One Long Keynote

A note from Matthew Pittinsky, Chairman of Blackboard:

Hey, this is Matthew Pittinsky piggy-backing on Greg Ritter's account. He promises me that tomorrow I will have one of my own. It is the end of day one, and my biggest responsibility as chairman of Blackboard is behind me. The Keynotes. Whew.

Its a great privilige to co-present our annual product strategy talk each year. Sometimes we get the tempo and topics right. Other times?.... Not so much. I am sure others will share their thoughts but I'm afraid it went too long, and tackled one topic too many. Lesson learned.

As others have posted, this year's keynote had some exciting announcements though. The MERLOT Search open source application (which I wanted to call MILES, but that is another story). Caliper, our development project to tackle the tough issues of academically-useful data collection and analysis. Backpack, our new off-line desktop client application. Cool stuff.

Less sexy, but in my view just as important, was the sharing of different examples of schools and universities who use Blackboard and have developed strong ROI cases for their higher ups when it comes to e-Learning technologies. It is clear that we are moving from a 1.0 stage of e-Learning to a 2.0, in the sense that the initial focus on breadth and depth is giving away to new concerns with openness, ROI and more. All good topics for discussion.

On a personal note, something I couldn't say up on stage but felt deeply, was just an overwhelming sense of humility (and some self-pinching) to look out at an audience of 1,400 people. And to know that those attending the UC are but a fraction of the overall community of practice. Its a real high -- one I guess I abused by going 20 minutes over! Sorry!

Final thought? Keynote for the Mac is awesome. I love using for my presentations. Just makes a huge difference in production quality.

Looking forward to Day Two!