
Bye-bye blackboard - yitchelle
http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/blackboard/introduction.htm
======
jerf
Is the blackboard really disappearing, though? First, while there are some
subtly-different affordances between a whiteboard and a blackboard, they're
not _that_ different. Second, where powerpoint and presentations and slides
are making inroads are in places where the blackboard was already simply being
used for slide delivery. A professor can get up in front of a 500-person class
and say whatever words they like about how they want this to be an interactive
experience, but it's still by-and-large a bulk slide dispensing class by
necessity. (I say this as one of the lunatics who would participate even so,
so yes, I know it's possible. But on average, 496 people are passively sitting
there.)

Once you clear away the essentially non-interactive uses, is it really
"disappearing"? Except for maybe a few whiteboards instead of blackboards,
it's not going anywhere any time soon, I think. I've never seen a digital
replacement that even comes close.

All the blackboards they show that are plausibly snapshots from real classes
(as opposed to the three or four that are being used just a political
polemics) would still be blackboard-based today, quite likely.

~~~
baldfat
I went on a classroom tour at Princeton. I was there for a confrence of
Librarians. On the tour there was construction happening in all the
classrooms.

Princeton removed all their white boards and replaced them with black boards.
Reason the professors kept using permanent markers on them and the person in-
charge replaced all of them that summer. (2007)

~~~
LgWoodenBadger
All you have to do is trace over the permanent marker with a dry-erase marker,
and then erase. Comes off as if it was all dry-erase ink. Works on a variety
of surfaces (I removed permanent marker from a stainless steel coffee mug that
I inherited using this technique)

~~~
gabeio
This works amazingly well! I had accidentally left a black sharpie inside a
pants pocket of mine, when it hit the dryer it burst from the heat and managed
to be fairly evenly distributed inside the white dryer. Using a dry-erase
marker it all came off! (I would not suggest trying it on anything that isn't
a "shiny" surface ie: un-treated wood, cloth, etc.)

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sjy
It's interesting that blackboards are almost exclusively used to teach
mathematics these days (at least in my experience at university). It's still
much easier to do maths by hand than with a keyboard. Is that just a side
effect of the way our keyboards are designed, or is there something deeper
going on?

~~~
nathancahill
Try typing something as simple as a fraction. You'll quickly discover that
it's not the keyboard, but our convention of formatting text in lines. LaTeX
and now MathJax solve this for writing papers, but to quickly write math
expressions, you have to do it by hand.

~~~
kraig
this is something mathcad had done very well imo. it provided you with a blank
page where you could write anywhere and the equations nearly looked like they
had been written with latex. even better, all changes to variables were live
and you could tweak things anywhere to see how it effected your numbers. miss
it a lot. calca is similar to it now on the mac, but not nearly as pretty and
you still end up with lines of text and no equations.

~~~
tjl
The problem is that it's still a pain to type complex formulas in MathCAD. So,
it's not really suitable for when you're trying write out equations live.

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kzhahou
For those that didn't get the title reference, it borrows from the jazz
standard Bye Bye Blackbird.

Here is Miles Davis on the great 1957 album, 'Round About Midnight:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV2lNHfSXBQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV2lNHfSXBQ)

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jagger27
FWIW, all of the lecture halls and most of the tutorial rooms at Carleton
University still have blackboards. A few labs have whiteboards, every room has
a projector or two, but the blackboard is still ever present here.

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jordigh
I hope the maths departments still cherish chalk boards. When I was teaching
in 2007, I specifically requested a blackboard when all of my colleagues
preferred whiteboards.

~~~
the_real_nfm
My math professors all preferred blackboards because chalk is an order of
magnitude cheaper than markers. Of course, all of our classrooms had
whiteboards. :)

~~~
tjr
I have fond memories of my favorite math professor, always looking somewhat
disheveled, and often with streaks of chalk on his clothes or in his hair.
Whiteboards just aren't the same.

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Someone
Similar:
[https://whatsonmyblackboard.wordpress.com](https://whatsonmyblackboard.wordpress.com)

~~~
yitchelle
Thanks for sharing this. I learn a couple of new thing with that.

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gadders
This is a bit old - Bobby Robson died in 2009.

~~~
throwaway049
On the intro page it mentions the guest blackboards were prepared in early
2005.

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tluyben2
I was hoping this was about the Blackboard software; some of the worst product
I had the displeasure of working with in my life.

~~~
vinceyuan
I am surprised to see the bad comments about Blackboard software. I never use
it. But my ex-manager and several ex-colleagues (software developers and QA)
are now working for Blackboard. They are confident in their company's future.

~~~
hnal943
That doesn't mean that they make good software.

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justinmk
Meanwhile, Blackboard software[1] continues to infect universities with its
half-baked cash-grab approach to UX (slop on a nominal manifestation of a
"feature" so that it can be listed in a sales-pitch checklist, then let it
languish for years and move on to our next anti-interpretation of a UI fad we
heard about 5 degrees removed). It is obvious why their HQ is located in
Washington, D.C.

[1] [http://www.blackboard.com](http://www.blackboard.com)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
My understanding is that its hard to be competitive in this space because
Blackboard is very patent litigious. Patent 6,988,138 “Internet-based
education support system and methods” is considered overly-broad and has been
used against competitors.

An East Texas jury gave Blackboard 2.5m in damages in a suit against a
competitor in 2008 using this patent. Read the patent, it a complete cockup,
by the already low standards of the USPTO. The abstract is laughable because
its so broad:

A system and methods for implementing education online by providing
institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken
by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course
materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are
available to the students over a network such as the Internet. Various levels
of functionality are provided through a three-tiered licensing program that
suits the needs of the institution offering the program. In addition, an open
platform system is provided such that anyone with access to the Internet can
create, manage, and offer a course to anyone else with access to the Internet
without the need for an affiliation with an institution, thus enabling the
virtual classroom to extend worldwide.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Abstracts don't define the patent, claims do.

In the UK the abstract is part of the patentee's submission, but examiners
would redraft them as needed to make them useful. IIRC the USPTO doesn't spend
any resources on abstract re-drafting(?) and so abstracts are very poor.

US6988138 is "EXPIRED DUE TO FAILURE TO PAY MAINTENANCE FEE" as of 2014; note
that in 2010 it was "EXPIRED DUE TO REEXAMINATION WHICH CANCELED ALL CLAIMS"!

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jiantastic
Thought this was referring to the Blackboard software. From the comments it
seems that people agree with me :)

~~~
reustle
I think those are the people who didn't open the article

