This is a guest post by Jim Farmer. Apologies to Jim; this has been sitting in my inbox for a couple of weeks now. “The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is closing a grant program that financed a series of high-profile university software projects, leaving some worried about a vacuum of support for open-source ventures.” – Marc […]
LETSI: HR-XML Consortium Seeks Cross-Domain Interoperability
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer. “Learning, education, and HR standards communities have very little to show in terms of cross-domain standards interoperability and convergence despite significant investments over a period of more than a decade.” Chuck Allen, Executive Director of the HR-XML Consortium, made this assessment of standards that cross the boundaries […]
Blackboard, Inc. Analysis, Part 2: Financial Performance
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer. Investors should be pleased with Blackboard’s stock prices. The stock prices consistently outperform the NASDAQ Composite Index. [1] Financial analysts continue to rate the stock as outperforming the market with buy and strong buy recommendations. Each quarter Blackboard CEO Mike Chasen, CFO Mike Beach and Senior Vice […]
Blackboard, Inc. Analysis, Part 1: Software Licenses
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer. As the dominant supplier of learning system software, Blackboard Inc. is “mission critical” to colleges and universities in the U.S. It has been more than two years since Blackboard completed the acquisition of WebCT. Reviewing Blackboard’s performance may provide some insight.
Social Constructivists and eLearning
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer On July 15th Luke Fernandez, Weber State University and frequent Sakai contributor, posted “Moodle and Social Constructionism: Looking for the Individual in the Community” on Academic Commons. Broadly interpreting his post about attending the San Francisco MoodleMoot US 2008, he identified two issues: (1) How does the […]
Moodle Developer Martin Dougiamas Honored at OSCON 2008
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer. Martin Dougiamas was named Best Education Enabler at last week’s OSCON (Open Source Conference) 2008 in Portland. The Google-O’Reilly Open Source award was made for his contribution to Moodle, an open source learning system. This is the first year anyone from education was nominated for the annual […]
The Second Anniversary: Blackboard v. Desire2Learn
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer Two years ago while speaking at the Desire2Learn Users Conference, CEO John Baker learned that Blackboard Inc. accused Desire2Learn of infringing a Blackboard patent. Following a jury’s decision and failed attempts to reach a settlement, the dispute is now headed for appeal at the U.S. Court of […]