e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Lessons from Blackboard?

    This is a guest blog post by Jim Farmer, Coordinator, Scholarly Systems Group at Georgetown University and editor at the eReSS project, University of Hull.

    Blackboard’s Second Quarter financial reports and conference call (edited mp3 audio) may say more about eLearning in higher education than it did about Blackboard. And they say a lot about Blackboard. There are hints of increased outsourcing of eLearning, expansion of an academic “suite” of integrated applications, and an Outcomes System to encourage public support of higher education based on accountability.

    (more…)

  • First 35 Claims of Blackboard's Patent Ruled Invalid

    According to D2L’s patent blog, the judge in the patent case just ruled the first 35 of the 44 claims in Blackboard’s current patent invalid:

    The more significant, immediate result is that the Court found the “Means for assigning a level of access to and control of each data file based on a user of the system’s predetermined role in a course,” a “means-plus-function” term, to be indefinite. See pages 16-17 of the Memorandum Opinion. Because that phrase is indefinite, all of Claim 1 is rendered invalid because of indefiniteness. Further, all dependent claims that rely on Claim 1 (in our case, Claims 2 through 35) are similarly invalid.

    There’s more to the ruling, too. The Court agreed with  D2L’s definitions of certain terms in the patent, which could impact the way the surviving pieces of the patent are litigated at trial.  If you’ve been following the legal maneuverings closely, you may want to check out the whole post.

    Note that this development is completely unrelated to either of the pending re-examinations or, apparently, to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the nature of “obviousness” in the patent law. It was something that came out of the Markman Hearing, which is the part of the trial in which the court determines literally what the patent means for the purposes of the trial. It sounds from this post as if the court may have found that the first claim doesn’t have a specific enough meaning to be patentable, and that the 34 claims that depend on that first claim therefore are also not patentable.
    This appears to be a pretty significant victory for D2L.

  • How a Campus IT Department Should Communicate

    Following up on my previous post about Patrick Masson and why you should all subscribe to his blog, I want to point out that his staff now has a group blog that’s aimed at increasing transparency to the campus.

    Patrick kicked it off with the following post:

    “…be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites; keep men and things apart; guard against the prestige of great names; see that your judgments are your own, and do not shrink from disagreement; no trusting without testing; be more severe to ideas than to actions; do not overlook the strength of the bad cause or the weakness of the good; never be surprised by the crumbling of an idol or the disclosure of a skeleton; judge talent at its best and character at its worst; suspect power more than vice, and study problems in preference to periods;” -Lord Acton

    Academics continually challenges us all to reflect, discover, debate and understand. Considering this, it is appropriate to apply these same challenges to the field of technology, a field that now supports teaching and learning in so many ways. Why do we operate and offer the services and systems we do? What are those new or evolving technologies that may prove critical or catastrophic? How do we assess our current practices against evolving techniques? And, when should we adopt, adapt or abandon?

    It is my belief that open dialog and debate adds to this endeavor. It is my hope that this forum can serve that goal. Throughout the months ahead, SUNY Delhi CIS staff and others will contribute to this forum in order to engage our colleagues, foster discussion and share experiences on various issues, ideas and events; most technical, but perhaps a few outside the traditional realm of bits and bytes.

    I welcome you to the SUNY Delhi Computer Information Systems Blog…

    True to that introduction, the subsequent posts on the blog by various members of the SUNY Delhi CIS staff are all about issues and updates that are relevant to the campus community. There’s a fair bit of “thinking out loud” here, too, which is…well…not the sort of bravery one expects from campus bureaucracy.

    Don’t you wish every IT department worked this way?

  • Google Soon Adding JotSpot to Google Apps

    Thanks to fellow Oracle blogger Jake Kuramoto for pointing to this ZDNet piece revealing (among other things) that JotSpot is about to become part of the Google Apps package. Long-time e-Literate readers know that I was lucky enough to be able to interview JotSpot’s co-founders in the early history of this blog, and that they had a profound influence on my thinking about educational technology. (Some of the intellectual roots of the LMOS concept can be traced back to that interview.)

    To my mind, this is big news for educational technology. JotSpot is a fantastic platform for building long-tail educational tools. The fact that it is becoming a first-class citizen in the Google ecosphere opens up many great possibilities.

  • What Really Happened at SUNY: Another View

    For those of you who wanted to hear more of the gory details regarding the death of SLN2, my good friend Patrick Masson has lifted the veil just a little bit higher in a recent blog post. As a side note, I am thrilled to see Patrick join the blogosphere. His blog, “CIoh-no!”, presents a perspective that you will not often hear voiced from a campus CIO. (The tag line for his blog is “facilitate, not mandate.”)

    You definitely want to add this feed to your RSS reader.

  • Desire2Learn and Blackboard Technology Tutorials for the Patent Case

    D2L has posted the Flash-based technology tutorials that both sides prepared for the court (for viewing by the Judge? The Jury?). The presentations are intended to give summaries of their arguments and evidence in relatively non-technical terms and with a minimum of legal jargon as well. Finally, we have clear statements on what each side thinks the patent means. I hope that decision-makers in universities will take the opportunity to review these arguments and make their own evaluations regarding the merits of the patent and its prosecution.
    D2L’s is here and Blackboard’s is here. However, D2L warns,

    Note that the Blackboard tutorial was not designed to run on the web, and lacks a preloader. Please be patient until the initial file is loaded (15-30 seconds or more, depending on your connection speed). For similar reasons, the audio file may be inconsistent. Although Desire2Learn obtained permission to post the file, we do not have the source files to correct the situation. Our apologies for any inconvenience.

    Thanks to Seb Schmoller and other friends for alerting me to this.

  • The Site is Back Up

    After two days of being down due to problems with my service provider, e-Literate is back up.

    Sorry about the interruption.