just check you are in the right room?" oh dear, this isn't going to be good, he goes on "the Embry-Riddle session is cancelled, the session in this room will now be Using Bb in Your Campus Emergency Response Plan" run away.......

First session

aka - what happens when session choice goes bad (you might discover this will be a recurring theme)

Session title - Meeting Pedagogical Goals with Bb Software from Babson College

First 3 lessons in conference session choice - US use of the "pedagogical" is a very loosely fitting suit, sessions that use words we would use in abstract eg "curriculum innovation" will probably disappoint and the one I thought I knew but chose to forget - if you've never heard of the institution, there is probably a reason for that.

So, session intro "let us tell you about our institution" 1,900 undergraduates, 1,400 postgraduate, 85 faculty and an e-learning team of 9. At that point I should have legged it for the door, but I was feeling generous/optimistic/jetferenced etc. Basically it would have been a good on-campus session explaining to academic staff how features of Bb can be used within their modules and the importance of site design for ease of use/time on task etc, but everyone in the room knew about the Bb feature set and didn't really need the extended advert. It wasn't about pedagogy at all really (not as we know it, anyway) it was about making things easy to use/easy to do. All that said, I was in a minority in the room, others got very enthusiastic about it all asking loads of questions about how to get staff involved (all 85 of them!), how to secure funding for e-learning teams, what to build/what to buy etc...so, just confirmed for me that it is all about targetting sessions from similar institutions to you.

Chris Etesse and kadoo

As I mentioned in an earlier post Chris Etesse is here and we bumped into him coming out of keynote. As it turns out he didn't stay at Monster long as he was "hired-away" to be CEO of a new start up, kadoo. Catchy slogan don't you think?! Gonna meet him this afternoon to take a look, so once again...more later. Click on image link to find out more

Freakonomics

You know what (d'oh) I've just realised this is a flipping portmanteau too!

So anyway, first keynote of the day gives an idea of the size of the conference - approx 2,500 people all trying not to cross the Bb/WebCT divide... The "my head" thing is weird here too, you know, not giant and posterised like in Nice but definitely in too many places. Mary and I even found ourselves discussing whether a smaller, spinning head was better than a big static one - answer no, not really, and note to self, never, ever, ever have another photo taken, ever.

Keynote kicked off with someone introducing the introducer...always a bit odd. Surprisingly Michael Chasen was very excited to have Steven Levitt doing the keynote (what were the odds?) I read Freakonomics about a year or so ago and quite liked it - certainly liked it better than the Gladwell liteweight stuff from last year's keynote. I think Levitt gave quite a good keynote. I thought it was entertaining, interesting and he did avoid (to some extent) getting sucked into a talk about education, although as an economics professor he did have more relevant experience than some previous keynotes - Cal Ripkin Jnr for example. He told two or three funny stories and then talked about some of his current work studying the economics of prostitution, particularly with regard to pricing strategies. It was interesting and also made everyone in the room think slightly differently about the engagement of guest lecturers (yes, he did get a prosititute to guest lecture one of his classes). One of the best bits was at the end when MC came back on stage and realised he was going to have to follow the prostitute story... he was almost lost for words.

Felt like a nice light start to the conference, but on reflection did focus on some big concepts like the importance of ideas, commitment to keep pushing ideas even if others try to stop you, not following the mainstream, finding something that is "yours" and authenticity in designing learning activities and experiences ...albeit from a very unusual angle.

Focus Group

This wasn't exactly the Focus Group it made itself out to be, but still...

It was about giving staff and students access to info about "What's new, What's wrong and What's due"

Some points that came up:
would staff want to see info at a global level or by course?
would they want info about work that had been handed in?
would they want notifications by email?
does everything a member of staff wants to know about class as what's due, rather than what's new?
should/could information about students faling behind be sent to staff with responsibility for retention?

would students want to see info at a global level or course level?
should students be able to see all their grades in one place?

Thoughts, anyone?

as if we weren't nervous enough

Check out the BbWorld playlist where 5 key players recommend their 5 favourite sessions.
http://blackboard.com/company/events/BbWorld07/Playlist.htm

Mike Simmonds from Texas Women's University is looking forward to the "toughest staff development session you'll ever run...." session based on the Uni Exec engagement and Volker Kleinschmidt (yes, Mary, that is exactly who I said) is looking forward to the "Whose portal is it anyway?" session.....gulp!

For those of you not scared by this, just to let you know that usually when we attend Bb events without Mary, she asks us to got to sessions by Volker (possibly as a punishment) and write down everything that he says, not expect to understand any of it, just write it down. I suddenly feel the need to lie down but the Freakonomics keynote beckons.

international clients reception

OK, so we need to set the scene for this one. Paul declares that under no circumstances is he going to the international client reception. We try (and fail) to find the "special client leaders" reception. We stood in the foyer at the alloted time but the payphone didn't ring with the next clue for the actual location...so we set off to get something to eat and walking past the international reception, Paul says, "OK, let's go in there for a bit but we are out by 7" (which was about 10 minutes), finally dragged him away about 8-ish. Anyone else know that was going to happen?

Soooo, international (certainly more people than the horror Helen and I experienced in Baltimore) lots of Bb people, some new UK faces and some old UK faces - you know who I mean. Good to get the chance to catch up with Demetra (who says hi everyone), Aaron Goldstein (still laughing and looking confused) and Paul Grist (one of my fave Bb people ever who I haven't seen since his Edinburgh humilification, it was great to catch up). Carl O'Keefe, Joe Mitchell and Paul Helm set up some kind of scousers-by-the-bar special interest group and various US-Bb people kept asking me really difficult questions. The nice lady from Reading tried to get me to explain our entire portal strategy in 5 minutes, Juan Luca (Head of International) tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a payrise for me with Paul. Aaron and Carl had clearly got the "try to weave the word 'outcomes' into every client conversation" corporate memo, Demetra had not (thank goodness). UofLeeds people made quite an impression on Paul and Mary for very different reasons. I got an invite to Amsterdam to run some staff development sessions for the sales team, to tell them "fully and frankly" what it is like from the client end...hmmmm...I think I could do that.

But the big news of the event was that there was pineapple on the buffet so Paul was happy and Mary and I were spared the anticipated pineapunt (trekking from restaurant to restaurant trying to find one that sells pineapple). Dinner later was interesting (Paul's turn to choose) not too bad but we did all wimped out of trying the "cheeseburger pizza". So you see, Boston, not just portmanteau words but also portmanteau food :0)

pre-conference sessions

Yes, I have something conference-related to post. The pre-conference session I went to yesterday morning was not great, it was Bb-facilitated and aimed at academic staff with little or no experience of instructional design. Nothing really wrong with what was said but then again nothing worth writing down either.

The afternoon, on the other hand, was a whole different story, loads worth writing down but sworn to a whole host of confidentiality stuff until later in the conference. The afternoon session was the Bb Ideas Exchange Steering Committee meeting, it was great to catch up with the people I met back in December. We were then treated to various sneak previews; the "coming soon" keynote announcements, the future scenarios for Bb (the session you emailed me about Brian), the app packs availability schedule, developments of social learning spaces, further scholar stuff and then....the moment we'd all been waiting for - Project NG roadmap and a detailed look at the NG prototypes. Can't do that sort of stuff justice on a blog esp with the NDA, but will do an e-learning development team briefing on it when I get back - one thing I will say is that, unlike recent experiences, I did like what I saw.

portmantwo

Round 2 of competition:

Just to quickly recap on the one that still hasn't been guessed - Humilified

Three more real ones from last 24 hours to have a go at:
Calital
Amphibibus
Scholark

And a new one from me "shoutlook" - the expression of frustration when web access sends you message mid sentence. Can I have a point?

Normal life

I used to have a normal life, free from any surridium....

...but on the bright side, my room has a nice view, I have fewer ribbons on my badge than Louise (less ostentatious) but more than Paul, and there's a swimming pool.

Sunday night in Boston

A guy says hi to me in the bar, "who's that" asks Paul. "Don't you remember, you ate a burger on his bed in Dallas" I replied (almost with a straight face) and then it was downhill all the way.

Andrew Rosen fed all my frankensteins in a very short space of time - studio 60, heroes, presidential pardons, a couple of west wing quotes, a surrealist joke, iPhones, tennis, a bit more american politics, a chasen story, recommending scary drinks and hot sauces as well as reading out a "humorous" email from Bb re the patriot act. His parting comment "what have you done!!!" as he looks out of the bar window to see the rain bouncing off the pavement. Sing along - Everywhere we go, we always bring the weather with us...

Continuing the singing theme, Mary and I too scared to go into the restroom because of the woman singing at the top of her voice from in there, then trying to get in and out as quickly as possible before she emerged from the cubicle and spotted the fact that we were hysterical (or worse asked us to join in). Did the whole seafood dinner thing, then walking back from the restaurant a taxi comes speeding towards us as we are crossing the road, screeches to a halt and a man jumps out shouting "hey! hey!".......what the????.....then the really scary bit when we realise it is Mike "Country" Cuthriell in his "I've been vacationing in NY, don't you know" hawaiian-print shorts and flip flops...too traumatised to return to the bar for scary drinks with Andrew, retired to bed early trying to forget.

Now I'm not one for complaining...

in the last few weeks, I have been to Bath (a spa town), Harrogate (a spa town), and now Boston. Not a spa town. And not near Leeds. It is hot and it is raining. My badge has not got many ribbons on it, and my view is this:

My knees hurt from the plane. And who's idea was it to wear a pair of new shoes for this visit? I went down to the lobby to work for a change of scene, the musak here is rather loud - and it is jazz. Unfortunately, other hotels are full, otherwise I would have changed. Anyway, things going well, wish you were here.

btw normal service continues on the LTI/LTA blog. Blackboard related stuff will go here.

Too showy??

....er yes, probably....

Exemplary Course Program - Workshop

Interesting session - 15ish participants - half Bb or half WebCT, mostly small institutions. Favourite quotes from the session:

"we alternate between swearing by Bb and swearing at Bb"

"it's not that we failed to finish, we were just not sufficiently advanced when we ran out of time"

It was a good insight into the process of the ECP - the sorts of things the committee look for, their views on the absolute givens in good practice and their unintentional, but obvious, affordance to US-style curriculum design.

The session began by the whole group brainstorming what are the key elements of good practice, when I get a copy of the full mindmap built, I'll post it up, but in the meantime, thought you might be interested in the first four suggestions put forward:

• good quality online discussions
• consistency of navigation and structure
• clarity of purpose and rationale
• opportunities for collaboration and shared knowledge construction

So we are obviously on the right lines. The group got very enthusiastic about my suggestion of "stickiness" (full credit for term, of course, really belongs to Liz - thanks Liz). They loooovvveed it.

We then went on to critique (based upon the ECP rubric) two unsuccessful entries from this year's submissions - one Bb and one WebCT. This was really useful although my group didn't have any shared vocabulary so we spent a lot of time debating what we meant by learner support, interactivity etc. The objective was to provide concise feedback on the sections of the rubric to be sent to the entrants to suggest ways they might improve their sites.

What I know from the process - I'm really glad we don't use WebCT (much easier to have inconsistent design), course cartridges are still horrible, clarity of purpose of site is even more important than I thought (if that is possible) and it is really hard to figure out what people are doing in their sites when you just look at them cold.

The rubric is used by a number of institutions as an internal tool:

• for staff self-assessment
• as a framework for workshop activities
• as the basis of detailed instructional design guidelines
• to replicate the ECP competition within the institution

Some interesting stuff said about content-rich sites, use of media and role of learning objects (the things not the company) but I'll save those for now and blog them seperately.

portmanteau

Yes, that's right - it's competition time - with many excellent prizes!!!

This site is called a blogston in honour of the fact we appear to be in the portmanteau word capital of the world (and you know how I love them) ... so I thought this sounds like a cue for a competition (and I know how you love them, you know who you are, people).

Here are a few that I've encountered in the last 12 hours to get you started - what are all these about?

scanalyzer
temptrol
nasagestion

3 points for the correct answer, 2 point for any funny Bb/conference/SHU-related suggested translations, 1 point for a funny non-related suggestion.

Also there is 1 point available for any newly-made Bb/conference/SHU-related portmanteau.

Here's my go at a newly-made one:

tipulator (anyone who is not Paul) - is that worth a point?

Enjoy

BbWorld goes YouTube

er...of course??

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c4Yu_Iepg4

Settling in SHU-style

As usual we spent the first few hours here getting acclimatised (yes to the glorious sunshine) but also to the area. In fact it was all way too easy, we had found the required bookshop, supermarket, pharmacy, bars, restaurants and numerous Starbucks within the first few minutes, not to mention the very strange public transport they have around here (more on that later). It might not sound like much of an achievement but since Liz and I did the Dallas-route-march for about 4 hours trying to find a single Starbucks when we were at the Educause conference, I've come to take nothing for granted. Last night we fulfilled another SHU first-night-at-a-conference tradition, wandering the streets, walking past many, many restaurants trying to decide where to eat, only to end up eating in the Chinese restaurant right next door to the hotel - well at least we walked up an appetite and Paul got to practice his tip maths (15% of 100...hmmm)

Anyway more later

We're here...so far so good

OK - yes it was a bit of an early start and the food on the flight was the worst I've ever experienced, but we arrived in Boston lunchtime (local time), the hotel actually knew we were coming, I've got a fabulous view over Back Bay and the river from the 20th floor of the North Tower, Mary likewise from the 22nd floor of the South Tower, Paul is overlooking the carpark from the 7th floor (reserved for smokers and carpark enthusiasts).

And of course the bit you all really, really care about - it is a balmy 80 degrees and it is going to get hotter and hotter as the week progresses. Ahh so this is what summer is supposed to feel like :-)