John Porter contacted me after he read this post and said that there were some inaccuracies that he wanted to get cleared up. I certainly don’t want to be spreading incorrect information so I agreed to a conference call with him and Ben Wang. I didn’t get Ben’s job title, but I gather that he works in product development, specifically on the learning environment connector (LEC). Blockquotes below are from my original post.
A brief writeup of my BBWorld09 session. The PowerPoint file is here:
PowerSight Presentation from BBWorld09
What is the PowerSight Kit? It’s a series of views in the database that are denormalized to make them easier to query. They include:
All of these views have interesting information in them, but for my purposes, I spent my time analyzing rpt_tracking. Rpt_tracking contains a record for every action taken in Vista, along with who took the action, which section it was in, which tool was used, and exactly when (down to the millisecond!). So you can see how parsing through this data could yield some useful results.
» Continue reading “Extracting Useful Information from the Powersight Kit”
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In looking back over my recent blog posts, I can see where someone might get the idea that I think Blackboard is a shifty, evil company. This is far from the case… in fact, I think Blackboard has made huge progress over the past couple years. I thought I’d highlight a few things I think they’ve done right.
During the keynote, Blackboard announced that they had purchased TerriblyClever, a company that specializes in creating software applications for mobile devices for the higher education market. Specifically, they have created mobile apps that access consolidated data from disparate sources on a college campus.
I consider myself to have pretty deep and broad technical knowledge, but listening to Steve Feldman always leaves me wondering which key on my keyboard is the “any” key. I leave his sessions feeling like I was full after the first 15 minutes and somehow missed all the really important stuff that happened after that because I was in some sort of geek coma. 
UPDATE: See this post for updated information on this topic.
This session was run by Paul Grist (Sr. Director of Solutions Marketing) and Matt Davis (Sr. Solutions Engineer). Their objective was to “provide a nucleus of a plan for you to move to BB 9(.x)”.
The upshot of the meeting is that 9.1 is still on track to be released in late 2009 or early 2010. It contains a couple features that most CE/Vista schools can’t really live without: learning modules and course files. Supposedly, the learning module changes also include better import from CE/Vista sections; this would be good, because the current import is “lossy” (that’s programmer slang for “it sucks”).
» Continue reading “Upgrading to Blackboard Learn 9 for CE/Vista clients”
Is it bad that I listed Ray Henderson first in the title of this post? I think Ray is a breath of fresh air in the Blackboard organization… a “green shoot” if you will (to borrow the current economic phrase). I hope he sticks around.
“You can’t over-communicate with your clients” – Ray Henderson
I love this quote. It’s so true. Even if your product sucks, or your support is awful, some of that… a lot of it… can be mitigated by open, honest communication. If I know that you know that you have issues and that you are working on them, I’ll be much more forgiving of your flaws. If you try to hide them or make excuses, I’ll likely hold a grudge for a long time.
George Kroner’s session (Customizing the Blackboard Virtual Learning Experience with Openness) was very interesting, although slightly slanted towards defending Blackboard’s closed source strategy. Which, I suppose, is understandable; have to keep an eye on who signs your paycheck, right?
Blackboard World 2009 opened with a keynote speech from Seth Godin, author of Tribes (among other things). He pointed out that, if Ben Franklin were to come back to life today, one of the only things he would recognize would be our educational system. (Personally, I think if Ben Franklin were to come back to life today, he’d be clawing frantically at the lid of his coffin, but that’s just me ).
Well, next week is BBWorld in Washington DC. I’ll be arriving in DC on Monday evening, ready for an informative week, full of learning new things about Vista, how BB9 works, more about “co-production”, what the product development roadmap is, and, most importantly, build on relationships with both peers at other schools as well as Blackboard staff.
I’ll be trying to blog here daily while I’m there, publishing my take on the sessions I attend and the things I learn.
