Blackboard and the Library

I gave a presentation this morning to a group of library staff here at Bond. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was asked to 'talk about Blackboard' sometime late last year. Rather than give a very dry explanation of the Blackboard implementation project and the nuts and bolt of the roll-out, I decided to take a page from Presentation Zen and try my best to deliver 'inspiration over information', while making sure that the main points still came across. There was some great discussion after the presentation and a few excited-looking faces, which was pretty good for a 9am start! I was impressed by the types of suggestions that came from the librarians, reinforcing my belief that there are some seriously switched-on people within the profession.

Talking with a colleague afterwards, I commented on how managing an LMS in Bond's environment was going to be very different doing it in the large public universities I'm used to. One of the things I've noticed here is the volume of creative ideas for using Blackboard that are being raised already. I'm finding myself regularly saying "What a great idea! I haven't heard of Blackboard being used to do that before, but I'm pretty sure it can." And the thing isn't even live yet. Just imagine what ideas will come up once people actually become familiar with the system. I can't wait.

Turns out I'm an educational institution all by myself

"Combined Ingenuity. That's Genius. That's Clarkson."

That's the tagline in the welcome message from the President of Clarkson University. Apart from sharing my name, the university is also one of America's Most Connected Campuses according to Forbes. I wouldn't expect anything less from a Clarkson.

Thoughts on education in a wider sphere

Having survived the cold and wet of a west-coast Canadian winter, I'm now struggling to cope with the heat and mugginess of a Queensland summer. The trip was wonderful, and gave me a chance to think about education in a broader context than just my little corner of the planet. In my last post, I mentioned figures given in the final keynote address at ASCILITE regarding the growth of tertiary education in China. While en-route to Canada, I read a series of articles on the state of higher education in fast-developing countries such as India and China. One article discussed the need to improve the quality of tertiary education in India in particular, and quoted one Indian chancellor as saying that 90% of university graduates are unemployable due to extreme underfunding of universities. It made me think about educational institutions in developing countries needing to change the way they operate in order to produce graduates that will be globally competitive.
When I spent a month in India last year, I was excited to see the number of young women attending the local university in a city I worked in for a week. I was then saddened to hear from my hosts that a number of them only attend in order to improve their marriage prospects. My western mind struggles with this.

But the main purpose of my trip was to spend time with family I hadn't seen in years, my older sister in particular. She has spent considerable time in the Canadian university sector, both as a student and as a tutor. She told me about the high number of graduates who go into debt living off student loans, only to find that the only jobs they can get upon graduation are only barely within their field of study and grossly below their qualifications. She told me about students she had who excelled in the most challenging areas of their computer science degrees, only to have to return to university to complete more lower-level IT degrees in order to find paying work. It almost seems like the economy is not at the point where it is able to utilise the advanced skills of the graduates that universities are turning out.