Last week, Central Michigan University hosted the 2007 Conference of the Michigan Blackboard Users Group (miBUG). The conference, entitled “Engineering E-Learning,” featured presentations focusing on the effective use of Blackboard’s suite of products as well as building block software and programs related to the production and maintenance of E-Learning, multimedia content, online education and classroom supplementation.

The conference agenda included sessions on social bookmarking as an effective tool for sharing, discovery and collaboration; the employment of social software applications such as blogs, wikis and podcasts for effective teaching and learning; and the construction of structured ontologies that allow networking and information retrieval to take place more efficiently in knowledge management systems (KMS).

Karen Gage, Blackboard’s VP of Product Strategy, provided the Keynote Address, which covered the evolution of Blackboard solutions for educational needs.