Closing Session

Closing Session – end of the Developer's Conference
by George Kroner, Bb Solutions Evangelist

Slideshow consisting mainly of pictures of Malcolm Murray and George Kroner, besides disturbing Star Trek pictures at the end.

Dev conference – 280+ people, 13 countries; United Arab Emirates – furthest away participant – only 26 hours flying, that's all!

Dr. Wesch's presentation was eye-opening for some, maybe good for developers to hear, quite aligned with what other e-learning folks are looking at.

First time awarding the Blackboard Innovators Awards for developers who have done lots of work. Winners:

• Andrew Martin (Newcastle) – Blackboard Web Service project leader – the top downloaded open source project/ building block
• Peter Vandepitte (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) – improved API quality, most downloaded developer tool from OSCELOT
• Stephen Vickers (University of Edinburgh) – top client contributor to developer forums for PowerLinks
• Malcolm Murray (Durham) and Peter Fokkinga (University of Groningen) – provided client wiki articles on how to create a building block using the command line
  

You may have noticed that every single award was won by a European, which is quite interesting I think.

My personal award goes out to Wonda Yuhasz for having the most interesting name. There is no neat plaque that goes with my award though.

Not quite sure how useful this closing session was, as it was more of a thanking everyone than a proper plenary, which might have worked better and attempted to capture some of the feelings and things from the past two days. And I didn't win another Nintendo Wii, so I'm 0 for 2. Boo.