I am back in Vancouver after an eventful week at the Annual WebCT Users Conference, held in Chicago this year. It was a bittersweet event for me, since it was the last official WebCT-only conference -- all future ones will be joint Blackboard/WebCT events. I was able to reminisce with a few old-timers about the past 8 annual conferences, and the great energy and enthusiasm the attendees and the staff have brought to these events.

Ok - enough of that. Let's get to some the major take-aways for me:

Blackboard's Beyond Initiative

This initiative was announced in March at BbWorld, and originally focused on 4 areas: Global Learning Objects Respository, Social Networking, ePortfolios for Life, and Outcomes Management.

In the opening keynote by Matt Pittinsky and Michael Chasen, a fifth element was added, which was Student Centered Learning. This was of particular interest to me, since it happens to be the exact title of the handout that I created for the WebCT-Elgg integration, and which was an insert for the conference bags. It is good to see that everyone is thinking along the same lines.

Blackboard is just starting on these initiatives, and clearly stated that they would be multi-year projects. While real details were not yet available, I hope that these central sites will have a trickle-down effect to the product lines, so that web 2.0-type functionality can be taken advantage of directly within the course environment right across the institution.

Blogs, Wikis, RSS and Podcasts are everywhere

There was a huge buzz on these topics at the conference, with many sessions and pre-conference workshops touching on one or more of these. Most of the users take advantage of centrally-hosted commercial sites, such as blogger, blogspot, del.icio.us, so I took the opportunity to mention Elgg as a locally-hosted option in many of my conversations.

Dr. Helen Barrett's Closing Keynote on ePortfolios

Very good presentation touching on a number of key points (Download slides here).

The take-aways for me were:

• Concept of Working Portfolios vs. Presentation Portfolios
  
• Is Portfolio to be used as an Assessment of learning (summative), or as an Assessment for learning?

The Closing Video

It would not have been a WebCT conference without some comic relief from Utah State's Kevin Reeve and Marc Hugentobler. This time, they wandered around the conference with a camera crew and captured some great moments. The sailor suits for the conference party at the Navy Pier were a nice touch.

It is good to see that open source solutions are generating some interest at the Blackboard user conference which kicks off next week in San Diego.

Matt Pittinsky's overview of the conference highlights a panel session on Open Source. A follow-up post mentions birds-of-a-feather sessions on Blogs, Podcasting, RSS and Wikis.

From my read of the information, Bb seems to recognize that open source e-learning can (and will) co-exist with commercial solutions on campus. The timing of the conference is unfortunate, as it overlaps completely with the WebCT European User conference which I will be attending. After all those years of wondering what goes on at a Bb event, this would have been my opportunity, but it's just not meant to be.

If anyone attends any of the open source sessions at Bb World 06, or sees any summaries posted, please do point them out to me.