Presenting at ARBug 04/12/2012
I presented the course evaluations building block at ARBug this year. I did this to practice for my upcoming presetation at BbWorld DevCon 12. The presentation was geared towards system admins but there were only 3 system admins out of the 12 people that showed up so the audience wasn't really right. Below is the prezi I used, I may not use this for DevCon... as it was a little more liberal in nature.
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Blackboard Course Evaluations Building Block 01/04/2012
During the month of November, I worked on a project at UALR to create a process for online course evaluations. The result of several weeks of slaving away on one of my first blackboard Building Blocks (B2) ended up being used to allow online students evaluate courses at the university. If you're interested read on...
Blackboard taglib issue with itemIdAccessor 11/26/2011
Blackboard has a tag library which allows you to put familar Blackboard looking html objects into your Building block. One element in the tag library is an inventoryList, which gives you a nice looking list of items. An inventory list in Blackboard might render something like this:  You can drag and drop to re-order this list. ActiveRecord is to Ruby on Rails as Active Objects is to Java. Ideally it would be called AwesomeObjects. At last, persisting data for your Java web application is not all xml, POJOS, EJBs and did I mention xml? I don't hate xml but I find configuring your application extremely inefficient after working with other frameworks that utilize convention over configuration. Why do I have to specifiy a log4j properties file, hibernate persistance.xml configuration. And there's soooo many options of how to develop: JPA, Wicket, OJB, Spring, Struts, Torque, Cayenne, Jaxor, TJDO, JDBM, pBeans, JPOX, Simple ORM, Ibatis, XORM, Speedo, Smyle, PAT, LiDO, JDO, IntelliBO, KodoJDO, Hamlets, Faces, RIFE, Shale, Sling, Stripes, Vaadin, Poopdeck (okay, I just made that one up). Point is that It can be a real headache to develop a Java web app. Furthermore, why do I have to create my POJOs and SQL for my database? Why can't a framework just create my data objects, along with nice RESTful CRUD operations for each. Why, crow, why?! So at least for the moment, finding ActiveObjects is lemonade to quench my thirst for answers. Blackboard CourseSites (Introduction) 10/21/2011
Am I head over heals for Blackboard CourseSites? CourseSites offers anyone who signs up as an instructor 5 free courses, templates, plenty of integration such as Blackboard IM and Facebook, which means you can chat with your students that are in your course. Anyone who has a Facebook, Google, twitter, Hotmail, yahoo, i.e. OpenID account can login to CourseSites as a student - without ever creating a Blackboard account. This seems like an awesome step forward for online education. Unfortunately, it may take a few years for universities to realize that net ids and expensive custom SSO portal integration offers little value for the cost. In minutes I had configured a profile: https://ktdockins.coursesites.com/
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