This is good news. Former ANGELista and current Blackboard Learn President Ray Henderson has started a blog, where he says he will respond to conversations in the blogosphere and generally try to make Blackboard more transparent. He has also turned blog comments on, which he acknowledges is a small deal in the wider world but a non-trivial deal for a corporate blog. (This is true.) Maybe he’ll respond to my post on three tests for the”new” Blackboard.
In marginally related news (under the heading of “openness”), I learned from Blackboard folks on Twitter that Blackboard’s API documentation is available without requiring a contract or login at their EduGarage site. FWIW.
There is an open source community built around Blackboard building blocks (primarily, not exclusively), OSCELOT (Open Source Community for Educational Learning Objects and Tools). http://oscelot.org
Lots of free building blocks are available through the community and there is a dynamic listserve on which folks (whether officially part of OSCELOT or not) share ideas and swap technical help. Folks can sign up at http://bb-opensource.org/
fwiw.