@BbWorld 2010

You should probably read "Three Cups of Tea".

Day one of Blackboard World 2010 is in progress.

My first surprise was the initial keynote. Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea”, and creator of a foundation that has been building schools in Afghanistan. He gave a great, human, important opening keynote, well beyond the issues of education and technology that is Blackboard’s bread and butter. He shifted the focus from technology and education to the war in Afghanistan and the lessons he has learned working at the local level with village elders in the Afghani countryside to accomplish his goals of building schools, especially schools for girls. His reporting on interaction  with the U.S. military on this front was exciting and enlightening, if not directly in line with what we hear about our involvement in this long war.

It was a passionate, great, and …. unexpected. I felt the need to go back and change my slides for my presentation based on his opening keynote to really focus on the goals and reasons we’ve moved in this direction with Blackboard central.

I’ve now completed my presentation on our Northwestern Mobile story. The room was packed and the audience was receptive. I opened the presentation with the video produced by Blackboard about our experience. I’ll post my presentation here later.

Related posts:

  1. MLK Day @ NU 2010
  2. Farewell to the 2010 Olympics
  3. April 2010 training
  4. Educause 2010 Conference Presentation
  5. Apps on the NU homepage banner

This entry was written by Harlan Wallach, posted on 14 Jul 2010 at 1:34 pm, filed under About our staff, General, NUAMPS, Web / Interactive and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

7 Comments

  1. Mark Wetherstone
    Posted 14 Jul 2010 at 1:51 pm | Permalink

    With all this new technology around these days, it will be a matter of time before something better than blackberrys.

  2. lintang
    Posted 16 Jul 2010 at 9:19 pm | Permalink

    congrats on your presentation.

  3. ETQ Generator
    Posted 7 Aug 2010 at 11:09 am | Permalink

    It will be outdated soon but then they will change their platform. Northwestern is obviously on top of things and are using technology to help students and also recruit the best ones.

  4. Paul
    Posted 15 Aug 2010 at 9:25 pm | Permalink

    All technology gets outdated. technology is more than machines but also the process by which things are done.

    Will transcripts of the presentation be published?

  5. Carey
    Posted 30 Aug 2010 at 5:52 pm | Permalink

    I’ve never read “Three cups of tea” but after what you are saying it sure sounds like the author is a great person. I always find it interesting what people do and it sounds like this guy does such good for the world.

  6. Alex Tava
    Posted 10 Sep 2010 at 1:10 pm | Permalink

    Great experience.
    I’m interested in everything about ancient history of Afghanistan.

  7. Dr Callaway
    Posted 14 Nov 2010 at 10:46 am | Permalink

    Yes well done on the presentation, nice to here of positive things happening in Afghanistan.

Post a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Switch to our mobile site