conference

Information is only valuable when found. It is great someone took notes during the conference call, but four months later, when I do not recall the date of the meeting or who sent the notes, I’ll rely on my computer searching for it.

Thunderbird returns pretty quickly when it searches subjects only. So I will start there. I will try a few terms. Probably it will yield a few results without what I seek or too many results to browse through because people rarely use descriptive subjects.

Next, I will turn to searching the bodies of emails. As long as the notes were taken by someone technical, they will be text in the body of the email. So I will find them easily. Non-technical folks send the notes inside Word or Excel documents. So I won’t find the notes.

Not finding information because notes are inside attachments has burned me lately, so I have taken to copying out the text and sending it to myself as regular text.

UPDATE: Have another source who disagrees with Badge who made the claim below.

———

Hopefully this is true. I’d hate to be spreading a false rumor. Anyone willing to confirm?

According to J. L. Badge, Blackboard 9 will be the “NextGen” product we are… *cough* eagerly… *ahem* waiting to see. John Fontaine was in our building Thursday. He mentioned NextGen several times. I must have fallen asleep to have missed a version number was mentioned when he talked about NextGen. It makes me wonder if Jan Posten Day’s recent blog post re: Blackboard Ide Exchange is to elicit early feedback on NextGen?

Certainly, if Bb9 is The One and people can get a first look at BbWorld ‘08, then the conference will be mobbed. Lovely.

The “Too little, too late.” comment is funny. Apparently he is professor who has moved on to hanging out by himself in Second Life. A little ahead of the curve.

My interest for Blackboard products are 1) stability, 2) deployments, and 3) doing tier 3+ support well. These early looks are only going to tell me maybe a bit about #3. I really won’t know what I want to know until I talk to the Bb Perfomance Team and look at the dirt from the command-line. Of course, the elimination of all but a few Java applets deserves for us to lift John Fontaine up on our shoulders and parade him around all during BbWorld ‘09.

Index of posts:

1. RE 2007: GeorgiaVIEW Meeting (Pre-Conference)
2. RE 2007: Birds of Feather: GeorgiaVIEW Vista
3. RE 2007: Top Ten Disruptive Trends
4. RE 2007: Birds of a Feather: Luminis
5. RE 2007: Administering Sakai
6. RE 2007: GeorgiaVIEW Vista File and Content Sharing
7. RE 2007: USG Digital Content Repositories: Resources to Share

After this point, I got wrapped up in other things, moderating, fireworks, a Texas Hold ‘Em tournament, and dealing with tickets. The above are all sessions which affect my area even tangentially. Hope you enjoy.

Harold Powers, Georgia State University

• Template
• Copy files in File Manager
• Learning Module - Only content pages and assessments are exported in a learning module. Other tools such as discussion, chat, urls, etc. are not exported.

Kathy Kral, University of West Georgia

• Luminis IV CPIP connector: Clayton, Augusta, West GA.
• Issues with IMS when allowing IMAP from outside the Luminis application? VSU no issues with IMAP and POP allowed outside. Augusta initially restricted but opened up access without advertisement. Mention on one of email lists Blackberries fail to do a close with connection resulting in stale sessions accumulating.
• Mailbox sizes: West GA 10MB, Augusta 40MB for students and 125MB for faculty, Valdosta 250MB.
• Makarand Kulkarani, Sungard - Created a replacement so mailbox is Gmail. This is a professional service engagement. Engagements start at 90 hours with unused hours un-billed. When GCF connectors are built Training similar, typically 48 hours.
• Name changes are a pita.

Jesse Lyman built a Luminis to Vista 4 single-sign on connector to handle multiple institutions.

Rock Eagle 2007

Keynote - David Cearley, Gartner

Way too many unfamiliar acronyms an terminology. It moved really fast without spending much time to explain anything.

Disruptive trends selected by timing, speed, and likelihood.

1. Multricore to fabric - Core on processors will double every two years through 2015. Applications will have to adapt to multi-cores. Software licensing around cores, influences purchasing. Sets the stage for hybrid systems where power core and cell processor cores integrated. 3D chip (cube of cores) is coming. Next evolution in blade technology is to have shared memory. Fabric allows dynamic allocation and partioning of memory and processors and I/O for servers.
2. Tera-Archicture Compute Element - Self-assembling and self-managing applications.
3. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) - Developers will create modularized applications for a dynamic, flexible environment. They will need new tools, training, vizualization. Way platforms are built change. Vendors will not off the components, instead, we will need to create these ourselves. Pervasive… It will hit every level of the enterprise.
4. Open Source - Development tools, Application Servers, Security, Operating Systems currently hold the most maturity. It will have viable alternatives for 80% of software choices.
5. Web 2.0 - Biggest disruption over next 10 years as it has been the last 10 years. Web 2-.0 - applications built on web tech and design prin that may exploit community based development and social networking and/or new web-based business models. Long-term journey for increasing community, business involvement. Web Oriented Architecture = SOA + WWW+ REST. WOA replaces complex public API calls in current SOA model in favor in simple interfaces.
   1. Mashups - Composite applications on the web. Classic portal model built complex APIs. Mashups use WOA using RSS and Atom to provide feeds of info. Typically used in simple, high value applications.
   2. Web Platform - Everything as a service. Service providers offering infrastructure. Google and IBM offering a service to universities to build applications using the Googleplex infrastructure and IBM support.
   3. Symantic Web - Microformats - Simple way offering metadata.
6. Social software - RS, podcasts, folksonomies, blogs, wiki, social bookmarks, content rating, prediction parket, taste sharing, social networks. The Participatory Web. Threadless makes user designed teeshirts sold back to users. How can we create communities and harness the power of the collective. Start with a purpose. Nuture the community. Open socially mediated spaces work better than technically managed systems. Have a tipping point plan.
7. Netowrk Virtual Worlds - Games - People are 3D, have a profound impact on people.
8. Displays - UIs are changing.
9. Video - Counterfeit reality - how are you sure video has not changed?

.

• Wimba has a PowerLink (version 1.5) for their version 5.0 to work with Vista 3.
• First look for USG admins look at Vista 4.2.3.
  • Anyone remember WebCT CE?
• Definitely a period of time Vista 3 and 4 are both in production. (Ref)

I am blogging from the pre-conference GeorgiaVIEW meeting @ Rock Eagle yesterday afternoon and this morning. I enjoy connecting with people around the state of Georgia who use our Vista system. Most of them do not make it to BbWorld. Some hot topics:

• Alternatives to Blackboard Vista
• Training
  • Content repository
• Returning Reports and Tracking to instructors.
  • Some reports still failing. One approach may be to remove tracking data from Vista database and make it available elsewhere.
• Upgrade to Vista 4. People want a timeline, access to a training instance ASAP, please not do an in-place upgrade.
  • Limited shelf life on internals of Vista 3 / 4.0 - 4.1.2
  • More of customers have moved or are moving to Vista 4 / CE 6 than a year ago.
  • Can take advantage of new tools available in Vista 4.
  • Data retention - policy, reponsibilities (faculty, campus, OIIT)
  • Phased approach - parallel environments, at some point Vista 3 goes away and no longer available.
  • End of Fall 2008 or Spring 2009.
• People are both quite happy we are going to Vista 4 and disconcerted at the prospect of having to move to Vista 4 in even over a year from now (at the worst by April 2009).
  • Export / import of non-SIS created users.
  • Training

Lovely (yeah a real person and she is) says Lovely Freelove would be one of the best names ever.

In the last throes of the BbWorld ‘07 Developer’s Conference (the regular conference ended yesterday). Some pictures are in Flickr in my “BbWorld 2007” set. I’ll likely post the rest tonight. Our presentations should be posted soon on the conference site.

Some important ideas of keynotes:

EdVentures in Technology » Notes from BbWorld 2007 in Boston, MA:

Incentives matter
– Steven Leavitt

Arkansawyer » 2007» July» 11 (most comprehensive BbWorld ‘07 blog I’ve fount):
Guy Kawasaki

1. Make meaning.
2. Make mantra.
3. Jump to the next curve.
4. Roll the DICEE.
5. Don’t worry, be crappy.
6. Polarize people.
7. Let a hundred flowers blossom
8. Churn, baby, churn
9. Niche thyself
10. Follow the 10/20/30 rule
11. Don’t let the bozos grind you down

Talked to lots of Blackboard upper management. I haven’t drank the Kool-Aid.