Or the Blackboard (WebCT?) 2007 European conference to those that speak English. I was planning to blog more extensively from the conference this year, but my plans have been scuppered by a distinct lack of internet access at this learning technology conference. There’s no wifi in the conference venue and the ‘cyber cafe’ (haven’t heard that term in a while) consists of about 15 stand-up email terminals for a 400 delegate conference.

It’s lunchtime on day 1 – the guy from the World Bank (Bruno Lanvin) provided a broad and interesting perspective on how technology is currently the key globalisation driver and how education and technology can work to reduce global inequalities. Typical keynote fayre.

The opening Blackboard keynote was okay – a number of vague statements on future directions and how they won’t make the same mistakes re. stability and quality in future as Blackboard have invested lots of resources for testing and quality assurance. I became more depressed when Mr Chasen added 2.0 to the end of a number of key terms. Apparently we’re to have Blackboard 2.0 (I thought they were already on 7?), along with Web 2.0, e-learning 2.0 and even… ‘education 2.0’ (I wonder if Bb have trademarked that yet). I think he means they’re planning to employ a bit of Ajax technology here and there.

To end on a brighter note – some Manchester University colleagues covered copying course content between different flavours of WebCT and Blackboard for simultaneous delivery of the same course at 4 different institutions. Their conclusion was that JISC Reload really didn’t help, while the WebCT IMS export tool was the key to migration. They had quite a few problems with migrating just one fairly basic content based course, so it served as a good reminder that we at LSE will need to be extremely thorough with our migration plans this year.

Finally, I need to go and see a brief glimpse of some Cote D’Azur sunshine after being stuck inside all day!

Kris.