Conversations with Bloggers

Turns out there are a few more conference participants blogging the 2005 Users Conference.

Patrick Klassen is blogging in Dutch, so I don't know what he's writing (but I trust he's having a good time, like the rest of us). I haven't run into Patrick yet, but Kate Boardman came by this morning to personally lobby for a blog feature in the product. I've known Kate for years, but didn't know she was a blogger, so now I've got a new feed to put into my aggregator.

Shortly thereafter, Thomas Thorpe (who I mentioned yesterday) stopped by the booth and we had a long conversation about adoption of Blackboard at Loyola College in Maryland. They have the full Blackboard Academic Suite, as well as the Blackboard Transaction System.

Thomas was saying that the biggest driver for increased adoption by faculty at Loyola was having the Blackboard Academic Suite integrated with the Datatel student information system. Once every student automatically was assigned an account, one a Blackboard course web site was automatically generated for every course (with students automatically enrolled in the course web site based on registrar data), then the threshhold for getting involved was so low that faculty adoption became nearly ubiquitous.