Category: Computers


  • What is the worst possible outcome of an event from an admin’s perspective? You lose everything. Next worst is lose a large portion of the data. Losing days worth of data, as Utah did, is huge. This is the biggest news since the merger of Blackboard and WebCT, I think. To Utah’s credit, they have…

  • Social Marketing

    Normally, I consider John Dvorak a crotchety old-timer who doesn’t get human-computer interaction due to his myopic self-centered view. (His use isn’t usually my use, so he gripes seem inapplicable.) Finally, he got one right… almost. In his most recent blog post… er… opinion article, he described people using social networks as “marketing” themselves. Actually,…

  • PLEs reflect the needs of a student information gatherer. VLEs (aka LMSs) reflect the classroom and institution online. (PLEs vs VLEs) Blackboard Vista is a VLE. Its competitors are all VLEs. Vista is the worst VLE of them all as its designed to host multiple institutions in one site. The GeorgiaVIEW project takes the VLE…

  • Heh… I am now on Twitter.

  •   I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. The Outsourced Brain – New York Times Facetiousness aside, it does point out how others are consumed by these tools rather than consume them. Tom-Tom is…

  • Today I received an email announcing new certification courses from Blackboard. Every administrator around our system did as well. We have a large body of certified trainers and administrators with multiple individuals at every campus who have been through the certification plus all the functional support have been through both training and admin certification. I’m…

  • Sunset on Whois

    Whois may die. I’ve used it in the past to determine who owns a web site. I’ve even been frustrated that a very negative web site had a privacy blocker in place so I could not determine who ran the site. At the same time, I have the same protection on most of my domains.…

  • Fear brings out the worst in people. Fear of change or the unknown manifests in criticism, anger, and overreaction. Yes, I am guilty of this like everyone else… I am not somehow above all this. The idea of democracy, I think, where everyone is able to provide input into the making of a decision was…

  • At the BbWorld Developers’ Conference (Thursday afternoon and Friday morning after BbWorld), there was a session by John Fontaine called What the Heck is a Hotfix? (PPT,audio recording). I’d been meaning to go look for this at the Bb Connections web site where the conference presentations were uploaded. However, I found this through a Bb…