Believe it or not, one of the primary tasks I’ve been assigned at the moment is to investigate the functionality in Blackboard Learn, evaluate how it works and how it can be harnessed to support learning and teaching. You can imagine my excitement. At the same time I recognise the opportunities in this to expose users to 3rd party tools located outside the walled garden. So I’m looking at this as a challenge to see how many holes I can pierce in the bubble, and actually enable the light of day to shine through.

The inspiration for this clip was the discovery that – at least based on what we’ve seen so far – system administrators seem to be the only people who can create new RSS feeds in a Blackboard course. Instructors seem to have access to only those feeds that already exist. I really, really hope we’re wrong about this, because if we’re not it’s a really dumb limitation. Anyone who can assist or point out where I’m wrong, please speak up. Fortunately there are workarounds, and this video demonstrates one of them.

The video covers use of Netvibes to create course portals that aggregate disparate pieces of data and content streams. The Netvibes page (such as this one) can then be added as an external link to a Blackboard course, whereby it is loaded in a frame within the course. This is intended to be a demonstration more than a training video, so I cover a fair amount of territory and at quite fast pace, so if you have questions or want me to go back through specific aspects more slowly please let me know.

Dean Groom is currently streaming the SICTAS Symposium in Sydney via Ustream.TV (or at least he was – the feed seems to have gone down) via http://www.ustream.tv/channel/edtechshedtech

This is a very interesting use case of how a collection of different technologies can be combined to present a fairly cohesive view of a live event. We are (or at least were) able to watch the even live via Ustream, read up on the background and planning via the wiki, hold discussions via Twitter with both local participants (such as Dean) as well as others no present, aggregate and syndicate the Twitter conversations using an RSS feed for the hashtag #sictassy, collaborate on a live document via an EtherPad document and ultimately reflect on what was discussed on blogs, tying them together via a common tag.

For a semi-live feed of the Twitter discussion you can also go to the Tweetchat room (Twitter account required). Tweetchat aggregates all tweets based on a designated hashtag, and filters out everything that isn’t tagged with the same term – much like the Twitter Search Results. It also, however updates and refreshes every few seconds so you are shown the most recent tweets automatically. The room’s hashtag is also added automatically to anything you post from within the room.

Events still going though, so I’d better get back to the action.

UStream.TV feed

Flickr Set by Education.au

Screencast of Interactivity
I just recorded a quick and dirty screencast of the different elements/tools currently being used to engage in the discussion. The video is available on YouTube, Blip.TV (embedded below), or as a download.

If you would like to download it please see the podcast feed.

I’ve just received word that the recordings of the event have been released and are now available for download via the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software (ASK-OSS) website, who were largely responsible for organising and facilitating the event.

For the record I’m including my slides and the MP3 of my presentation below. Alas with only 6 minutes to devote to the talk I was hard pressed to cover as much as I would have liked to, but I’m hopeful that I presented a fairly holistic picture of the student experience:

[podcast]http://techticker.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/10mike_unsw.mp3[/podcast]