Educate, Innovate, Everywhere: Blackboard Reinvention Beyond the Classrooms

Author:

• Kerk F. Kee (Univ of Texas, Austin)

Abstract:

Through qualitative interviewing of 11 reinventors at the University, three streams of Blackboard reinventions are found outside the classrooms: as a conduit for target marking by a non-academic office on campus, as a container for sharing documents with sensitive information among administrators and faculty committees for decision making, and a community for professional knowledge sharing and collegial relationship building. I argue that the process of diffusion in the case of a reinvention can be understood as an interplay between the push of technologically deterministic vision and the pull of social construction of technological reinvention.