Pandæmonium

This conference is my first Blackboard conference, and the first anyone from Richmond has attended in four years. One of my big goals in attending the conference was to get a better line on where Blackboard was overall, and where they’re going. As a result I have planned on attending several of Blackboard’s “Listening Sessions.”

First up was the Listening Session on Blackboard Client Support. I should say that I’ve been impressed with our support from Blackboard, especially with Randy Min, who was our TSA for a while this past year. My purpose in attending this session was more to get a level of how everyone else felt about client support and what issues they had that could become issues for me.

Craig Chanoff, Blackboard’s VP for Client Support, presided. He started out with a brief presentation looking at the problems from a year ago and reporting on where they are now. While they still get plenty of technical issue calls, they’re also starting to get calls about things like capacity planning and faculty training. Chanoff sees this as a sign that things overall are better. He also pointed to their implementation of Google Search on Blackboard’s support site, and mentioned that soon the search tool will scan all of the different list archives, not just ASU’s primary Blackboard list.

Quality Assurance processes are better now than before. Version 7 went through six months of beta testing at schools before it was released. Chanoff did say that he was disappointed not to have made progress with browser compatibility. He offered that WebCT has some nice features for browser support, so perhaps we’ll see something in time.

Craig also talked about Blackboard’s new Enhancement Requests process. They received 500 requests in 2005. Of those, 25% were gradebook related, 30% pertained to the GUI, and 45% were technical (relating to e-mail, APIs and so on). 75% of the requests were accepted or flagged for future development efforts. Not too bad.

As for the Listening part of the session. Here are some of the items that came up:

• Blackboard’s Internal Knowledge – Blackboard seems to know things that we don’t, and we can only get the information if we ask the right question of the right TSA. Craig said that they currently have 2 knowledge bases in the client support area, one of which is a wiki. Blackboard may make the wiki available to clients, flagging some items so that only the Bb staff can see, but opening up lots of other items to the rest of us.
• Pushing fixes to clients. Oftentimes we have to hit a problem, diagnose, and call in to technical support only to find that it’s a known issue that’s come out since the last release. Craig said that as of version 7 a list of known issues is available on their support site. He added that as of today, clients can not only subscribe to news alerts (RSS feeds) from Behind the Blackboard, but they can subscribe to RSS feeds for case communication.
• Craig pushed the Blackboard WebEx site as a place for clients to learn more. They’re working to put more events out there for us, so keep visitng the Blackboard WebEx site.
• Blackboard uses Peoplesoft’s CRM and HR products for client support. Just so we know.
• John Fontaine spoke about how development is working to improve the quality of what we get. He pointed to the changes they’ve made with the Gradebook, since high-stakes assessments essentially fail in 6.2 (our current version!). In 6.3 it’s better, but it’s fixed for the most part in 7.0. They’re currently investigating running multiple JVMs on the system to accommodate the huge amount of resources necessary for assessments. They’re also looking at making multiple attempts at assessments possible. As a workaround for clients having problems with assessments, John suggested going to a question-by-question format for the test or quiz, since all-at-once requires so much more memory.
• Another client asked about being able to grade a single question for all students at once. Fontaine is interested in this, but it didn’t seem like anyone was working on it now.

A good session overall. Clients aren’t frustrated, Blackboard is making progress, and I think Richmond is in a good place with our systems, UR Operations & DBA support and our tech support from Blackboard.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, was our keynote speaker. He shared several entertaining stories of tipping point moments – those moments when someone does something that transforms. The big message was that we’re on the verge of a tipping point with eLearning. We just need someone to come along with a transformational application of systems like Blackboard. It’ll be cheap and will require putting several disparate pieces together that none of us see today, but when it happens it will be transformational.

Not sure I agree here. While most of us would like a transformational embrace of the resources we provide, not all changes are transformational. The academy in particular is slow to embrace change because the current methods of teaching have been adjusted and proven over time.

He focused on Connectors – people who know people from a large number of social circles. Most of us have work circles, home circles and maybe two or three other circles depending on our interests. Connectors have 10 or more circles, and they’re the ones you want to find when you’re trying to get the word out. They know people you don’t, and what’s more important – people know them and listen to them. Paul Revere was a connector – Gladwell highlights him in his book. While Paul Revere rode in one direction to alert the populace, William Dawes rode in the other. Revere’s towns raised the alarm and were ready when the British showed up. Dawes, who didn’t know people the way Revere did, failed to reach the people who would gather the troops, and the British rolled through those towns.

He also explained Mavens – people who know everything (instead of everyone), and who are driven to share the good things they know. Gladwell’s brother is a computer Maven, helping him to buy the right computer so he doesn’t have to understand the world of MHz and GB. Mavens are the ones who keep grocery stores in line. Stores have learned that people buy stuff when you put a “Consistently Low Price!” sign on everything. So what keeps stores from setting high prices and putting “Consistently Low Price!” signs out there? Mavens. Mavens know when a price is low, when a bargain is good or bad, and if you’re not behaving nicely they’ll tell everyone they know.

All in all a pleasant keynote. And I’ll keep thinking about what it is we need to tip eLearning, but I’m not convinced it’s a tip-able thing.

For the first break I braced myself for a Blackboard session on what’s coming in Blackboard. This was one of those sessions where 10-20 people sit in chairs at the booth. The big deal is that the Discussion Board is almost completely redone. Faculty and students will now be able to search in the Discussion Board within a date range, across forums. Peer review can be set up for forums so TAs or students can moderate or grade. It’s possible to set up e-mail notification of posts to a Bb Discussion Board (note to self: e-mail from the server is going to exponentially increase), and forums can now have “controlled release”, i.e. faculty can create a forum and make it available between certain dates just like other Blackboard content.

Blackboard has also integrated a discussion grader into the Discussion Board. This will replace the Building Block we’re currently using but the good news is the new discussion grader was deployed with the assistance of the folks who built the Building Block.

Break food was not good, but that’s no surprise. On to the next session.

Continental breakfast at the Manchester Grand Hyatt is $19. $19! I hadn’t yet registered for the conference so I decided to register then check the Marriott’s buffet price. Perhaps I missed it somewhere on the Bb World site, but they’re serving breakfast in the San Diego Conference Center, so my anger with the Hyatt’s pricing actually helped save Richmond a bit of money.

I was a little late getting to the first session of the conference, but I managed to get a seat towards the back of the room. One of the nice things at the conference is that rather than provide just rows of chairs, Blackboard has long tables where you can put out your stuff. I promptly pulled out my PowerBook and looked for the wireless network. There wasn’t any! My only option was to pay $24.00 a day to the convention center. In disbelief I checked the conference program, where I learned that if I sit on the ground within 50 feet of the e-mail stations, I can pick up a small wireless network set up for the conference.

Blackboard, if you’re reading, please fix this for next year. It’s a technology conference, for Pete’s sake. And you have the means to make this happen. This is the first conference I’ve attended in years (more than 3) that didn’t have a wireless network available to all.

Glen Parker’s presentation was a good start. He’d made his presentation slides available before the conference. I shared them with Betsy, who told me she hoped I’d attend his session to hear more. The slides are available online.

Here are some of the things I heard that weren’t on the slides:

• Glen likes the Activity Accumulator information because it provides a better query interface (SQL) than looking at the system logs. We should understand how this information is stored for those times we want to know what a person was doing in the system when a problem occurred.
• Gradebook Main stores student attempts on gradebook items. The qti field contains XML information about the attempt.
• Gradebook scores, along with when they were recorded are kept in the Attempts table, not Gradebook Main.
• Glen presented four problems in need of a SQL solution. Each of the four examples is a roadmap to most any other query you might want to make against the system. The introductory slide of features you can query is based on version 6.2; for 6.3 it would be a much longer list.
• His Student Performance Assistant query was used for a Building Block that shows faculty how many times a student has accessed the course over time.
• USF keeps a year’s worth of data in the Activity Accumulator. I think this is a default. We should check to see how long we keep our data.

I'm in Wisnton-Salem this week attending Wake Forest's Technology Consortium 2006. The theme is mobile computing and it's my first real look at how Richmond might engage with the mobile world. Years ago I had a Palm IIIc, but it lacked connectivity. That significantly reduced its usefulness, though I did use the device to take notes in meetings and to review my synchronized e-mail.

Two requirements emerge in these sessions as requirements of any mobile initiative we might undertake. Mobile devices today are connected and convenient. That's their power and that's what we need to understand if we're going to leverage the devices for teaching and learning. One of the most interesting observations was made by Jay Dominick, Wake's AVP and CIO: it's taken ten years of significant effort to have 90% of our University community to use computers; it's taken ten years (perhaps less) of no effort for 90% our University community to use mobile devices. Are we promoting the right device? It's not as if we could abandon the computer for a mobile device, but it is time to start looking at the devices our students, faculty and staff want to use.

Where will the convergence take place – Handheld units or cell phones? The wisdom at the Consortium is the cell phone. Wake's pilot programs demonstrate that when the device is the student's primary cell phone, the experience and benefits of the device are significantly better than when it's not the primary cell phone. IBM also demonstrated some compelling voice applications they've been developing using the XHTML and VoiceXML standards. Voice will be important in a converged device, and this points even more to the phone being the converged tool.

My one take away at this point is that we need to develop our services for the tools that our students, faculty, staff and even alumni have today. Wake has tried giving devices to the students but there are headaches and costs everywhere in convincing students to use the institutionally-supplied device instead of the one they've had all along. Developing services for all mobiles means we're looking for the web browser to be standards compliant, since that's the way our community will receive our services. Wake has taken some time to develop applications for their specific devices, even turning their devices into web servers to accomplish what they want to do, but I think this locks the institution into a device, and into operating systems and technologies that may be outdated or replaced very quickly. By working to develop services that can be accessed through the browsers on mobile devices, we can count on the services working universally.

Earlier this week my family attended The Cuban Spectacular, which I describe in this 2.5 minute podcast.

I found a Widget worthy of note. Widgets are little programs that can run on your Mac – OS X 10.4 and later. Screenshot Plus is a fantastic screen image grabbing tool that allows you to capture any element of your screen and save it to your desktop, your home folder or even open it in Photoshop. You can save images in many formats, but the default is PNG, which is fine by me.

If you've got Tiger, this one is worth a look.