Blackboard is pleased to announce our BbWorld^® Europe ’07 keynote speakers!

Michael L. Chasen
Chief Executive Officer, Blackboard

Enhancing Education, Improving Outcomes
Monday, 26 February, 5:00 PM
The leading global client community of educational practitioners has a powerful voice in developing the next generation of innovative uses of e-Learning around the world. WebCT and Blackboard clients will be presented with unprecedented opportunities to collaborate with each other, access new resources and share best practices. Kicking off our first combined conference in Europe, Michael L. Chasen, co-founder of Blackboard, will take the stage to discuss the many benefits of the Blackboard community of practice through 2007 and 2008. He will share news on how Blackboard and its products are evolving to best support clients' needs - including new releases, exciting product developments on the horizon, and major partnership initiatives aimed at helping clients "Educate. Innovate. Everywhere." Come hear about exciting client innovations and collaborations from the past year that have impacted educational outcomes and institutional performance for students, faculty and administrators across the broad community.


Bruno Lanvin
Regional Coordinator for Telecommunications, IT and e-Strategies Issues, The World Bank

Knowledge Societies and the Global Education Challenge
Tuesday, 27 February, 9:00 AM
What will learners and educators want? Will e-learning respond to their expectations? In the emerging global information economy, knowledge is playing a central role as a source of growth, employment, productivity and competitiveness. At the same time, ”applicable knowledge“ seems to be increasingly short-lived, because technologies, business models and geopolitics keep changing at an ever more rapid pace. What kind of education can best cater to the needs of this new world? How can the imperatives and potential of network societies, lifelong learning, global mobility and knowledge-based competition best be meshed? Can current approaches to e-Learning respond to those new challenges? What will be the expectations of learners and educators in the coming years?

Dr. Lanvin will attempt to spell out and address such hot issues, based on concrete examples from the experience gathered by the World Bank from all parts of the world. A special accent will be put on the unique challenges faced by Europe in the areas of knowledge, information and education.

Dr. Lanvin is the World Bank’s regional coordinator (Europe and Central Asia) for Telecommunications, IT and e-strategies issues. He is also the head of Client Capacity Building for the same issues. From June 2001 to December 2003, he was the Manager of the Information for Development Program (infoDev).  In 2000, Mr. Lanvin was appointed Executive Secretary of the G-8 DOT Force. Until then, he was Head of Electronic Commerce in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva and occupied various senior positions including Chief of Cabinet of the Director General of the United Nations in New-York, Head of Strategic Planning and later Chief of the SME Trade Competitiveness Unit of UNCTAD/SITE.

Serge J. Goldstein
Director of Academic Services, Princeton University

CMS to LMS to AMS: The Evolution of Blackboard at Princeton University
Wednesday, 28 February, 9:00 AM
At first, institutions called systems that Blackboard and WebCT offered “Course Management Systems" (CMS) because they were mainly used for managing course content. As feature sets grew and enabled innovation outside the course, the tag "Learning Management Systems" (LMS) reflected these systems’ ability to manage a variety of learning contexts and provide more than content. With the advent of Blackboard Building Blocks, PowerLinks and more advanced features, Blackboard's systems have morphed into what Dr. Goldstein calls an "Academic Management System" (AMS): a system that allows schools to manage the academic enterprise and solve institution-wide academic challenges.

Serge Goldstein’s keynote will review this evolution at Princeton University, illustrating how they use Blackboard systems today as a core Academic Infrastructure product that allows them to integrate and inter-operate among multiple software systems, thereby creating communities of learning. He will also discuss how this idea of an AMS must continue to evolve, providing the functionality needed to make it a key strategic asset for the university of tomorrow.