This’ll be a quick post as my tired old legs need a rest. Just a note on the Blackboard ‘next generation’ talk (presented by the head of product development) that I attended yesterday afternoon. This was generally disappointing as it was a rehash of the opening keynote with a little more detail, but it still managed to be suitably vague. Bb confirmed that they’re extending support for WebCT 4 CE for those that want to wait for Blackboard 2.0/NG or whatever they choose to call it (hey, they even refer to it verbally as WebCT rather than Blackboard Learning System CE 4 blah blah blah). It strikes me then that there is little incentive to migrate to CE6 in the near future if there are going to be further changes down the line and waiting is now ‘officially’ an option. They also outlined how they see the future Blackboard Academic Suite architecture as a framework for linking a whole number of Blackboard and non-Blackboard systems together – including… Moodle as some sort of ‘niche’ VLE within the Blackboard universe. See ‘Other 3rd party CMS or LMS’ in the diagram below.

From Blackboard Conference 2007

Just attended an interesting session on how Sheffield Hallam University provide Blackboard support for their staff – essentially they outsource their first line support for basic technical queries, thus allowing SHU staff to concentrate on pedagogical and more in depth questions.

Before that I listened to a discussion about the application of blog, wiki, podcasting and other ’emerging technologies’ for teaching and learning. There were a few people trying similar things to LSE, one person even plans to use Elgg to support their PhD community – didn’t get a chance to chat unfortunately. But generally I got the impression that wikis and blogs haven’t become ‘mass market’ anywhere else yet (at least nobody from Warwick piped up).

It looks like this is going to be my final post from the conference as they’re packing up the cyber-cafe around me – guess I’d better go and catch the end of the final session – Blackboard’s approach to open-source; should be fun.