e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Going to IMS Learning Impact This Week

    Ugh. I have so much to say about the JA-SIG conference and had just dug out enough from my work backlog to think about writing a few blog posts. Now I’m going away again and will have my head crammed full of even more stuff to blog about.I’m going to try to get to at least some of the JA-SIG stuff before it fades from my memory, but in the meantime, Sakai Foundation Executive Director Michael Korcuska has a few good posts up about it on his blog.

    At any rate, if you’re going to Learning Impact, look me up. I’ll be around for the entire conference (including Thursday morning) and will be participating in the “Analytics and Learning Outcomes” panel on Tuesday at 1 PM.

  • Cost of Exit

    A while back, I picked up on D’Arcy Norman’s complaint about how Moodle doesn’t export content to a standard. In a response to one of the comments on my post, I suggested that open source LMS communities like Moodle’s should encourage adopting institutions to consider the cost of exit as a selection criterion for their LMS. Doing so would encourage them to invest in export capabilities at the time when their commitment to the platform is high.

    Well, as Chuck Severence notes, Oxford is considering doing exactly that with Sakai. Check out his post for some good notes on the pros and cons of various export strategies.

  • At the JA-SIG Conference Next Week

    I’ll be traveling to St. Paul, MN on Sunday for the JA-SIG conference. I’ll be there all week, including the post-conference Sakai planning sessions on Thursday and Friday. I’m a co-presenter for one session with Unicon’s Cris Holdorph on integrating Sakai with Peoplesoft. Other than that, the most likely place you will find me during the day is in the sessions from the “Community Source Management/Governance” track.

    Feel free to ping me or just track me down if you want to meet up and chat.

  • Is Blackboard's Lawyer Calling D2L's Customers?

    Here’s an interesting bit from D2L’s patent blog:

    Clients have been calling us to let us know that Matthew Small, General Counsel of Blackboard, has been calling them. From what we understand, his purpose appears to be twofold: (1) to encourage clients to switch to Blackboard ; and (2) to create FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) with respect to alternative products and services in the eLearning space.

    From what we gather, he has been making statements that are not supported by the record in the Court or by the actions of the Patent & Trademark Office. If your organization is called, we invite you to suggest to Mr. Small that we are always willing to engage in an open dialogue with you and him.

    We remain confident that Learning Environment version 8.3 is an appropriate design-around to the patent claims – as we announced nearly one month ago. We also remain confident that the patent’s claims are invalid and that the Courts and the PTO will ultimately invalidate the patent.

    As there is no www.factcheck.org for this litigation, we continue to encourage you to review the documents and the facts. We are happy to discuss any questions that any client, or other interested people, may have. Just let us know!

    John Baker, President and CEO ([email protected])
    Diane Lank, General Counsel and Director, Legal Services ([email protected])
    John McLeod, Director of Marketing ([email protected])

    It’s unsurprising that an aggressive company engaged in a lawsuit with its competitor would use the suit to try to poach customers. But I’ve never heard of a company having their lawyer act as a sales guy. If it’s true, it certainly demonstrates a pretty high level of chutzpah.

    I’m very curious to find out more.  If you’ve received a call like this or know anybody who has, let me know. I’m particularly interested in who called and in what factual claims they made about the legal situation.

  • SpikeSource Supporting Moodle on the Microsoft Stack

    Jim Farmer has an interesting guest post over at Seb’s blog about SpikeSource supporting Moodle on Windows/IIS. Both the creation of supported softwares stack for higher education and the mixture of proprietary and open source software in at least some of those stacks strike me as natural steps. I expect that we’ll see more of this kind of thing.

  • Great Open Source Conference in Upstate New York

    Update: The dates of the conference are actually June 19-20. Sorry about that.

    (Patrick will never let me live this down.)

    My friend Patrick Masson has put together a two-day conference at Delhi, NY on May 23-24 that looks terrific. The first day, which is about open source in higher education in general, has tracks on quality, total cost of ownership, and external support. The second day is a Moodle Moot. I’ll be one of the speakers.

    Be there or be rectangular, as they say.

  • What the Sakai Announcement Means

    Barry Dahl read the Sakai Foundation’s recent announcement about the Blackboard patent pretty closely and is concerned that it sounds like they think the fight is over. I completely understand why he interpreted it that way, but I read it a little differently. If you look closely at the specifics of the legal situation, the Foundation’s position begins to make a lot more sense.

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