meetings

here is a post I almost made on Friday before the internet left florida for once and for all...

ooh! internet connection...quick, quick!! OK gonna do a few synthesis posts so that you don't all think we've fallen off the end of the world! ...yeah, I was excited at the time but then it was gone :-(

As always Educause comes with its fair share of meetings as well as sessions, so here is a quick round up:

Greg Devine globalsynergies.com Greg is ex-Bb (this will be a bit of a recurring theme here) some of you may know him as he did the Bb/SI integration back in 2001 and the Presidium scoping in 2006 - he really knows his stuff. Greg's work now is mainly about consulting and he has two things that may be of particular interest to us - he has a Bb building block that provides a usage dashboard (a really nice looking interface that provides ongoing access to the sort of usage analysis data that we get from Bb once a year), secondly he has developed a model that will calculate TCO for open source based on your institutional variables (would be interesting to have real numbers of this - though we can predict the broad expectation). Great meeting, great to see Greg and I was really impressed with the service he was offering.

Chris Etesse kadoo.com Chris is ex-Bb (....) I've been talking about kadoo for a while now, since i saw its early beta version back in Boston July 2007 and it was formally launched at BbWorld this year in Vegas. I remember being slightly disappointed with the formal launch as it seemed to have changed significantly from its original concept (I think the term fully loaded was invented for the kadoo first launch!) so I was glad to see when I met with Chris that they had stripped a lot of the features and UI back to something more managable. Kadoo is a web2.0 online multi-storage site - one place to put images, files, videos that you can then link to and push to various other sites - I guess a bit like a web2.0 content management system so you can have just one version of stuff. It also has a large email client and networks so that you can share your stuff with particular people based upon their relationship with you. I've been interested for a while in its potential for portfolios, so I was really interested when Chris said they were developing a specific ePortfolio feature that will allow users to aggregate a series of assets in one place an present to a viewer (either within kadoo or as an external website). Currently called "stories", which obviously I was less keen on and we talked about alternatives there is real scope in this for students to develop portfolios that are truly theirs and stay with them for life. There is a Bb building block that can enable users to have a kadoo tab within Bb, a portal channel and do some user authentication. It is definitely worth exploring more formally - I think some of you may be involved in a demo call Brian has organised in Nov - if not and you want to come along, speak to Brian. If you just want to take a look (though I'm not sure when the newer version goes live), go to kadoo and sign up - it's free!!

Andrew Rosen http://www.presidiumlearning.com/ Andrew is.... (you know the rest) but then again, Andrew is more importantly current presidium and honorary LTI christmas party attendee!! Andrew and I caught up on developments at presidium specifically about their plans for new waves of training for CSRs on Bb support for staff and some of the new operational procedures for account management. We discussed the September Project that Brian has completed and the associated document was quite the topic of conversation at the client reception too!! Anthony will follow up with Brian. It was good to touch base and just see how things are going, where they are putting their emphasis for new activity and how we can continually improve the service.

David Yaskin starfishsolutions.com David is.... (once more with feeling) This one is much more emergent and still may not travel over the Atlantic (though I hear Teeside and Dundee are looking at it). The early warning stuff is apparently very popular in US though I'm not sure that it travels, the scheduler part of the solution is more interesting to me but would need to be very cheap to be worth having an external service. I think there are some good ideas in the concept and have agreed to discuss further with David once back in UK, though can't see it being a priority (there's a limit to how many priorities we can have at a time.

Other meetings... just to reassure you that I didn't just meet with ex-Bb staff, be assured that there were lots of ex-Bb staff there that I didn't meet with (boom! boom!) - though may have enjoyed a beer with some of them including Dan McFadyen, Steve Gilfus, Greg Davies, Peter van Tiernan, Carl O'Keefe, Joe Mitchell...possibly others I don't recall at this unearthly hour...there were a lot of them around!! I did meet with a couple of Bb people interested in what we are doing with the Bb content system beyond student portfolios, I did my best to lash something coherent together but have recommended they speak to Susannah for the reality!

I also met with Teddy Diggs (editor of Educause Review and fellow twitterer), she is keen to explore us writing something for ER, I also met Nancy Mays at the same time (editor of EQ) also interesting receiving proposals so if anyone interested in this, let's chat when I get back and I can give you the lowdown on what fits best with each publication and how they work the process.

I also caught up with Carie Page (nee Windham) and Julie Little of ELI both of whom had interesting and exciting things to say about ELI's plans for the Annual Meeting and their Teaching and Learning Challenge.

Other people i've got to chat with, sometimes briefly, sometimes more formally each had interesting things to share off-blog - Gardner Campbell, Bryan Alexander, Anand Padmanabhan (CIO NYU Stern), Jon Mott (BYU)

Any questions about any of these...please ask