I had fun at the D2L conference last week. As usual, I don’t have as much time as I would like to blog about the details, so this highlight post will have to do:
- Conference attendance was good. There were about 550 attendees this year, up from about 400 last year.
- I had chance to get a brief tour of D2L’s new ePortfolio product. It’s quite good, although I continue to be struck by how much effort all the LMS vendors have to put into writing content management capabilities that have been implemented 6,947 times in other systems already. In an ideal world, they would be able to call existing code and focus their efforts on building education-specific enhancements.
- After my rant about conference bags, D2L made a point of giving out bags that can be re-used as cloth grocery sacks. Now that’s a company with values! I have already re-used my bag for this purpose and am happy to report that it works great.
- D2L is also the only company I’m aware of that produced a theme album for their conference. Since it was in Memphis, they licensed well-known music that was appropriate for the venue and put it on a CD with the conference program.
- The attendees seemed to be both well informed and realistic about the patent fight. Despite the risks, new customers are still signing on with D2L. (I even saw an old SUNY colleague from Suffolk County Community College, which just left Blackboard for D2L.)
- I had a highly enjoyable if somewhat chaotic panel discussion with Barry Dahl, Stephen Downes, and Robbie Melton. It was I have taken to calling The Stephen Downes Experience, with the chat backchannel projected for the audience and speakers to see. I admit that I struggled to keep up with the conversation flow, especially when I was speaking, but the struggle was definitely worth it. I will say, though, that it’s important to set expecations with the audience. Some attendees told me they were not expecting a Web 2.0 social experiment and were a little disappointed that they didn’t get a more traditional panel discussion.
- I missed the D2L Version 8.3 product launch, but I’m told that their integration story is a big part of it and that they highlighted work that they’ve been doing with my team at Oracle on implementing IMS Enterprise Services v2 (now called Learning Information Services). I’ll have much more to say about that Real Soon Now, when we release our own product.
- Good news: I managed to avoid spilling beer on Barry Dahl this time. Bad news: That’s partly because I didn’t drink any beer this time.
MikeCondon says
Enjoyed your participation on that panel – the whole back-channel thing reminded me of VAXtalk days in grad school (SUNYA, just down the hall from Peter Shea) – poor teacher trying to teach in one the earliest networked classrooms, and we students mis behavin’.
The phrase I took away from your comments on that panel was the “architecture of privacy” – very provocative – and very interesting. What’s out there along those lines?
Overall – I liked the panel – as a spectator, I could see all of you – Stephen, Barry, Robbie and you – pulled in several directions simultaneously – but you coped well. Gives a new meaning to unfiltered, eh?
The session on IMS Enterprise v2 (is that now: IMS Enterprise Services?) wil Bill Lee was very useful too – sorry if I go a little fiesty, but that stuff’s near and dear.
I was teasin’ the D2L folks that I loaded up that CD in my iTunes, and got an inquiry from RIAA the following day :).
Ditto content mgmt – I think it’s up to 6,953 today.
-mike