Richard Parsons has passed along some information regarding the inaugural meeting on the 28 November 2008

1. Registrations for the Dundee meeting will close at 5 pm on Monday 24 November to allow planning to occur.

2. A light lunch of vegetarian and non-vegetarian selections will be available. Any additional dietary requirements should be communicated to r.parsons@dundee.ac.uk, by 5 pm Monday 24 November.

3. We plan to obtain a limited amount of car parking spaces, and those requiring this facility should contact r.parsons@dundee.ac.uk.

4. Anyone wishing to receive the presentations live via a web-conferencing system may be able to have access if they let us know.

The inaugural meeting of Scot-BUG (the new name for the former Celtic WebCT Users Group – the new name reflects the addition of the Scottish Blackboard Classic users) is scheduled for Friday, 28th November 2008 in Dundee. The main theme of the meeting is the Learning Objects software, with presentations from both Margaret Adamson (on the use at Dundee) and from the company itself http://www.learningobjects.com/ (link opens in new window).

Richard Burrows will also bring us up-to-date on developments with Blackboard 9 and finally Richard Parsons (University of Dundee) will give a short report from the Educause Conference.

Agenda

Date – Friday, 28th November 2008
Location – University of Dundee Main Library, City Campus. Meeting room 2, second floor.Building 22 on this map http://www.dundee.ac.uk/general/campusmap/ (link opens in new window). Car parking is ‘challenging’, Dundee train station is 7 minutes walk.

12.30 – 13.30 Arrival and Lunch
13.30 – 13.40 Introduction: Stephen Vickers
13.40 – 14.10 Blackboard 9 Update: Richard Burrows
14.10 – 14.40 Learning Object@Dundee: Margaret Adamson (University of Dundee)
14.40 – 15.00 Coffee/Tea
15.00 – 15.40 Learning Objects: The Company (by web-conference)
15.40 – 16.00 Educause Report: Richard Parsons (University of Dundee)

Stephen is too modest to shout out about his recent “Innovators Award” from BlackBoard. So I’ll do it for him! Well done Stephen.

The Innovators Award

Honoring those who enable educational innovations with tools that directly impact teaching and learning. The Innovators Award rewards those who give back to the community by sharing their expertise and recognizes meaningful contributions to the Blackboard Developer Community.

INNOVATORS AWARD WINNERS

Andrew Martin – Newcastle University
Andrew developed the most downloaded open source project. It is called “Blackboard Web Services.”  He has been generous with his time and expertise and has given much assistance to fellow developers.  We recognize Andrew for his accomplishments, his innovative project and his community involvement.

Pieter Vandepitte – Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Pieter has the most downloaded developer tool.  He has been generous with his time and energy to support collaborative developer efforts and has worked closely with Blackboard to improve the APIs in terms of their quality and capabilities.

Stephen Vickers – University of Edinburgh
Stephen’s middle name is PowerLinks.  He is the top contributor to the developer help forum and an active developer of several open source projects.  Stephen has done much to advance the Blackboard platform.

Malcolm Murray – Durham University & Peter Fokkinga – University of Groningen Malcolm and Peter are active in their outreach to other developers and give generously of their time to support them.  They are the authors of the most-viewed Edugarage wiki article.

Theme: Evaluating VLEs (or what are the must-haves for VLE services)

Location: The University of Edinburgh (further details provided after registration)

The main purpose of this event is to provide an opportunity for YOU to reflect on what the important characteristics of a VLE are for your institution. Is it only a matter of functionality? How can long-term strategic goals be incorporated into the formulation of evaluation criteria? There will be a presentation from two institutions which have recently been through this process, a facilitated discussion and a two-way dialogue with a supplier. All that plus news from the community and a look at a new ePortfolio product. Please come along and join in! All welcome.

Agenda

9:30 Coffee on arrival

10:00 Selecting the next generation virtual learning platform for the University: a case study from Nottingham Trent University (Elaine Swift, Education & Training Manager – Educational Development Unit, Nottingham Trent University)

10:45 Selecting Moodle for RGU (Jacqui Nicol, eLearning Technologies Development Manager, The Robert Gordon University)

11:30 How would YOU evaluate a VLE? (a facilitated discussion)

13:00 News round-up (news for and from the community)

13:15 Lunch

14:00 How can suppliers support their customers in meeting the current issues and challenges? (a discussion lead by Kenneth Chapman, Head of Product Management, Desire2Learn)

15:30 New product demonstration: Desire2Learn ePortfolio

16:00 Close

We are grateful to Desire2Learn for their assistance in sponsoring this event.

For further information please contact Stephen Vickers.

The location for the next meeting of the Celtic WebCT User Group will be: P515, Graham Hills Building, 50 George Street entrance: http://www.strath.ac.uk/maps/grahamhillsbuilding

Location: University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

At the last meeting of the Celtic WebCT User Group, we started to discuss how we might bring together colleagues from across the Campus Edition/Vista and Blackboard ‘Classic’ communities with a view to widening the membership of the existing User Group.

With the forthcoming release of ‘Product NG’ application packs, the Next Generation technology, fast approaching, we felt that it would be timely to hold a special meeting of the ‘Celtic WebCT User Group’ which will focus upon how the whole Blackboard community in this region can work together to share experience and good practice.

The meeting will also be an opportunity for those of you unable to attend the BbWorld Europe meeting in Manchester to catch up on the latest news from the wider Blackboard community and meet with senior members of Blackboard’s Client Engagement personnel, who will be attending to update us on Blackboard’s Client Success Initiative and general Blackboard news.

Agenda

10.15-10.45 Coffee

10.45 Welcome, overview & outline for Blackboard ‘classic’ customers of what Celtic WebCT Usergroup has done to date and how we’ve worked together.

11.00 Jan Poston-Day, Senior Director, Client Engagement, Blackboard (or if available, Blackboard’s new Communities Manager post holder) will meet with us to discuss the following:
– Blackboard’s Client Success Initiatives;
– How Blackboard would like to work with us as a Group going forward;
– General Bb news/updates;
– Q&A.

12.00 Feedback from BbWorld Europe (reports from Campus Edition/Vista clients & Classic Learning System clients)

12.45 News round-up from the institutions

1.15 Lunch

2.00 Roundtable discussion on Celtic WebCT Usergroup:*
– Name;
– Review objectives with Blackboard institutions;
– Organisation going forward.
* institutions only

3.30 Close

Location: Queen Margaret University

Schedule

09:00 – 11:00
bookable one-to-one sessions with Blackboard TSM, Andy Hume. Please contact speacock@qmu.ac.uk for further details.

10:30 – 11:00 coffee

11:00 – 12:00
During this time, members of the BlackBoard team will provide an update on BlackBoard

12:00 – 12:45 Tim Squires and Stephen Vickers
“If only…” I’m sure that most academics working with any VLE will have muttered these words more than once. This presentation tells the story of my “if only” moment and how, through collaborative efforts, we ended up at “That’s Better…”

WebCT offers a range of assignment tools. Although all of these function quite adequately, none of them do exactly what I was looking for in exactly the manner I wanted. Hence the “If only…” And that thought would have remained just a thought had it not been for the work of our developer (Author Two) with the skills to turn ideas into reality and the involvement of a second academic (Author Three) who recognised the potential advantages of the proposal for her own programme.

12:45 – 13:15 A support update from BlackBoard.

13:15 – 13:45 Lunch

13:45 – 15:00
Mike Bailey from Horizon Wimba will present to us: “Connect, engage and collaborate with your learners” His presentation will include Wimba “Collaboration Suite” integrated with WebCT which will allow you to build powerful engaging content for students and learners. Mike will show you how to create powerful content from Microsoft Word, deploy in WebCT, including Voice, Live Classes and much more.

For un-planned, informal communication, Wimba has “Wimba Pronto” a university, WebCT centric instant messaging tool. Pronto automatically populates its “Buddy List” from the WebCT single sign on and course lists.

15:00 – 15:40
A technical member of the BlackBoard team will hold a Q & A session

15:45 train to Waverley or:
• optional tour around the new campus at QMU
• bookable one-to-one sessions with Blackboard TSM, Andy Hume. Please contact speacock@qmu.ac.uk for further details

The next Celtic WebCT Meeting was scheduled to take place on the 25 January 2008 at Queen Margaret University. This has now been postponed. Look out for a new date in February.