Academic Suite Reception

I'm so jazzed that Matthew posted to the blog albeit through Greg Ritter's blog account. By tomorrow he will have an account of his very own :)

The Academic Suite Reception this evening was fabulous. I think we demo-ed the MERLOT Building Block to more people than I can remember. Speaking of merlot, I want to congratulate Vicki Fegers from the School Board of Broward County, Florida. She was the lucky winner of the MERLOT merlot prize drawing. Vicki, please drop by the Building Blocks booth tomorrow to claim your prize!

There was much mixing and mingling tonight. Everywhere I looked I saw clients engaged in conversation, laughter, demoing their websites to one another, talking with vendors, and generally enjoying themselves. I too enjoyed the many conversations I had with folks.

This evening I talked with
- JQ Johnson (University of Oregon) about Blackboard's relationship with Sakai, work in the Standards community, and library systems integration.
- Bert Leene (Avans University, Netherlands), who I met last year at Blackboard's European Users Conference and I talked about his website and all the photos I took from the Bb European UC.
- Mark O'Neil (Dartmouth College), Bob Alcorn and I spoke about Sakai, OKI, and Blackboard's progress implementing the IMS Tools & Interoperability Spec in preparation for the June 2005 IMS Alt-i-Lab.
- Wayne Twitchell, Malcolm Murray and a crew from the University of Durham (UK), folks from Brigham Young University and so many others popped in to chat, see demos, learn about Project Caliper, talk about specific APIs, and more.

Although I'd been on my feet since 6:00am this morning and my feet were killing me, it was so energizing to talk to so many clients, answer questions, and hear about all the neat things going on in their lives and at their institutions. Day two is going to be great fun!