Via OLDaily comes this piece about developers at Cambridge building a new interface for Sakai based on Google’s OpenSocial API. This is good because Sakai utterly sucks at the UI level and the observation about it being written by and for hard core Java developers (who love architecture) with no space for innovation by others is completely accurate. It’s a very long-standing complaint of mine.
We often are called on to solve strange problems that students have with Blackboard, and I see these discussions on some of the lists all the time. A year or so ago, I pulled together a list of things to check and it has served us well.
Some are them are obvious to seasoned users, but some really are not (checking the time zone settings for example). Read on for the full list of suggestions:
Blackboard has a number of pending patents in addition to the recently granted one.
These were posted by Santo Nucifora to the Blackboard list out of ASU.
PUB. APP. NO. Title
1. 20060168233
Internet-based education support system and methods
2. 20060026213
Content and portal systems and associated methods
3. 20050086296
Content system and associated methods
4. 20040167822
Method and system for conducting online transactions
5. 20040030781
Internet-based education support system and method with multi-language capability
We have run into some very strange performance problems with Blackboard and Internet Explorer recently. We think there is an interaction with our load balancer (which is an F5 BigIP - forget which version). We have found that Internet Explorer 6.0 will randomly slow to a crawl, where Firefox is zipping along just fine.
This appears to be a new phenomenom (February 2006), although we cannot point to an exact date, but it manifests itself as random slowdowns in IE only and it appears to be only with our Blackboard system sitting behind our F5 load balancer, not with other systems. We think it is a threading problem in the browser, but can’t really explain it. Blackboard distinguishes itself from other applications on that load balancer by having horrible HTML loaded down with images, etc, but it’s still strange.
Has anyone else seen anything like this?
Updated versions of my Blackboard Administrator scripts as referenced on the Wytheville site I used to maintain.
Also, for downloading the output of the backup tool, see Wackget, which should allow you to drag all the links to the program and not have to download them individually.