Who are you?
George Kroner, developer relations engineer for Blackboard, the popular virtual learning environment
What are your areas of interest?
Learning tools, digital repositories and data visualisation. And snowboarding.
What idea are you working on here?
I’m really here to support a lot of other teams with their ideas. In particular, those who want to integrate their apps with their VLE. Blackboard are providing an iPod Touch as a prize in the Decathlon for the best tool that implements the new IMS learning tools interoperability standard.
What’s the major challenge in education software right now?
I think the explosion of data combined with the rapid pace of change. That can affect everything from research data down to content that students would interact with in their daily learning experiences.
What are the most exciting developments in education software?
We’re finally getting to a point where the barrier to entry for developers to make significant progress or impact has lowered due to new techniques to retrieve, re-use and mash-up data. Combine that ability to provide meaningful learning experiences with the ability to track and trend progress over time and the result is that we’re becoming increasingly more capable of figuring out what helps students the most.
What have you learnt so far / interesting things have you heard?
There’s just so much…This event is not like anything I’ve seen before on this scale and to have so many different developer communities cross-pollinating ideas is really powerful. I think we’re going to see many tangible, useful tools coming out of this event.