However, another option to the creation of a new product, is for a current one with large market share (Bb?) to invite an extended, open collaboration with those who clearly already have knowledge in the area and a vested interest in the result? Opening moderated consultation to experts and end-users could possibly produce the same results as your suggestion, if not in a revised product, at least a new product that had a jumping start of stimulus to work with.

@Alan Levine – great point and I think I agree with you. The convention in this space seems to be quite dissimilar to other technological developments. I think Bb are making efforts to move someway to satisfy people with similar thoughts. George’s comment on integration becoming the focus now is an indication of this. I think there is still definitely value in examining the possibilities of harnessing the powerful interaction/integration strategies of newer technologies.

Possibly a reason this hasn’t been so successful in the past with Bb is because they may have either lost some expertise in past acquisitions or not gained as much as they’d hoped? Or perhaps a mismatch in ideology? I’m not versed in the history of these buy-outs, so I’m only speculating though.

Still, as a long-time end user of the Bb product in its various stages, I will be interested to see how things are now released.

As institutions buying into this, aren’t we telling our educated faculty and the learners we are educating, in our most ma/paternalistic voices, is “Technology is very powerful for teaching and learning, but to tell the truth, we don’t think we are smart or savvy enough to use the most modern tools that you will have to figure out on your own once you leave the garden. So we have built this nice safe plastic place that is unlike the environments you use in every day life. Click here. Then there.”

And now there is all this scrambling to find the cheap, small alternatives. The thing that is critical, is unless you are doing this for a small group of people, the infrastructute/network impact of running live voice (VOIP) on a system is huge. And it is something that Elluminate has done well for a long time; sure, maybe not the most sexy interface, but it was very reliable for running meetings for 100+ with live voice, over international distances. Just because you can do a quick demo with XxxxxxXxxx is not a use case for doing it on a real scale.

Ruth just forwarded me this post – so i’ll comment a bit.
we have used junto.. it’s an amazing concept.. one in the direction we certainly need to go in ed.
a phrase i learned from you, george, community as curriculum.

if that’s so, there must be more sophisticated ways to learn from the times we’re together in a virtual room.

can we tag parts of a conversation, can we tag author’s intent of verbage? can you imagine spending less time arguing semantics?..

junto is however still in beta form.

concept here @venessamiemis http://emergentbydesign.com/2010/06/29/junto-overview-of-concept-philosophy-and-components/

Link here @gavinkeech http://www.gavinkeech.com/junto-portal/

As a forrmer user of WebCT, I can tell you that Bb was most certainly NOT open about how WebCT would merge with Bb. We used to grill our Bb rep about it and he would just tell us that they would keep supporting both and would never integrate. We even directly said to him and his manager “Come on, any company would merge the two” and they would deny it. Then Bb stopped answering any support calls for WebCT. After a few months of complaint from many universities, they finally started changing their tune and talking about integration.

I still don’t see BbMobile as a success, mainly because I haven’t seen anyone ever get it to work. At a conference recently, several people all pulled it up and talked about what it would do “if it worked.”

I am not sure if I understand your quote on Bb Connect – that is a warning notification system, so wouldn’t usage be up to the university, not the student? I can’t find anything online that supports what you read.

@Gary Deitz: No one is forgetting the people that work at Elluminate or Wimba. The sad truth is that very few mergers result in entire teams of good people staying together. Cuts have to be made, and then there are people that don’t like the new boss/system and leave. Blackboard has also driven out its fair share of good people (I have personally spoken to quite a few). So there is just no guarantee that the people will still be there this time next year. That is just business, really – not something that only Bb does.

@Jenna the big problem for a lot of faculty I work with is that they don’t want to deal with the administration of a wiki, or a message board or anything else – it’s an add-on that’s not seen as value added by administration or even their colleagues – so they do what they can with what’s easy to manage.

My problem with teaching these tools in school is that I think we need to use more open and collaborative approaches. Why not try a public wiki? How about creating a blog for discussions instead of using the poorly designed discussion boards in Bb? I think students and teachers should try more open products that encourage more users to take part in a social way.

I wish I learned how to collaborate online using tools I would use in the future, not proprietary educational software that is not intuitive at all. But that’s just my opinion. I’m glad we have made it this far in e-learning, but it’s only the beginning.