Blackboard Next Generation

From the Canadian Blackboard Users Group online conference yesterday, I learned some interesting announcements coming out of Blackboard. Of course this is after the court case ruling in Blackboard's favour in the patent suit against Desire 2 Learn.

• Blackboard classic version 8.0 was released last Fall and this Spring Vista and Campus Edition (former WebCT products) version 8.0 will be released. These editions are not much different then proceeding versions but this action will synchronize the version numbers of the three products.
  
• The real interest part of this is that Bb is promising the release of Blackboard 9.0 before the end of 2008. This is the Next Generation edition that will have significant differences from previous version AND this is the version that finally merges the two former WebCT products with the classic Blackboard product. From the little they showed of the mockups, this product will have a whole new look, feel and new features. The timing of this release means that many schools will be testing this release out in the first half of 2009 and considering upgrading to it in the Summer of 2009, or not.
  
• My jury is still out if this is good and bad news. The new is good in that now we know what is planned. But could be bad because most schools may not be able to afford the new product. It promises to deliver all of the Web2.0 functionality that we are looking for but it seems to me that most of these features will be distributed in the suite of modules that Bb offers. At most schools, they just run the one core module and can't afford the extra modules.
  
• I have a meeting with a Bb representative this coming week so I will raise these concerns to him and report back here.
  

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats

Here is the downloadable utility from Microsoft that will allow you to open Office 2007 formatted documents, with the x on the end of the file extension, in Office 2000, XP or 2003. This is a nice band-aid to a huge problem that occurred when MS released a non compatible file format for the Office 2007 suite of apps. I have heard that there is more compression in these new file formats, so a PowerPoint file would be significantly smaller but I haven't tested that myself yet.

I assume that there was a great reason for introducing this new set of formats that would off-set the pain it is causing, but I can't think of any.

Anyway, you can download the Compatibility Pack from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en

or you can use http://www.zamzar.com to convert your files.

Richard Baraniuk: Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning

Here is a very interesting TED Talks from Richard Baraniuk who gives us his vision of the future of textbooks, and open-source learning.

It is 19 minutes long but worth a view and thinking about. Go to http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/25 to see it.

Rod

Get a First Life

If you haven't seen this before, you need to check this site out. It is simply and parody on Second Life, which is getting a lot attention from the e-learning community lately. Go to http://www.getafirstlife.com/ to check it out.

It is kind of like the www.dhmo.org that is a parody of many sites about toxic substances. BTW, if you can't see the humour in this site, ask a chemistry student.

Rod

bFree - Blackboard Export Extractor

Here is a very interesting and useful tool if you are working with Blackboard version 6.3 and higher. This tool is freely available from the UNC website. Essentially, this tool will allow you or your students to view and extract any content for a Blackboard Archive or Export zip file. It also can be used to do the following:

• If you need to extract a document from an old course that you have an archive file, you can use bFree an avoid having to mount the file back into a Blackboard course shell.
• You can convert your course into a web site with the same structure, that can be shared outside of Blackboard either on a disk or website.
  
• This would be a very useful tool if you needed to move your course from Blackboard to a different LMS.
  

Rod Corbett