A Couple of Good Patent Posts

I’ve been slow to catch these because I’m really heads-down with work this week. (That will continue next week as well, since I’ll be at Oracle’s big higher education conference for most of the week.) Al Essa has his latest analysis of how broad he believes Blackboard’s patent is. It’s a timely review for those who haven’t thought about the details in a while. Meanwhile, Barry Dahl gives us advance warning that D2L will be posting their motion responding to Blackboard’s motion for an injunction (which Blackboard apparently submitted under seal) later today. This could be very important; I think teachers, students, and administrators in the United States will want to see Blackboard’s arguments for why schools who think D2L is the best platform for education should not have the option of choosing it in the future. Barry also has some other very interesting details; it’s worth reading the post in its entirety. As a side note, I’m really pleased to see Barry doing some investigative journalism on this subject. It’s critical for the educational community that we have as many people as possible uncovering the facts and their implications. The more crowd-sourcing we can do on this, the better.