Created on 15 September 2010
Recently I had the pleasure of attending Blackboard’s Summit 2010 in Cairns (Queensland, Australia). BBSummit 2010 consisted of the Blackboard developers day and following that a two day conference covering a range of topics. The dev day saw a massive turnout this year of ~50 developers from the Asia Pacific region and served as an opportunity to put ideas to the community and get some great networking in with our peers.
It was great to see that Blackboard is working towards opening up more of the application to make integration and customisation far more straight forward. During the conference I was also able to attend a session on the Blackboard Central and Blackboard Learn mobile applications which are more recent offerings of Blackboard and in the case of Mobile Central the product has come a long way since the first time I got a peek at the Stanford University app at the BbSummit 2009 in Brisbane (Queensland, Australia).
I have to say that I really enjoyed the conference in both the location, setup, content presented and most of all the Blackboard Client Appreciation Dinner which consisted of many laughs and a great band.
For the record before I continue if you are reading this after having attended the conference as well, you may know me better as the guy that got up and sang “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison in a somewhat interesting reggae style at the dinner. Yup that was me! This therefore leads me into my amusing post conference checklist of my time at the conference…
- Ensure that the black tie gear was packed for is years client appreciation dinner – check!
- Within 10 minutes of the official conference opening, shake hands with Michael Chasen the CEO – check!
- Realise that this years conference dinner actually isn’t a black tie event and actually has a “Tropical Wilderness” theme and have to run round to put a costume together on the day – check!
- Get awesome feedback at the client appreciation dinner regarding the costume and win second place for best dressed – check!
- Somehow find out that one of the ladies at the conference knew how to dance Ceroc which you also know how too, burn it up with some moves on the dance floor for a few songs – check!
- Finish the client appreciation dinner night by getting up with the reggae band and singing “Brown Eyed Girl” – check!
- Seeing the look on everyones faces when they found out you had done ALL of this stone cold sober… PRICELESS!!!
So if you saw me at the conference and want to drop me a line please feel free to through the Contact Me page or follow me on twitter. OOOOh and if you have any photos of me with my little birdie on my shoulder from the client appreciation dinner that you could flick my way for me to put up here that would be awesome.
I look forward to seeing everyone again at next years BbSummit conference in Melbourne.
Stuart
Quite a while back a friend introduced me to a cuisine that I had never had before. Korean BBQ! Some of you may have seen the places before that have holes in the middle of the tables for them to put a BBQ of some sorts. A lot of places I have seen have gas ones however there is a nice little place in Strathfield (here in Sydney, Australia) that gives you a slab of hot rocks like the ones in the photo to the right.
