Looking Back, Looking Forward
The year was 2005 and we had decided to hold our first Blackboard User Conference at CUNY. At the time, we were a fledgling Blackboard User Group. We had first come together in the fall of 2004 for economic reasons: a host of universities coming together to see if we could find efficiencies by banding together. I remember that first meeting in the large conference room on West 57th Street. We were just getting introduced then, and we discovered that we had many things in common, and many things that we wanted to share. And so we planned our first conference, and along the way we recognized that we worked very well together.
We invited Matthew Pittinsky, one of the founders of Blackboard to be our keynote speaker. He is at the center in the picture. We had a very successful conference that day, topped off by what has become a tradition at all of our conferences: the Ice Cream Social.
A decade later, there have been many changes. Matthew Pittinsky went on to get his Ph.D. from Columbia University and is now CEO of Parchment an electronic transcript exchange company in Scotsdale, AZ. Northeast Connect is now a separately organized nonprofit charitable organization serving a growing membership. Our membership’s needs have changed as well. We now support many more online programs and classes using increasingly sophisticated learning management systems and multimedia software. Our faculty are now becoming a community of learners of instructional design and universal design, and our students now have the expectation that they will be using sophisticated online tools as part of their learning experience.
Northeast Connect now has a new website and a new social media presence. Our goal is to lead by example, and to showcase to our members the best instructional technology ideas. That’s where you come in. We want to encourage your participation and contribution. We want this new site to be useful to you in your job and for your constituents. As new needs arise, we will grow this website to accommodate them.
Welcome to our new home!
