Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Blackboard Vista

  • Everything to Everyone

    This is intended to be a more thoughtful response to Laura regarding Course Management Systems and the need for innovation. Currently, Course Management Systems are bloatware. They got this way by trying to provide everything to everyone. One instructor wants a feature, the university presses for this feature, the CMS programmers put in the feature.…

  • Vos operor non obvius ut is Eruditio Contineo contigi

    Blackboard Vista 3 (also 4 and CE 6) – You change your role in a section and get the error below. What do you do? Error: You do not have access to this Learning Context Solution: Log out and log in again. This inconsistently happens after an institutional administrator changes roles for their own account.…

  • BbWorld 2008 Call for Proposals

    Last year, we three DBAs submitted three proposals thinking one might be accepted. All three were. Its daunting to think of something because we are behind the times. We run Vista 3.0.7 while almost everyone else is at least on 4.1.x or higher. Also, we ended up changing our presentations last year because we were…

  • The Shot Heard Round the Vista World

    What is the worst possible outcome of an event from an admin’s perspective? You lose everything. Next worst is lose a large portion of the data. Losing days worth of data, as Utah did, is huge. This is the biggest news since the merger of Blackboard and WebCT, I think. To Utah’s credit, they have…

  • VLE vs PLE

    PLEs reflect the needs of a student information gatherer. VLEs (aka LMSs) reflect the classroom and institution online. (PLEs vs VLEs) Blackboard Vista is a VLE. Its competitors are all VLEs. Vista is the worst VLE of them all as its designed to host multiple institutions in one site. The GeorgiaVIEW project takes the VLE…

  • Certification Courses

    Today I received an email announcing new certification courses from Blackboard. Every administrator around our system did as well. We have a large body of certified trainers and administrators with multiple individuals at every campus who have been through the certification plus all the functional support have been through both training and admin certification. I’m…

  • Input Into Decisions

    Fear brings out the worst in people. Fear of change or the unknown manifests in criticism, anger, and overreaction. Yes, I am guilty of this like everyone else… I am not somehow above all this. The idea of democracy, I think, where everyone is able to provide input into the making of a decision was…

  • What the Heck Is a Hot Fix?

    At the BbWorld Developers’ Conference (Thursday afternoon and Friday morning after BbWorld), there was a session by John Fontaine called What the Heck is a Hotfix? (PPT,audio recording). I’d been meaning to go look for this at the Bb Connections web site where the conference presentations were uploaded. However, I found this through a Bb…

  • Necromancing Vista

    Warm fuzzies abound when support uses this as the last item for when something occurs. Some form of dark wizardry I know this was meant to be funny. I even found it funny. Seriously…. There is a lot of dark wizardry….