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 […]
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 […]
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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Interview with an East Texas IP Lawyer on Blackboard v Desire2Learn
A few of the usual suspects have pointed to this one already, but in case you haven’t seen it yet, Barry Dahl has a fantastic podcast interview up (about 30 minutes) with Michael C. Smith, an intellectual property lawyer in the district where the case was filed and author of EDTexweblog. Both interviewer and interviewee […]