A Rose

What’s in a name? Well, I guess it can mean anything you damn well want it to as long as it's your name to play with. The reason I bring this up is because I am involved in two new initiatives with Desire2Learn and they have created a couple of new names that might need some clarification.

The first new thing is the 2007 D2L User Conference to be held in Duluth next July. The company has chosen the name “Fusion 2007” to be the identifier for the conference. I admit that I didn’t really get it at first, so I had to ask Simone at D2L what it meant. She gave a very good answer that centered on the idea of bringing together all the different users as well as all the different tools in the D2L Learning Environment. Basically, it is the idea of bringing together higher ed, K-12, and corporate users, from all over the globe to share ideas and learn together about the various tools created by D2L. Some basic definitions of the term deal with 1) an occurrence that involves the production of a union, or 2) the act of melting together (from Google definitions). So, come to Duluth for a little Fusion next summer.

The other new thing is something called “The Spoke.” The Spoke will be a new feature of the D2L Community Web site. The company plans to post some of my Desire2Pod podcasts inside the community site and brand them as “The Spoke.” I’m just glad they didn’t call it the Broken Spoke. This should see its debut somewhere around the end of November.

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