Brisbane Blackboard Day on the Gold Coast

Another week, another seminar! This year Bond University on the Gold Coast hosted the Brisbane Blackboard day. Among various interesting presentations we were shown how to create a podcast using Apple apps in less than 10 mins. Well that was providing you already had your pictures and content arranged - but yes it looked quick and easy.

We heard how Blackboard Consultancy Services approaches the support of customers with particular attention to ensuring the product supports the strategic objectives of the customer and alignment with its business processes. Hmm! I haven't seen or heard of much of that with library systems vendors. It seems more a case of plug it in and once you are past the implementation phase you just start sending in bug reports and enhancement requests. But I'd like to hear from you if your experience is different. Or maybe it's just that libraries just can't afford the consultancy fees attached to that level of service. (Is that because they are not seen as core businesses by their parent organisations?)
I thought it would be in the vendor's interest to make sure their product's potential was fully realised.

Course Genie - looked like a handy plugin for converting Word documents to accessible (sans Microsoft markup) web pages with navigation automatically created, images compressed. Useful for more than just course pages despite its name. Is there something similar out there in open source land? Does Open Office offer this? Good questions for another day.

Other topics were support provision, identity of users (authentication and multiple roles), content creation tools. All topics relevant to libraries. It was useful for this librarian to see these from a teaching and learning perspective.

Comments

Peta said…
From Engadget on ipods as educational tools. Downloadable study guides.