Everybody's Blogging

We noticed an article in the Oracle, the campus newspaper at University of South Florida, about a new weblogging project called blog@USF. The university is hosting a weblog service for their students using WordPress, an open source weblog server.

My colleague and buddy, Melissa Chotiner (Blackboard PR Manager and newly converted to the wonders of blogging) is standing over my shoulder saying, "Greg, Greg, why can't we put a blogging feature in our software?" The answer is there's no technical reason why we can't, but we haven't heard from customers that they really want this as a core feature of Blackboard software.

What do you think? Blogging in Blackboard Academic Suite? Thumbs up or thumbs down? How would you use it on your campus? Are teachers and students on your campus already using blogs in education?

P.S. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Learning Objects Inc. has created a Building Block called Journal LX that incorporates weblogs into Blackboard. There's also a Building Block from Baylor University called My Journal that also sort of blog-like.

Blackboard and RSS

Did we forget to post about this yesterday? It definitely deserves it's own post.

During his Product Roadmap speech, Matthew mentioned the RSS Building Block under development by Matt Hartman of the University of Cincinnatti. Matt's got a few more tweaks to make before he's ready to release it, but the demo he gave in the Building Block booth today was sweet.

Basically, the RSS Building Block defines RSS as a content type in the Blackboard Learning System. The instructor can now grab an RSS or Atom feed, insert it into the course content, decide whether students will view headlines or the full item, and set caching on the feed. When the student views the course, it will automatically go out and grab the RSS feed (depending on the caching parameters) and display the updated content inside the course. Great way for instructors to include weblog content, news feeds, etc. in their course.

Kudos to Matt Hartman and his collaborators on the bb-opensource mailing list for their work on this cool Building Block.

Second Days

Why is it that second days of a conference always feel busier than the first day? Here it is after 2:00pm and I'm just getting around to my first post of the day. Whew. I'm sure the increased activity has something to do with more people registering on the second day or participants arriving late. (It certainly couldn't have anything to do with hanging out until midnight with Paul Erickson from the U. of Nebraska and the aforementioned "crew" from Broward County Schools, could it?) The exhibit hall has been busy busy busy this afternoon. Thankfully, Jan came to relieve me from booth duty a little before 2pm, so I got to sneak across the street for lunch at Burger King and steal a few minutes to blog.

I started off the morning with a focus group for Project Caliper. David Yaskin & I have run two of these at the conference, one yesterday focusing on the higher education institutions, and one today oriented around K12. One of the great things about Users Conference is that we can get groups of our users together and get feedback on the products themselves. We've run focus groups on new projects, like Caliper and on existing feature sets like the Discussion Board, Online Gradebook, and Assignment Manager & Digital Dropbox. These encounters are key to helping us make product design decisions. Also, this year is the first time we've set up a usability lab at Users Conference. Our product development team is conducting usability testing with conference participants.

I've been busy in the Building Blocks booth. We've had a steady stream of traffic flowing through. For those out there in the blogosphere who aren't familiar, Building Blocks is Blackboard's open architecture that allows developers from academic institutions or other software vendors to extend the Blackboard products. There are still plenty of people who don't know a lot about Building Blocks, so Jan, Bob, and I wind up giving a lot of overviews. However, what's really amazing is the number of people who do know Building Blocks inside and out. It seems like every five minutes I'm pointing a user at Bob Alcorn, our Senior Architect, because they're coming to the booth with a technical development question that's out of my league.

Up later this afternoon: David's formal presentation on Caliper.

We're Not The Only Ones

We're not the only ones blogging the 2005 Blackboard User's Conference.

Thomas Winston Thorpe, manager of the Training & Development team at Loyola College in Maryland, is also blogging the UC. The good thing about Thomas' blog -- he gets to blog the sessions. Since the Bbloggers are staffing the conference, we don't get to attend many of the sessions, so Thomas's blog can give you a look at the conference from a participant's perspective instead of a staffer's perspective.

Swing by the Building Blocks booth, Thomas, and we'll compare conference blogging notes.

Is there anyone else out there blogging the UC?