Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: USG

  • LMS Non-Negotiables

    I listened in on the first town hall meeting for our USG LMS Transition Task Force on Thursday. There are 3 more town halls this week and a final one December 9th. It sounds like the task force is looking for what items are non-negotiable, extremely important, nice to have. Here are the non-negotiable items…

  • Name Collisions

    Blackboard has a conference they call BbWorld. I noticed there are some odd tweets with the same #bbworld hashtag lately. These appear to be about a Blackberry conference to be held next month. Collisions on names are common enough. For example, here are a couple names our clients use to brand their sites which other…

  • Odd Tracking File Recording

    Every time a Vista 3 node is shut down without going through the initiated shut down process, there is a chance of incorrect data written to the tracking files (in NodeA/tracking/). Normally it leaves strange characters or partial lines at the end of the file. This is the first time I have seen it write…

  • Blackboard iPhone App

    People have been contacting me all day about the Blackboard iPhone App. Both Blackboard and the Chronicle of Higher Education posted blogs about its release. Blackboard + iPhone = Learning on the Go (Blackboard) Blackboard Releases iPhone Application (Chronicle.com) I find it interesting Jessica mentioned a Georgia student is the inspiration in the Bb blog…

  • How Not To Break a Frame

    Correct: <script language=”Javascript” type=”text/javascript”> if (top != self) { top.location = window.location; } </script> Incorrect: <script language=”Javascript” type=”text/javascript”> if (top != self) { top.location = “/webct/urw/lc18361011.tp0/logonDisplay.dowebct”; } </script> The problem with incorrect is the address used here is not the address in the location bar.  The one in the location bar has the values required…

  • More IMS Import Headaches

    I got this error while trying to run an XML IMS import using the WebCT / Blackboard CE/Vista siapi.sh script… A unit of type Institution cannot have a unit of type Campus as a child. Guess being on vacation last week spaced my neurons. Normally, I ignore Blackboard errors as meaningless. This time I listened…

  • Nothing We Can Do?

    A statement by a faculty member to the effect of, “There isn’t anything our IT people can do to resolve this problem. The web application is overloaded,” puts the people running the application on the defensive. The problem turned out to be resolved with changes to the local browser environment (remove all the installs of…

  • We Need a 4th Vista DBA / Technical Support

    Work for OIIT! Become our 4th DBA / technical support person for our team. Located in Athens, GA (college town, UGA football) $, benefits, generous leave, rare snow we love open source PDF of GeorgiaVIEW DBA position Check out the PDF (right) for more information. Sorry for the convoluted route to the application… Click this…

  • Page View Metric Dying

    First Metricocracy measured hits. Pictures and other junk on pages inflated the results so Metricocracy decided on either unique visitors or page views. Now, the Metricocracy wants us to measure attention. Attention is engagement, how much time users spend on a page. What do we really want to know? Really it is the potential value…