Tag: user interface


  • Hi, Some people work in positions requiring high amounts of near constant contact. There is technology for this. One popular is the Blackberry which allows the user to no longer sit in front of the computer all the time. If more than one person is capable of doing the job you do, then set up…

  • 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…

  • Huh… A nearby school system plans to segregate sexes.The administrators say the research they have reviewed says boys and girls learn better in different environments: 1) Girls need quiet time. 2) Boys need to express themselves. Probably the Hawthorne Effect will cause scores to increase for the first couple years. 😀 So they will stick…

  • Marbles in the Mouth

    Dava Sobel on John Harrison in Longitute: Harrison, according to those who admired him most, never could express himself clearly in writing. He wrote with the scrivener’s equivalent of marbles in his mouth…. The first sentence [of his last published work] runs on, virtually punctuated, for twenty-five pages. I propose we call long winded typing…

  • 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…

  • Clusters can making finding where a user was working a clusterf***. Users end up on a node, but they don’t know which node. Heck, we are ahead of the curve to get user name, date, and time. Usually checking all the nodes in the past few days can net you the sessions. Capturing the session…

  • Blackboard Vista tracks student activity. This tracking data is viewed as a critical feature of Vista. Our instructors depended on the information until we revoked their ability to run reports themselves due to performance issues. Campus administrators can still generate reports (though some still fail). We doubt the solution to this is Blackboard improving the…

  • Tricky Quotes

    Archilochus (Greek lyric poet and soldier, 675-635bc) The fox has many tricks, and the hedgehog only one, but that is the best of all. Ingrid Bergman A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous. Ray Bradbury We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is,…

  • 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…