Hannah Whaley . com

Just last week Blackboard announced that they have bought Angel Learning. I thought it might be useful to pull together some of the information and opinion that I have observed online since this announcement.

First the info. Blackboard have been through the mill once before with a high profile acquisition, and while Angel is not as high profile as WebCT was in terms of client numbers it still represents a leading competitor at this time. Announcements came through thick and fast from Blackboard, and you can read them here:

• Michael Chasen’s twitter account, closely followed with retweets from other well known Bb twitterers, and complete with its own hashtag of #bbplusangel
• Blackboard blog posts
• Blackboard press release
• Dedicated section on Blackboard Website
• Michael Chasen on Fox Business News

Early reaction included lots of retweets, and news of a 10% drop in Bb‘s shares (Nasdaq BBBB) – this was later accredited to lower guidance and a downgrade on the day. Subsequent twitter reaction seemed to show disappointment from Angel clients, and approval from Blackboard clients. The news that Ray Henderson (the No.2 at Angel Learning) was now to become head of Blackboard Learn seemed to help even out the opinion.

From what I have read, I have seen three main themes for community concern and opinion – collated here with example blog posts to reflect them:

1. Can you escape the gravitational pull of Blackboard? Many felt they had made repeated decisions against Blackboard, by buying WebCT and then Angel, yet seem to be pulled back to being Blackboard clients without actively making that decision.

• Angelic Learning Online

2. Have enough lessons been learnt? Many of the statements of optimism from this acqusition seemed to reflect similar statements given at the time of the WebCT merger.

• Three tests for the ‘new’ Blackboard 

3. Can Blackboard ever have a good guy reputation? Many feel that Blackboard’s reputation is going from bad to worse, following the WebCT merger, D2L lawsuits and now this latest acqusition of a main competitor.

•  A corpse for Blackboard’s corpulence
• Inside Higher Ed

It is important to remember that Blackboard are a business. Not a charity, not an educational establishment, not a government funded body. They are a company, and if they don’t do business right then they will cease to be a company, and the time and money invested in them by institutions will amount to nothing.  Somebody has to be a leader in a marketplace, and that fact alone does not make them evil or dangerous. A lack of innovation or  monopolising while stagnating would do. In the time I’ve worked on Bb systems they have continuously taken significant steps forward, and that is important to me. Interesting that the anger is always directed to Blackboard who appear committed to offering educational products rather than the companies that sold out their customers. Perhaps its just easier to aim at the ones that are still around.

Also, they are a really young company. A big company, but still young and still learning. We all work to promote learning in individuals so why are we so unforgiving of businesses that are learning? Maybe they have learnt nothing at all from the WebCT merger, but I don’t believe that could be the case. However, learning is not enough alone, and they must act on what they have learnt. I hope they do, as it could benefit many institutions. I’m possibly too optimistic, but I feel that a focus on the negatives helps no-one. There will be opportunities to come from bbplusangel – perhaps people should focus on providing a strong community voice to guide them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about academic profiles lately. Partly because writing a blog like this makes you consider your own public profile, but also because of the recent release of Google Profiles. The release of any Google tool should make us all stop to consider why they made it and what the potential impact could be. We’ve seen enough apps from them grow into meaningful entities in their own right to have a right to get excited when something new is released. So what is Google profiles all about and how does it relate to academics?

In short, Profiles is a place to collate all the information held about you on other Google apps so that you can control how you are presented to the outside world. It lets you link out to your blog, twitter, flicker and facebook pages and so becomes your central profile. Nifty features include things like allowing others to email you at your GMail account without giving out your email address, and automatically incorporating data that you enter into other Google services. And the killer hook? The more you populate your profile, the higher up the search ranks it goes. Wham. Google just put themselves at the center of everything you do online – all they need is single sign on to them all and they control the internet. Well, control it more.

Researchers and academics are starting to cotton on to the power of a good internet presence. Open access to publications gives earlier and more citations – citations matter in external assessment exercises. Even without open access publishing, a good web presence will ensure that people who go looking for your articles can find out easy information about your work, research, conference attendance and forthcoming publications. Despite these obvious benefits, it is not commonplace for Universities to provide their staff with the tools, space and training to create online profiles. It is left to the interested few to develop their own techniques and find the ways that work for them. There are hundreds of simple html attempts (of the nature of ‘Jim’s Research Page’) left unattended and not updated on uni servers around the country due to an initial wave of academic enthusiasm for the internet.

So Google Profiles could provide a good solution? It certainly allows people to quickly create and maintain professional profiles. The recognisability of them as Google ones brings benefits, not least the jump in search ranks. However…. it is forcing our academic staff down a very individualistic route – there is nothing that identifies them resolutely as belonging to a particular university. Staff and their work are major assets of any institution, and the ideal solution would be to provide functionality of this kind in house. Interestingly, I was informed recently that Google rankings actually weight University domains highly, meaning that an in-house solution would also achieve a very visible public profile.

The other option would be to see Google expand their system to facilitate Academic Profiles – specifically associating them and their work with an institution, linking to that institution’s repository and other work from the same research groups/schools.

So which is more likely: institutions understanding the intangible benefits of social networking presence and providing a solution, or Google moving to expand its Profiles service into academia, and linking with existing services like Google Scholar, Google Reader and Google Book Search? I’ll let you decide.

I realised recently that my Twitter addiction has weaned me from my YouTube addiction without my knowledge. Sneaky Twitter. As I was reminiscing about my forgotten video friends I got to thinking about videos that I would happily watch again and again – and why. I think some videos are just good for you. So here is my pick of 3 videos that educational technologists should make time to watch every so often. I am sure you will have seen all of these before, but take 5 mins or so to watch them again now and think about why. If they don’t make you smile even a little then consult a doctor – you may be dead inside.

1. Michael Wesch’s Students: A Vision of Students Today
Great video which I first saw when he was a keynote at a Blackboard conf. I’ve heard many reactions to this video – some saying that it scares them, that they worry about how fast HE is changing, that they feel sorry for students today. Personally, it makes me happy, it reminds me that I’m glad I do the job I do. I’m glad there are others out there too, trying to make universities grow and change. Watch this and smile – you’re doing a good job.

2. Mrs Palin: Song for Sarah
I first saw this after a friend of a friend on facebook posted it, saying that it was two Russian students that they had taught. In the midst of the biggest election campaign in history they produced this video themselves, in response to Sarah Palin’s infamous interview about her foreign policy credentials (which seemed to centre around the fact that America used Alaska to launch planes into Russian airspace). Watch this and remember that your students are ingenious – you would be daft to underestimate them.

3. Dancing Matt: Where the Hell is Matt?
I can’t remember where I was first linked to this video. Matt dances all around the world, and finds some friends to dance with along the way. A great reminder that it is in our nature to build communities as soon as we have any common ground at all. Watch this, and think about how many more ways we could find to really interact with each other.

Any others?

A while back I asked around on twitter about the best way to take notes digitally. I was curious whether people use digital pens, iphone apps, netbooks or anything else. There was a reason I was asking….

For the last 5 years I have kept hardback notebooks at work to take notes in meetings - a common system amongst developers. I’ve never felt it suited me – realistically its about the only writing that I actually do with a pen. My particular concerns were that I didn’t have access to my notebook at home or around campus, I couldn’t easily search for anything in it, and I had no real reason to refer to it. In short, it was non-digital. Everything else I interact with is, which means I am used to being able to search through text, access things from anywhere, and integrate across tasks to increase usefulness. My notebook was effectively useless – I constantly took notes that never became useful to me, and that I didn’t tend to read once I’d written them. It makes sense to me that I rid myself of the final bit of paper and become a paperless person.

Anyway, most people that left me comments said that netbooks were good (and didn’t take as long to boot as I’d thought), that digital pens sounded cool but no-one had one, and that mobiles provide good spur of the moment note taking.

I thought I’d share with you the solution that I came up with, and am currently trialling at work. After much searching, I found an online service called Evernote that lets you create an account, take notes online, save them and search them. You can tag them, group them, add URLS, clip webpages and include snippets. Poifect.  But here is the cool bit…

• They have a Mac app that you can use as a client, and sync online
• They have a Windows app for the same purpose
• They have an iPhone app that also syncs with the online service, lets you take images, and can tag notes with your geo-location

Awesome. I have digital notes on my work mac, my home PC, my iPhone and on an Asus eeePC for meetings. I take the eeePC when I think I’m likely to need to take notes and the rest of the time I have my iPhone. If needed I can use any web-enabled PC to access my notes. I think I’m paperless…

Tweetie is my preferred twitter client for iPhone. I have about 4 others installed (including Twitterific and Twitterfon) but use nothing but Tweetie. I therefore had good reason to be excited about the release of the Tweetie Mac client a couple of days ago.

I expected it to be good, I didn’t expect to love it. And I do love it.

At first, I thought this was because:

• It has proper customizable show and hide commands
• You can easily do searches without switching client or using twitter’s webpage
• You can ‘tear off’ searches and keep them running
• It displays conversations as conversations
• You can retweet, and you can post webpages using a Tweetie bookmarklet
• Easy access to @ replies and direct messages

Then I realized something – those are the things that make it good, not the reason I love it. I actually love it because it is simple yet does advanced things, its smooth, it’s well laid out, it flows, it looks pretty. It has streamlined things I didn’t even realize I did regularly until I can now do them with less hassle. In short: it is well designed. You can never underestimate the power of something that is well designed – its what moves software from being useful to being a real pleasure to use.

The Twitterific client has been removed from my Mac dock. Not only has Tweetie taken its place, but I’ve actually designated some screen real estate for it to live in. It deserves it. A reminder to us all that thoughtful design is worth more than the sum of any number of features.