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!

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!

Photos

Just a quick link to some photos from this afternoon at the conference. Also, here are some pictures from yesterday's Partner Reception.

Blackboard, MERLOT . . . and now CAREO?

CAREO (Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects) is a learning object repository run out of the University of Calgary, University of Alberta, and Athabasca University. Ed-blogger extraordinaire and he-of-the-apostrophed-name, D'Arcy Norman, notes our earlier MERLOT announcement and writes:

"At the user’s conference, they appear to have announced a new Building Block for Bb that lets you search Merlot from within the Bb interface, to easily add resources to courses.

That’s exactly what I’ve been hoping to build for CAREO/APOLLO, but haven’t had any time to address. They’ll be releasing the source for this building block, so that might get me at least partially there…" [from D'Arcy Norman Dot Net]

Hey, D'Arcy, great idea!

The MERLOT Building Block is a fairly straightforward search servlet accessing metadata through MERLOT's web services. Assuming CAREO has their own search & retrieve web service, it shouldn't be too difficult to modify the code to function with a CAREO web service. So a lot of the work is probably already done for you.

This kind of idea is precisely the reason we decided to share the source code for this Building Block. We really want other developers to take this code and run with it, using it as a basis for making similar search & retrieval Building Blocks for a variety of services (or even combining all of those search services into one Building Block).

Blackboard Celebs

All the famous ASU Listserv (aka BLKBRD-L) folks are here. You can spot them because they're the ones with the crowds hovering around eager to learn more, see demos, chat about favorite listserv posts, etc. Just this afternoon at the Building Blocks booth we were swarmed with Bb celebs.

• Jeff Nuckles (Joliet Junior College) was surrounded by a sea of instructional technologists as he demo-ed his Discussion Grader Building Block
• Sorel Reisman (MERLOT) was on hand to demo the new MERLOT Search Building Block
  Matt Hartman (University of Cincinnati) whose RSS Content Building Block made him a rock star of Matthew Pittinsky's Product Roadmap presentation swung by to tell me he has yet another version of the RSS Content Building Block to show (this version with better Atom support)
• Santo Sighting! Santo Nucifora (Seneca College) stopped by the Building Blocks booth to say hi. I haven't seen him in 4 years (since Educause in Indianapolis) so it was great to see him again.
• John Llewellyn and Alicia Balsera (University of South Florida) stopped by to say hi and try to win the bottle of MERLOT for which we had a prize drawing.
• Wayne Twitchell (Grinnell College) the person I am counting on to help us work the kinks out of the Starting Block (I'll try to get Bob Alcorn to post more info about this one).

There were many more - photos to follow!

Caliper

So one more cat out of the bag -- during the Academic Suite Product Roadmap presentation, our CEO, Michael Chasen, officially announced Project Caliper, the "secret project" I've been working on for the last couple of months with David Yaskin, our VP of Product Strategy.

After talking with our clients about their needs for tracking student outcomes, managing program assessment, accreditation, and other performance related needs, Blackboard realized that we're in a unique position to help clients effectively use technology to solve the problems around gathering, tracking, and managing this data. Enter Caliper.

Caliper is a project to build an entirely new system that will become the fourth application in the Blackboard Academic Suite. It will address client needs in four areas:

• Assessment Management (for program assessment & accreditation)
• Enterprise test & survey (placement testing, benchmark testing, etc.)
• Student Outcome Tracking
• Institutional Research & Data Analysis

Feedback has already been terrific, and clients are eager to work collaboratively with us to define the requirements for a system that's going to help them measure and manage performance on their campuses at the institutional, program, and classroom levels.

By the way, "Caliper" = tool for measurement. Get it? ;-)

Feedback on the Conference Kickoff

So Dan Cane, Senior VP of R&D and co-founder of Blackboard had a few words to say about Michael Chasen's introduction to Cal Ripkin Jr.

That is the scariest thing I've ever seen. A giant Michael Chasen.

Bill Atkinson, a reporter from the Baltimore Sun said, "Wow, this is amazing. A full house!"

To see the photos checkout the slideshow at Shutterfly.

Lunchtime

Things have been really busy in the Exhibit Hall. The Building Blocks booth has been swamped with folks stopping by, asking great questions, learning about the upcoming 3rd Annual Developers Conference. One of the highlights for me at Users Conference is being able to finally meet so many people I've only emailed or talked to on the phone.

When he isn't in the booth, Bob Alcorn, Blackboard's Senior Architect has been super busy presenting on the Building Blocks technology. Greg Ritter, our Director of Strategy, has been working with David Yaskin, our VP of Product Strategy on some focus groups. We'll hear more about what they've been up to after 2pm.

I've given up getting the photos off my camera for now. It just isn't cooperating with the laptop. More from me after the keynote.

Blackboard and MERLOT Unleash Learning Resources

Okay, the press releases started rolling out the door at 7am, so I guess I can start breaking some of the stories on the weblog. Heck, before the day's out I might break one or two before the press releases go out, but don't tell our Marketing team. ;-)

One of the smaller, but cooler, surprises announcement at the conference today is that Blackboard has teamed up with MERLOT to create a MERLOT Search Building Block. When installed on a Blackboard Learning System server, the MERLOT Search Building Block allows an instructor to search the MERLOT repository from within the course authoring environment of the Blackboard Learning System. As they discover the learning objects in MERLOT that they would like to include in their course, it's just one click to publish a link to that resource in their course Web site. What's really exciting about this approach is that it goes beyond what other course management systems have done with MERLOT; it's the first time that the MERLOT search web service has been integrated right into the course management interface.

Another exciting tidbit regarding the MERLOT Search Building Block: when it's officially released after the conference, we're going to be open sourcing the code to the Building Block so the user community can extend and build upon the MERLOT-Blackboard integration.

Kickoff Keynote

The conference has officially started. Cal (can I call him that?) started off his presentation telling us that just last night he helped his daughter Rachel with her geometry proofs on Blackboard. How cool is that? I'll post some pictures as soon as I can get them off my camera.

The Building Blocks booth now has power and computers but no internet connectivity. Just 14 minutes to go before the Exhibit Hall opens...

Conference Kickoff

It is 8:32 and attendees are gathering to hear Michael Chasen, Blackboard CEO introduce Cal Ripkin Jr. They've got a lively mix of music playing including U2, Big Country, and REM. Attendees are smiling. Blackboarders are rarin' to go.

Meanwhile, the adjacent Exhibit Hall, the conference team is busy putting last minute touches on the booths. The Building Blocks booth doesn't have power, computers or even the demo kiosks set up yet but I have faith. There is nothing like a deadline to focus one's energies.

Things are about to start!

The 2005 Blackboard Users Conference is a hit!

And it hasn't even started yet! (Well, it officially starts in about 45 minutes. Close enough, eh?)

How do we know it's a hit, then? We officially have over well over 1400 people registered as of yesterday. 1437 to be exact. That makes it the largest Blackboard Users Conference ever.

And, boy, do we have some surprise announcements lined up for you today.