Blackboard, Birkbeck and Beer

These 3 Bs were on the agenda on Thursday and Friday last week.

On Thursday I met with Richard Horton (Regional Manager), Lenny Khan (Client Manager UK) and Dave Hayward (Marketing Manager in Europe) from Blackboard plus Philip Butler (e-Learning Adviser) @ JISC RSC London. The meeting was set up to discuss the London Blackboard Regional User Group, which I have recently taken over moderating and how we will be re-launching it by organising a meeting in late Feb/early March next year. Blackboard will subsidise the cost of the event (accommodation, catering) and will pretty much stay behind the scenes, but will drop into meetings to give presentations (e.g. demo of Bb8). I intend to use Bloomsbury Colleges as the venues for these meetings - to raise our profile and for convenience as they are centrally located.

Richard took the opportunity to talk to me about Blackboard consultancy offers for Snapshot, Startegy and Content System, but I told him now was not really the best time...

On Friday, I spent an enjoyable day at Birkbeck, meeting a staff development manager in the morning; attending the e-Learning Advisory Group and then a focus group looking at the interface of their future Blackboard site. It's great to be a part of this; seeing the implementation from the very beginning and being able to support it.

And the beer? Well I'd best leave it at that...