Canadian WebCT Conference - Wednesday Morning

Well there were a couple of really good sessions this morning, the first was the keynote by Blackboard CEO, Michael Chasen. He gave an very animated look at what Blackboard is looking to do with WebCT and BB in terms of "Blackboard 2.0" (yes, even though they are on 6.0 of the app... I didn't point that out to him, though I'm sure others did afterward). After the session, I asked about what, if anything Blackboard is doing to address alternative platforms, especially if they are (like Michael said) looking to support life long learning. I suggested cell phones and XBOX360 and PS3. He said that there is likely little with the consoles but he said that there was a law school out there that used cell phones to access BlackBoard, but I haven't found it - so I'm going to email him about that (I'll post the update). After that presentation, Matt Clare from Brock U talked about what they are doing to support for their faculty (and ironically there are more people accessing their content from Spain than there are accessing from Brock - granted there are more people from Spain, but it's an interesting talking point - . He also talked about the WebCT Wiki and how that project lead them to explore the idea of "Radical Trust of the User". A cool idea for sure, and one that if you don't adopt in PD to some degree, you are just going to make your work much more frustrating because then your users won't feel empowered - that show of trust however will. It also fit in with the idea of "Simple questions, deserve simple answers that are simple to maintain". Finally Beverley Day pointed out something on the "5 levels of online learning". I haven't seen it online anywhere (it's by ven der someone) which looks to be a good model for looking at online instruction and she showed how she designed courses, not around tools, but teaching and learning activities. Technorati Tags: Canadian WebCT Conference, BlackBoard