Category: Blackboard Vista


  • Are any of you readers out there familiar with Usablenet Mobile for Education, specifically with Blackboard/WebCT Vista? We have questions… How well it navigates with Vista’s frames and wide variety of views. How well it handles the sessions. The University of Florida has a good look at how Usablenet LIFT works and mentions Vista in…

  • I saw a CompSci.ca blog post for If a programming language was a boat… (through WIRED) and laughed at the descriptions of C, ColdFusion, Java, Perl, PHP, and Ruby. Java is a cargo ship. It’s very bulky. It’s very enterprise~y. Though it can also carry a lot of weight. Will carry a project, but not…

  • On Patents

    News of the USPTO reexamination results of the Blackboard ‘0138 patent hit Slashdot yesterday. Naturally, both Desire2Learn and Blackboard are cautiously claiming victory. Certainly, as this is a draft and not the final decision, the next 60 days could result in significant changes to this preliminary decision. We will just have to wait and see.…

  • A ticket our Blackboard technical support manager marked as really urgent was picked up by another technical support person who left a note about calling me. Except, the familiar phone number called wasn’t my office number or even my cell number. Nope, it is the office number at my previous job. Yup. I have not…

  • First Metricocracy measured hits. Pictures and other junk on pages inflated the results so Metricocracy decided on either unique visitors or page views. Now, the Metricocracy wants us to measure attention. Attention is engagement, how much time users spend on a page. What do we really want to know? Really it is the potential value…

  • More on concerns with editAssignmentSubmission.dowebct on Blackboard Vista nodes. Found an error in the exceptions logs tied to one of the transactions: Error occurred maintaining selective release status-Learning Object Id It gets better…. The assignment in question? Not using selective release. Yeah. There is an error for an assessment. Hopefully it is just the assignments…

  • Yesterday a Blackboard Vista node went unresponsive but recovered. Then a second and third did the same. This was odd as only the test which logs into the node reported a failure. Normally, in severe unresponsive cases the Weblogic monitor either reports either one of the parameters we watch is very high or fails because…

  • Tier1 support was contacted by a student to report a problem with a quiz. Some sort of anti-malware software complained about code in the quiz. Tier1 support replicated the issue. Their software identified it as belonging to MyWebSearch. Very bad news. Tier2 support suggested the student remove the MyWebSearch toolbar. Tier1 escalated to Tier3 who…

  • Someone hit my web site looking for “blackboard administrator certification”. So I was curious out what was out there on the Internet for this. I ran across a Blackboard training web site. In looking though the offerings, I was struck by the use of two different names for the same product. (I don’t mean like…