Blackboard BOF
When we presented our original Goal Aware ideas at the Baltimore Sakai Conference, I spoke with Deborah Everhart in the halls after our presentation. She told me that Blackboard was working on requirements for a similar system. I had followed up with Deb on the phone after the conference. She had someone in their product development group call me at Syracuse. I described our ideas to her and we really weren't sure how to proceed. At that time, I felt that the intellectual property issues around the idea was an impediment to collaboration.
While our Goal Aware installation of Sakai in the School of Education is our center for innovation in pedagogy and technology to support that, our enterprise courseware installation is Blackboard. It would be great if "Goal Awareness" could be baked into that installation. It would be even better if Blackboard could facilitate that.
Today, Chris Coppola asked the Bb reps what they have done to date to contribute to open source and Sakai. They weren't able to respond with much. At this BOF I re-introduced the Goal Aware idea to the Blackboard representatives and suggested that contributing some development or design work to build in interoperable components in Bb that could work with our development effort in Sakai. We didn't get technical. I just threw it out as a potential way for Bb to demonstrate that they are contributing to innovation and open source efforts.