As you might imagine, Blackboard and Desire2Learn have somewhat different interpretations of what the recent USPTO ruling means in the bigger picture. And there certainly is plenty of room for interpretation, given the complexity of the situation. There are now no less than three separate, parallel, but not entirely unrelated fronts in the legal war […]
Blackboard Patent Invalidated. Again.
Update: Turns out I was incorrect about the relationship between the old patent and the new one. The ruling may (or may not) have some influence on the suit over the new patent, but it is not determinative. This is getting very complicated. I’ll try to get a post up about at least some of […]
Blackboard Wastes Money on Worthless Patent
No, not that one. As we reported here about a year ago, Blackboard has been sued for patent infringement. A company called TechRadium asserts that Blackboard’s Connect product, which they acquired with the purchase of NTI, violate’s TechRadium’s patent regarding mass emergency notification systems. (I don’t know the details of the patents because to look […]
Imagining a WeLE
A while back, I noted with some interest Michael Korcuska’s screencast showing off a prototype of some functionality planned for Sakai 3. Some recent related conversation has come up on the Sakai listservs regarding the possibility of including wiki-like capabilities as core functionality of Sakai 3 and how this might overlap with and complement the […]
Blackboard's Market Share Erosion
Barry Dahl is asking the question, “Is Blackboard losing clients?” and has created a wiki for people to enter information on whether they are migrating to Blackboard, migrating from it, or re-evaluating their installation. In general, it would be great to see more visibility of information of this kind. I’d love to see a wiki […]
Nice Plug for the Oracle Academic Enterprise White Paper
Thanks to Sakai Foundation Executive Director Michael Korcuska for providing a nice review (with some thoughtful analysis good suggestions) of my team’s (relatively) new white paper.
Social Media, Social Activism, and Edupatents
Back when the Blackboard patent and lawsuit first surfaced in July of 2006, social software was still a pretty new thing. There was a fair bit of surprise in the community when the Wikipedia page on the History of the Virtual Learning Environment, created in large part to gather prior art for the suit, generated […]