Blackboard has posted their response to the USPTO ruling. They make some claims about how this will impact the trial, which I’m not in a position to evaluate just yet. They mention that all of the claims in the re-examination request “were unsuccessfully raised by Desire2Learn during recent litigation,” which is irrelevant since these are […]
All 44 Blackboard Patent Claims Invalidated by USPTO
This just in: On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard’s claims. We caution that this is a NON-final action; both Blackboard and Desire2Learn will […]
Mashing Up the LMS the Google Way
I have mentioned before Cambridge’s My Sakai project which, writ large, can be seen as an attempt to make Sakai more compatible with Web 2.0 by supporting development of widgets, gadgets, Facebook applications, and so on. Well, they’ve made some substantial progress of late, inspired in part by the Apache Shindig implementation of Google’s OpenSocial […]
Comment Troubles
I’m getting occasional reports from people that they’re getting error messages when they try to submit comments hereon e-Literate. (Something about headers.) Rest assured that, despite whatever the error message is telling you, your comment is getting into my blog and trapped by my spam filter. I check that filter daily and will release your […]
Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for Moodle
The American Association of Community College’s Instructional Technology Council (ITC) has just published its 2007 Distance Education Survey Results, covering data from 154 U.S. community colleges. And there’s a lot of interesting stuff in it. Here are the headlines that I drew from it: Distance education continues to grow at a very healthy clip, particularly […]
Case Study on Moving from WebCT to Moodle
EDUCAUSE has posted a presentation by SUNY Delhi’s Clark Shah-Nelson on their transition from WebCT CE to Moodlerooms-hosted Moodle. It’s quite good. By all accounts (including the presentation), it has been a pretty smooth transition for Delhi. But the biggest deal is the cost comparison, which Clark lays out in his slides. The total cost […]
On Open Source, Open Standards, and Lock-in
I’ve been meaning to comment on D’Arcy Norman’s frustrations with not being able to export Moodle courses to a common standard. He makes a very important point: Moodle happily ingests those formats, acting to absorb content into what then becomes an inescapable pit of quicksand. It’s a one-way trip. Content can check in, but it […]