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…
The modest proposal of having students help teachers learn to dance makes an interesting point. Suggesting the learners do not want to learn is an easy way to avoid the real problem. I hear from higher education faculty, students are unmotivated and fail to see the importance of learning. I hear from academic technical support…
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…
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…
Blackboard acquired patent ‘138 and brought a lawsuit against Desire2Learn. I would say 80-90% of the commentary about this case has been from anti-Blackboard crowd with about 90% of the rest from the let’s-wait-and-see crowd. Blackboard very much has been mum on the subject. I do not recall a blog of a single Blackboard supporter…
Blackboard support wants a backup of a section to replicate the instructor claimed behavior. Fine. I started making the backup, but I ended up closing the browser to go home. This morning, when I checked, the backup was not in the Vista file manager at the course level where I created it. So, I created…
UPDATE: Have another source who disagrees with Badge who made the claim below. ——— Hopefully this is true. I’d hate to be spreading a false rumor. Anyone willing to confirm? 😀 According to J. L. Badge, Blackboard 9 will be the “NextGen” product we are… *cough* eagerly… *ahem* waiting to see. John Fontaine was in…
I just finished How Doctors Think yesterday. First impression was doctors don’t spend very much time thinking and gathering information to make a diagnosis. That impress struck a very negative chord with me as it sounds like in my profession of database and computer administration we spend hours picking apart the data we have to…