Higher Tuition, Less Studying, and More Technology

When I started a community college right after high school, I paid $87 a credit. Today, that same community college is charging $146.55 a credit. That is a $59.55 increase in 23 years, in respect to price increase on other items in society (like Milk) that are consumed and gone the increase on education that stays with you for life isn't so bad. 



I know that 4-year schools have a higher rate

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Don't forget to register for the 10th Annual SLATE conference

The 10th Annual SLATE Conference will be held on October 11-12, 2012.  We are excited to announce a new venue this year -  the Northern Illinois University campus in Naperville, IL -
which will allow us to expand the conference and the number and types
of sessions that can be offered. This conference has become a premier
event in the Midwest and has attracted participants from around the

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VaBUG Conference Scheduled

The Virginia Blackboard Users Group (VaBUG) invites you to its third annual conference, to be held at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, on Friday, September 21, 2012!  All Bb users are welcome, you don't have to be from Virginia. 

Add this date to your calendars and please share this information with colleagues. 

This year’s theme is: “EXPANDING THE CLASSROOM: DOING MORE WITH DIGITAL

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Free Webinar From Parature on 7/31/2012

Parature states that their "web-based customer service software combines a variety
of robust modules in a single system that will have you up and running
fast, providing multi-channel, 24-7 support without assistance from IT." On January 4, 2006 , Parature announced that it enabled Bb "to take advantage of Google Enterprise Search
capabilities when receiving customer self service support.

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I Survived The Bulls in NOLA

It is hard to believe that BbWorld is now two weeks in the past and I am still sharing adventures from NOLA. If you have been following my blog back in May I talked about adventure opportunities within NOLA and one of the adventures was Running With The Bulls on Saturday, July 1. NOLA has The Big Easy Rollergirls dress as bulls and chase us. The event started in 2007 by Mickey Hanning after he

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Bastille Day in NOLA

After being mentally exhausted from the learning with Blackboard, Inc during their developers and user conferences, I really enjoyed the relaxing and fun Bastille Day celebration the city of NOLA had going on in the French Quarter.  As I enjoyed coffee & beignets from Cafe Du Monde, I watched a French Pet Costume contest. At lunch time, I got to see the ceremonial wreath laying and listen to some

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No One Thing Is To Blame For School Outcomes

The USA today reporter Richard Whitmire wrote an article titled "Poverty not all to blame for lousy school outcomes" that talks about school system or district failure  and teacher failure. But what about a student's willingness to learn, parental support, and expectations; don't they also play a part in a successful outcome?

Whitmire points out that there is federal data showing that

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Breaking Things To Make Them Better, Is A Good Idea

For 20+ years of working in the IT field and always hearing people say "if it ain't broke, don't mess with it".  And it is my understanding that Bert Lance [President Carter's Director of the Office of Mgmt &
Budget] believed he could save billions, if he could get the
government to adopt a the motto: ‘If it ain't broke, don't fix it.’, so the concept has been around for awhile. Read more here

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Do You Swival?

No one at SU does the Swivl yet and I had not heard of it until the BbWorld 2012 conference, I believe however that the product does open the door for the education field to be more creative and engaging. Swivl has a partnership not only with Blackboard but also with Kaltura (they were actually at the Kaltura booth).

According to the information I received from Steve Rubens "The Swivl is a

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Flipboard sparks creativity, as see at BbWorld 2012

As I sat in the airport to come home from BbWorld I read the USA Today and wouldn't you know it there was an article on Flipboard by Scott Martin. You can read it by clicking here or in CIO Today here.

This article talked about how this app takes webpages and breaths live into them by transforming them into an online magazine, thus sparking creativity. In 2010, Apple listed Flipboard as the "

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Improving Education One Town At A Time

On Saturday, July 14, my husband and I went to dinner at Bubba Gump's in NOLA trying to recover from the busy week at BbWorld. Interestingly our waiter, Chris, had just moved to NOLA from New York in hopes to find a teaching job. He was a May graduate with a teaching degree with a History concentration. We asked what grade he wanted to teach and he said "high school" would be his first choice,

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What do Justin Wilson and educators who use Bb have in common?

Just coming from the DevCon and BbWorld conferences hosted by Blackboard, Inc in NOLA. I have been thinking about what I learned and seeing how to apply it in my world. One thing that was strong at the conferences was the idea of engaging students through creative means.



This idea of thinking of new ways to help others learn could be seen in many sessions such as New Ways of Communicating at

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NOLA Haunting Stories Are Interesting

I am not sure how many attendees of  BbWorld, DevCon, or Collaborate Summit  really had time to listen to some of the local NOLA stories. I had been to NOLA several times, but had never participated in a haunting tour. Someone recommended French Quarter Phantoms to us and they were on NOLA's top 10 haunted tours list and being inside Flanagan’s Pub was an added bonus. Did you walk by these

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SoftChalk - Participate to Learn & Spark Your Creativity

SoftChalk a partner with Blackboard, Inc. will be hosting two webinars in the near future that you may be interested in. SoftChalk is an application that increases student engagement and may improve learning outcomes through allowing instructors to combine personalized content, embedded assessment,
interactivity, and immediate student feedback.
 
Medical Shelter Training website wins

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The VIP Blogger Experience & Final BbWorld 2012 Comments

While I wait for my servers weekly maintenance to complete I thought I would make some final comments on my Bb conference experience and thoughts about being a VIP Blogger.


The conference was amazing, I felt that the quality of sessions was nice. I had some people tell me that they attend some that were what they expected, I did not experience that. I found my self leaning towards more K-12

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BbWorld Keynotes Behind The Stage

One of the perks to winning the VIP Blogger status was that I got 15 minutes in the Green Room with each of the guest keynote speakers: Freeman Hrabowski, President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Sal Khan is the founder of the Khan Academy.

I was at first going to do a post on each speaker, but I thought I would instead do a combined post. Bb would have probably had

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BbWorld 2012 - The Final Day (July 12)

The day moved so fast and there was not much time to blog, thus why I am writing this the day after.  I was disappointed to learn that the Weaving Worlds Together by effectively integrating content into cloud-based resources was cancelled.

A Panel Discussion on how to build a virtual school was the first session of the day. This session nicely done by Nashville, Clay County, & Clark County

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Bb Finally Explained To 3500 At BbWorld Keynote

Michael Chasen, CEO and co-founder of Blackboard (Bb) finally explains the company in terms that all 3,500 attendees can understand.








Maybe Michael should write start re-writing some of the documentation on BtBb, just kidding.

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My BbWorld Photo Memories

Blackboard and others have been sharing great photos during the BbWorld conference. I figured I should join in. Mine though will not be fancy, have music, or be in a logical order. They are instead listed as they came off my phone, yes I had to be a little different. Some times it is better to say nothing, they tell me this at work all the time. So I am going to let the photos say everything.

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BbWorld Day 2 (July 11) Recap

Today started off with a wake up call from my kids telling me good luck with my presentation. After a final rehearsal of my presentation and packing my yellow blogger t-shirt, I headed off to breakfast to meet up with the other SU attendees (George Hoffman & Mary Gardiner). We had a good breakfast where I learned there was a human bug on the loose at BbWorld. Of which, I still have not seen

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TechBug Meeting Notes

Most of the members present were system admins and a few developers. The first matter at hand was to get the DevCon attendees onto the special course sites area (DevCon.coursesites.com) is the password conference hash tag without #.

Next the group came up with a list of topics for the monthly webinars. Which lead to the discussion of what time that would be fair to east coast and west coast...1

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Bb Mobile SDK Meetup

I was honored with an invitation to attend this lunch meeting and wanted to share with you what I learned. People traveled 31 hours for the meeting, no really it was BbWorld that brought them to NOLA.

I got to meet Yonghong Chen from Bb China. They have conferences each year. Their developers meet in July and users in October..he said we are all welcome to come. The current have 241 schools

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Blackboard Takes Security Seriously

Deciding between Stephanie's session on the new security building blocks coming out soon and Geoff's session on database metrics was tough. I opted to sit in on Stephanie's session.

Stephanie Tan is the Director of Product Security for Bb Learn. SU actively uses the Admin Console and we just installed the cookie building block. Both of these B2's were Bb's early security steps. Now we're told

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Up Coming Webinars By BbWorld 2012 Exhibitors

Finally, we are only hours from the first meeting of BbWorld 2012 and the opening of the vendor exhibit hall. Every attending BbWorld needs to make informed decisions about instructional quality, improve effectiveness and use this data in relationship to recruitment, retention, graduation rates, and accreditation.

eXplorance who will be at booth #207 and has over 3.7 million customers world

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BbW12: Discovering Free Building Blocks

Before switchingto a different LMS, why not consider using free building blocks to get thefeatures you desire. In most cases, other open source LMS systems requireexpensive support plans or a full programming staff and user re-training.Instead, just use an existing building block/extension or write one. Then youonly need to train users on the new tool, not an entirely new system. 

This was the

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Bb, Developers, and System Admins Relax

I totally enjoyed the day of being a technology geek, something I don't get to do very much. I was thankful though for the 15 minute breaks to relax with others and network with them in these cool chairs, my kids would love these chairs. The chairs also come in hand when you need to recharge your mobile devices..the outlets are hard to find though. If all else fails go talk to an Expert while

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Cengage, Pearson, Wiley & Blackboard Learn

Blackboard had Cengage, Pearson, & Wiley popup under the "featured building blocks" within the System Updates module on the System Admin tab.  At the same time I got the following from our rep, Ken Taylor:

"Each
publisher listed below has a unique integration through a Building
Block integration within Bb Learn which let faculty quickly and easily
incorporate rich digital content directly

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End of Course Evaluations By Kelt Dockins

The last session of the day that I attended was by Kelt Dockins from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.  Kelt's session start out with a noise that sounded like a fright train in the convention center, with the lights going on and off, and a lot of laughter from Kelt's jokes. Kelt explained how he solved one of University's needs of a simply end of course evaluations that could be

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Bb Error Logs Explained - My Notes

Thank you is the most important thing to say to Matthew Saltzman, who is a software engineer and former Tier 3 support person with Bb, for his great session on how to understand Bb error logs. This information was long over due and now many of us will be able to troubleshoot errors better before calling Bb support.

Config files for logs: bb/config/*.properties
Stdout_stder_log.txt

Important

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DevCon Afternoon Keynote

Speakers not only from Blackboard, but from Moodlesrooms, Sakai, and NetSpot. The topic is open source standards. You can watch a video here.

How does open source impact Learn? LTI, Common Cartridge, standards, group development so all platforms benefit because one company cannot build it all. Working together will allow for consistency for users if multiple LMS's use it the same way.

Chuck

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Morning DevCon Session Recap

Session 1: Troubleshooting B2s by Matthew Saltzman a security engineer with Bb. B2s need to be simple to build and must work on rollout. Four types of issues: authorization errors, network errors, logic errors, extension code errors. Bb manifest XML is the first place to go. If you use the eclipse plugin it will help with troubleshooting. Things you can do is check permissions & roles in GUI

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Bb Developers Conference Kicks-Off

The Bb store is open and breakfast is over. We are gathering for keynote. My day started off very interesting. Bb forgot that I was a DevCon attendee. They quickly fixed the problem with a smile.

I got to meet fellow blogger Terry Patterson finally and caught up with Brett McDaniel. Oh darn I forgot to scan there badge. Topics for keynote: user experience, mobile, and Bb learn.

Augmented

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Will Bb'ers Might Cause Bandwidth Issues in NOLA This Week

Mark McClusky wrote an article in the recent Hemispheres magazine titled "Strike Up The Bandwidth" and he talked about how smartphone data usage has increased and how we are approaching the limits of what cellular networks can handle. Do you agree?

Mark explains how today's society is a great time in which technology is helping people live longer and to talk with people around the world like

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Idea Village in NOLA hasn't seen anything yet!

I was reading the United Airline's magazine Hemispheres on the plane ride down to NOLA today for the Bb Developers Conference and BbWorld and read a great story by Paul Kix call Fertile Crescent where they explained how five guys met in a voodoo bar to figure out a way to bring back other technology mind individuals back to the Crescent City. The created at organization called "Idea Village" and

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Bb Conference Travel Day to NOLA

After a sad good-byes with the kids, I sat for 2 hours at the airport trying to figure out my new phone. Yes, since my HTC hero was too old for the BbWorld app, I decided to take Sprint up on their  upgrade offer and get a new phone...wow they got bigger and lighter, which seems the reverse of most technologies.

Just as the flight attendant was saying to turn our phones off, so we could push

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My Blackboard Week Is Almost Here!

I am so excited that tomorrow starts my week in NOLA for Bb DevCon and Bb World (http://www.blackboard.com/BbWorld/home.aspx). Then realization hit again of how much I had to do before leaving on Sunday.Yesterday at work was rough, when I got nothing done I had planned to do.

So I thought I would blog some of my thoughts since it was still related to the conference and I cannot fit it into the

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AppDynamics, a BbWorld vendor

App Man said last year at BbWorld "I take no crap from my app" when I use AppDynamics to monitor my applications. If you stop by and visit them in booth #308, you can pickup a free t-shirt (while they last).


Grpahic from AppDynamics




AppDynamics is an application monitoring product, that is suppose to be easy to setup with little manual configuration requirements. Their website claims

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VitalSource, What and Why?

When I saw Blackboard's tweet on Thursday, July 5 about their excitement to have VitalSource at BbWorld. I immediately thought this was a vendor for the medical schools, because it had to do with vital signs. So I decided that I would not blog about them. Then I got home and finally got to check my email and I had an email from VitalSource telling me that they would be at BbWorld. So I figured

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ExamSoft, A New Blackboard Partner

ExamSoft states that their mission is "to offer the most easy, secure, and reliable way to administer vital exams, using computer-based technology".  Sales Director, Katy Bailey, states that ExamSoft will let us collect, retain, and achieve. ExamSoft does this by (1) collecting valuable sources of evidence for
accreditation through the testing methods used today through the Bb integration (

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Who Will Be Bb's Learn Expert?

Have you watched these videos yet? If not you should to learn more about the super smart Bb Learn experts. On Tuesday, July 10 at 6:30p BbWorld 2012 attendees will enjoy a live Jeopardy game Bb style.

Sergio Ortiz the LMS Support Specialist II for Texas A&M University-Kingsville





Christine Paige a Bb Support Specialist from New York






Do you know who the 3rd contestant is?  I wonder who

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McGraw-Hill and Bb, an awesome team

Do your faculty use McGraw-Hill's Connect product? If you are like Shenandoah University, then the answer is yes. Your institution's system administrator needs to install the the McGraw-Hill building block to make your faculty and students life easier. The building block will let your faculty use the Connect product they are familiar with from inside Bb Learn that you want them to use and

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Why install the Internships.com B2 in Blackboard?

I never install a building block or make one available just because Blackboard (Bb) list them as a Featured Building Block or ships their Bb Learn product with it. Shenandoah University (SU) was already a client with Internships.com . Then Bb announced their partnership and I immediately talked with our Student Services group and watched the excitement on their faces and in their voices when

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Who Will Be Blogging & Twitting at BbWorld?

There will be a lot of blogging and tweeting going on this year at the BbWorld conference and I am that will include BbDevCon and Collaborate Summit also. Here is a list of people to watch. 

Alan from Kirkwood - Twitter or Blog (click here to see full list of blogs)
Chris Bray - Twitter or Blog
Lacie Crone - Twitter or Blog
Kelt Dockins - Twitter or Blog
Paul Erickson - Twitter or Blog 

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A few more education technology jobs to consider

My last two post about jobs seem to have been a hit. You can review them by clicking here and here. I don't know the status of those positions, but I know these are currently open. 

Instructional Technologist, Johnson & Wales University, Denver, CO This position will work collaboratively with faculty and staff on the appropriate and effective integration of instructional technology into

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Don't Leave for BbWorld 2012 without it!

You would not go to Bb World without your toothbrush, why would you want to go without downloading the conference? The app will ensure you don't miss a single part of the
BbWorld experience.

Plan
and navigate your BbWorld experience with the official BbWorld 2012 app
for Android™, iPhone®, and iPod touch®.


With the app, you can browse and search
for sessions, navigate the exhibit hall

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What is Bb Connect Anyway?

You might of heard about e2campus or ConnectYard, but have you looked at Bb Connect?  e2Campus does not have an interface for Bb. ConnectYard does have an integration with Bb Learn and you can learn more about them at booth 107 in the exhibitor hall during BbWorld. Bb states that the "Connect service gives you the ability to reach your
community in minutes—whether it is a time-sensitive

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Does your Bb Support team need more time to support users?

Does your institutions Bb Support team need more time to provide training, advance the Bb experience, and seek 3rd party vendors to integrate with? If so you might want to consider talking with Blackboard about Managed Hosting. What a thought, someone else to install updates! To be honest, Shenandoah has explored it but at this time our producers interfere with the "no backend" access rule, but I

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Should K-12 use Bb? I think so!

With a two kids in the K-12 area, I fully see the benefit to using Blackboard (Bb) during this time. However, I seem to be hearing more and more adults saying that they don't think elementary students should use it or it only distracts them in high school.  Just last week someone said to me, K-12 should not use Bb instead let them learn it in college.

While I agree technology, especially

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A Few Sessions & Focus Groups To Consider At BbWorld

These are just a few of the interesting sessions scheduled at BbWorld! You can see more sessions under the My Planner or click here to see the overview of sessions.



Are you a Ellucian (Datatel) school? Then consider attending the session titled "Increase adoption and improve the online teaching and learning experience with Ellucian's integration technologies" on Tuesday, July 10 at 3:10

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NBC Learn, METBUG, Bb Experts, and Conference Mobile App

NBC Learn will be at Blackboard World 2012 in New Orleans, will YOU? If you haven't registered yet, do so today by clicking here. You can visit NBC Learn at Booth #404 to see a short, live demo of their product which are global resources and historic film video archives of
NBC News in 2 to 5 minute
videos clips. They have a building block for Bb Learn that makes embedding these NBC News videos

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