Learning Innovation

What edtech conferences do you attend? My list has included EDUCAUSE, ELI, ELI Learning Technology Leadership, ECAR Symposiums, BbWorld, various NERCOMP events, and a growing number of gatherings contiguous to our edtech ecosystem. So far I have not been to a Sloan-C event or an NMC conference, and I hope to make it out to InstructureCon one of these days.

I'm 100% certain that half of the things that I think and write about Blackboard are wrong, I'm just not sure which half. Blackboard is a hard company to "get" because education is such a diverse business, technology moves so quickly, and Blackboard contains so many people, products and services.

What are you taking home as the big story of BbWorld 2012? At this point (Wednesday night) I have 3 main takeaways.

My conclusions from day one of BbWorld, after listening to a range of Blackboard leaders and managers, are as follows:

Are you in New Orleans this week for the big Blackboard conference (or BbWorld as the company brands the conference)? What are your big goals for the conference? What do you hope to learn from Blackboard?

We hear all the time that we are entering the "post PC era." Computers are out. Tablets are in. We will no longer be lugging around heavy machines with failure prone hard drives and bloated client applications. We will be carrying around thin and light screens (keyboard optional) that are portals to our cloud based apps and data.

I'm calling it. The age of software training is dead. We should never purchase another application or platform for our campus that requires any workshops, documentation, FAQs, or dedicated support people. If software is not intuitive and simple enough for people to teach themselves to use it then that software is flawed.

What would happen if the academic IT Department became the academic Collaboration Department?