iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Ray Henderson, new president of Blackboard (Bb) learn, sent out an E-Mail/blog post to the WebCT/Bb community today that amounts to a bit of a mea culpa.

As Brock University transitions from their WebCT CE 6 (Blackboard Learning System CE) Learning Management System (LMS) to Isaak, Brock University’s Sakai-Based LMS, it’s nice to see someone from Bb give a honest assessment of their acquisition of WebCT.

Ray shares what he’s come to understand and most of their clients suspected:

…the WebCT course management systems went through a major re-write just before Bb and WebCT merged – CE6 and Vista 4 were the results of that re-write. Just after the merger was completed more than 500 clients ended up going live on these new products.

It wasn’t until these clients went live that we discovered a large number of bugs (over 2,000) and some critical architectural issues. Frankly we made a mistake in not battle testing the new releases ourselves after the closing of the merger and for not keeping WebCT’s support center in Vancouver at full strength.

Brock University was one of those clients, and you can ask anyone who was at Brock University during the fall of 2006 or the start of term in winter of 2007 and 2008 to find out the number of issues Brock had – or read the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies’ annual reports.

That said, it’s small consolation to finally be given a frank assessment of what append and to know that Bb is finally willing to give an honest accounting of that part of their company’s history.

Brock gave-up a considerable amount of features when they abandoned WebCT CE 6 and may have missed out on some real potential with Blackboard 9. But that said, almost everyone at Brock University is pleased with Sakai and the transition appears to be going very well.
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I stumbled upon this new search engine while going through some server logs at work. SearchMe.Com is the best take on flash-based web search that I’ve seen. It’s actually useful!

I’m both excited and to be able to announce that Sakai will bro Brock’s next Learning Management System. Terry Boak, Brock University’s Vice-President Academic finally officially announced the move to an open-source Sakai-based Learning Management System (LMS) at Wednesday May 14th, University Senate meeting. Thus I feel I can now start blogging about it.

This new system will be based on the community-based LMS: Sakai. Brock’s new Sakai-based system will be built upon a cluster that will have all the features of a strong system that is redundant, reliable, scalable, and with sufficient capacity. More about the new cluster is available here: kumu.brocku.ca/sakai/Brock%27s_Sakai_System

The spring of 2008 marks the beginning of a phased transition to Brock using exclusively a Sakai-based LMS for the 2009 academic year. Instructors have the option to use Sakai right now and students may already be taking courses that make use of Sakai.

As of July 31st 2009 WebCT will no longer be available at Brock. An implementation plan has been drafted and posted at kumu.brocku.ca/sakai/Implementation_Plan. It should assure that this transition can be accomplished without incidents and discontinuities.

The Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies (CTLET) and others are already beginning the process of documenting Sakai and training faculty and will be posting updates here soon.

A contest to name the new Sakai-based system has been announced and can be found at http://www.brocku.ca/ctlet/sakai/contest.php – you can win an iPod.

Because of the steps, rules and accommodations we had to adhere to between the decision and the announcement we (Me, iMatt and we, Brock University) actually got scooped by another blog, sakaiblog.korcuska.net/2008/04/05/brock-university-adopts-sakai/, that probably read our non-announcement confirmation statement that we made to facilitate some presentations etc. and academic planning that needed to be done. That’s Brock.
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Most Firefox users know about the super-fast in-page search (ctrl+F/Command+F) – it’s one of those features that have been there since Firefox 1 and prevent users from switching back to other web browsers.

Did you know that you can instantly search for any text on a web page by hitting the forward slash and typing that word? For example, you want to find “Firefox” on this page, you would type /firefox. Then the first instance of “Firefox” will appear highlighted. This slash search feature is really just a shortcut to ctrl+F/Command+F but it shaves precious micro-seconds off of your workday.

This is part of one of the workshops I’ve been giving at Brock this month (as it pertains to WebCT and security/privacy). I thought it had valud outside Brock’s walls. The videos on YouTUBE so that it’s hamsters can do the heavy work.

HawkWings.net has a good write-up on MacInTouch reader Bill Benson’s rule for fighting image based spam. Basically, most of this image spam contains a heading Content-Type which contains multipart/related. You have to add the header to your rules in Mail.app, but that’s the only tough part. I would recommend you set the filter to change the background colour until you know everything is working.
www.hawkwings.net/2006/08/01/mailapp-rule-fix-for-image-spam/

Update: You may want to add something like “From” does not contain info@evite.com.

Recently NeoOffice released NeoOffice 2.0 in a final beta format. NeoOffice is a rebuild of OpenOffice.org for Mac OSX.

OpenOffice.org is an office suite that is being developed by the open source community, lead by Sun, that originally provided an office productivity suite to the free software based systems like Linux, Solaris and BSD. The initial offerings were not that great, and stability and compatibility were an issue. Today’s releases of open office for Linux are perfectly viable replacements for MS Office’s basics, and the actual “Writer” tool is about as good as MS Word.

OpenOffice.org” title=”Use OpenOffice.org” src=”http://marketing.openoffice.org/art/galleries/marketing/web_buttons/nicu/120x60_3_get.png” />The latest versions or OpenOffice.org (also known as OOo or OO.o) are available for Linux, BSD and Windows, but the Mac version has previously required extra steps to run on OSX, NeoOffice offered an alternative, but it was very unstable and slow until this 2.0 release.

The OpenOffice suite has always had the option to open and save files in the MS Office Format, as well as it’s own format and the Open Document/Open Text standard.

NeoOffice’s PDF support is better than any other OSX options. The print export option that comes with OSX and the Adobe creator that plugs directly into MS Word are notoriously bad when it comes to identify and preserving hyper links. The standard “Save as PDF” option in the print menu simply doesn’t preserve hyper links. Adobe should be able to preserve hyper links but often does not. OpenOffice/NeoOffice’s export to PDF option does preserve hyper links and I’ve already mentioned that it opens MS Office (Word) files!

This November is NeoOffice month for me because I plan on using nothing but OpenOffice/NeoOffice for the entire month. There is a small exception, if I have to demonstrate MS Office software at work I will, but I think it can be avoided.
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On Monday I found out that BlackBoard (Bb) had been issued a patent on eLearning. Bb recently bought WebCt inc. which makes the learning management system that consumes most of my days at work. I was dismissive of it until I learnt about the subsequent lawsuits against Desire2Learn (D2L) the day afterwards.

As far as I’m concerned it’s a problem with the US software patent system more than anything else. The reason I initially dismissed it was I assumed it was akin to Amazon’s “single click purchase” patent and the collection Microsoft and Apple hold against each other in a kind of cold war — then Bb sued D2L (see Slashdot).

Now I’m a little more concerned and hope that the patent gets invalidated, take a look at these gems (from US Patent office):

9. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise an asynchronous communication file.

10. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise a synchronous communication file.

19. The system of claim 18 wherein the grade is made available to the student user.

I’m pretty sure that there’s a lot of prior art on these points, some might even pre-date Matthew Pittinsky’s (Bb chairman of the board and co-founder) birth! I’m not sure if Bb can win on a few points of a patent that is otherwise invalid.

I left the international WebCT Conference in Chicago with a relativly good feeling about Bb and what their future plans were, even if I’ve never been a big fan of CEO Michael Chasen — that feeling is rapidly going away and according to the academic technology related list serves, I’m not the only one who feels this way.

To use a Chasen-ism, BlackBoard is becoming a thought leader in business bullying.

If you bought a copy of iPhoto ’06 or bought a new mac in ’06 here’s how you can subscribe to someone’s flickr photos:

• First head over to the flickr home page of the person or group you would like to subscribe to and find the feed at the bottom of the page.
  
• Follow that link or right (ctrl) click it and copy the URL.
• Next open iPhoto and find “Subscribe to Photocast” in the File menu.
  
• Past the URL (Command+V) into the space provided and press subscribe.
  
• You should now be subscribed and able to view and work with these photos.  iPhoto should check for new photos when you launch it or when you press the little refresh circle.
  

There’s a whole web site dedicated to dealing with questions that should have been Google’d before they were asked: justfuckinggoogleit.com.

But sometimes it can be hard to find help on a subject through Google. Often if you search How to convert an audio file Google will tell you that how is too common and omit it, leaving you with nothing but ads etc.

What I’ve found helps is to stop Google from omitting how with this search +How convert audio file and even getting Google to look for convert and converting with +How convert~ audio file.

Those tips might help with your next search.