Simile Timeline - the ajaxy time-based events widget, has been implemented as a building block. Great to see educational tools embedded in Blackboard. You’ll need to upgrade to Blackboard version 8 to install it though. If you are developer minded, check out the ppt on its development from the BBDev 08.

I’ll be heading to Adelaide to present at BbWorld AsiaPac ’08. The presentation is entitled “Visualising Social Network Formation”, and covers work done in collaboration with Dr Shane Dawson on community formation. The presentation will feature a client-side Greasemonkey script for Firefox that facilitates the social network analysis of discussion forum data in Blackboard and Vista (WebCT). I’ll post more on the tool in the coming weeks…

I can’t help but wonder (in a nightmarish way) about what is involved in 1 - porting over content and 2 - updating building blocks to Blackboard NG…. I so want to return to ed tech development, but am so scared of having to migrate content/activities and fix links again. Most uni’s in South East QLD use Blackboard which makes it hard to find ed tech jobs where I will be safe. Sob!

Um - the NG stands for Next Generation, a new way to say BB 2.0 but as we can’t because BB NG is actually BB 9.

Ok so I just watched the Blackboard NG videos. Phil Chatterton does a great job presenting the new BB NG features.

What I liked:

• The iGoogle like drag ‘n drop portal
• Drag ‘n drop content reordering
• Mashup — well just embed Social stuff (eg Flickr, YouTube) anywhere in a course

What I’d like to know more about:

• The BB API changes
• Are there new content building block types?

Google trends graph is starting to look interesting in the LMS space. Has Moodle become more popular? Maybe the question is are people researching Moodle via Google as a viable alternative?

Nine totally hilarious episodes of Bollywood Blackboardwala documents the Blackboard patent saga pretty well with clips from a bollywood movie. My favorite is Blackboardwala World 2008!!!

Wibbit is a Media Wiki extension that allows tabular data to be dynamically converted to various visualizations such as maps, filtered tables and detail views. Essentially all the functionality of Exhibit is now easily implemented with some simple Wiki markup. It would be great to see this as a Confluence Plugin or Blackboard building block, if the license permits.

It had to happen - Blackboard now integrates with Facebook. The product is called BlackboardSync. I don’t have access to Blackboard so am unable to fully review. I merely report on its existance. There is also a support wiki. What if… …your students could use their online social network to help them learn? hehe - its from the Ad on the wiki. Thats funny! What if… …your students could learn from the social tools embedded within the LMS???? Now thats the question, that should be asked!

Scott Leslie has consolidated a list of ‘get out of LMS (um - jail) free’ content migration tools. Its a good sign that more tools are becoming available and hopefully this will put an end to proprietary lock-in. It was not so long ago that I had to build a tool to export content and activities from an in-house built LMS to the IMS-CP Blackboard format. Seeing the list Scott has put together gives me hope that I will never again be forced to build such a tool. To say it was a nightmare is an understatement!

Justice seems to finally be on the way to prevailing - the PTO has found all of the 44 Blackboard patent claims to be invalid. It is however a non-final action - not sure what this means in legal terms. I hope it won’t be too long before a final verdict is made.

Wondering what impact this will have on the BB vs D2L Trial?