e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Blackboard Announces New 'Institutional Effectiveness Platform'; Patents Pending

    From today’s press release:

    BbWorld Europe, Nice, France – February 26, 2007 – Blackboard Inc. (NASDAQ: BBBB), a leading provider of enterprise technology to the education industry, today unveiled, at the Annual BbWorld Europe 2007 Users Conference in Nice, its latest and most significant product offering, the Blackboard Outcomes System™ in front of 400 European and International e-Learning leaders. The new solution facilitates the continuous improvement of academic and administrative processes with a focus on student learning, academic programs and co-curricular activities.
     
    The Blackboard Outcomes System is a comprehensive, flexible platform to guide institutional effectiveness across the entire higher education institution or system– from classrooms to the President’s Office. It was developed with guidance from national assessment experts and dozens of academic institutions including private teaching colleges, research universities, systems, and community colleges.  The Blackboard Outcomes System leverages the capabilities and familiar user experience of the Blackboard Academic Suite™ to help institutions make evidence-based decisions, streamline assessment processes, and engage students in their own learning.

    I think it’s interesting that Blackboard is calling Outcomes its “most significant” product offering. That gives you some sense of where they think their market is going and where they think the bulk of their business is going to be in the future.

    Note also that many of Blackboard’s recent patent applications (reported by Mark Oehlert) appear to be related to this new product.

  • USPTO Orders Blackboard Patent Re-examined–Again

    We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog post to bring you this breaking news:

    Based on Desire2Learn’s Inter Partes request, the USPTO has ordered that the Blackboard patent be re-examined. This is a separate ruling from the one in response to the Ex Parte Sakai/ATutor/Moodle filing. As I have previously noted, the law requires that the USPTO issue a preliminary ruling along with a re-exam order in an Inter Partes challenge. That means we should know shortly whether the government is upholding the patent, narrowing it, or invalidating it altogether.

    Stay tuned.

    There are a number of events that are likely to cascade from this ruling rather quickly. I will not always have time to blog now about every post and development that I see. However, I will, at the very least, tag items I see for inclusion in the Edupatent Alerts. (I hope that you will do the same.) If you want to follow these developments closely, I strongly suggest that you subscribe by email or RSS.

  • Visualizations of Online Social Archives, Part I

    It’s not often that you find a graduate thesis that is actually fun to read, but that’s exactly what I found in Revealing individual and collective pasts: Visualization of online social archives by Fernanda Bertini Viegas, an alumna of MIT’s Media Lab. The bibliography alone is worth the trip; she does an amazing job of pulling together a critical mass of the credible literature on online social interaction (which can be hard to find amid all the garbage that’s churned out). Beyond that, her empirical research into visualization tools is fascinating. There’s a lot here that we can use to improve online learning environments.

    In this first post, I’ll review some high-level lessons that can be gleaned from the paper regarding best teaching practices in today’s learning environments. In my next post, I’ll follow up with some analysis about how this research can be used to improve those environments.

    (more…)

  • Comprehensive Information About Extending WordPress

    If you use WordPress, or if you are just interested in learning more about what is possible to accomplish with good blog software, then you should spend some time reading Lorelle on WordPress. She is in the middle of a month-long commitment to write one post every day about WordPress plugins. These aren’t just short posts about one plugin each; they are long, detailed articles about entire categories of plugins. For example, her post “Video, Music, Podcasts, Audio, and Multimedia WordPress Plugins” covers no fewer than 45 plugins in various levels of detail and also includes links to documentation and technical support resources. In some cases, she’s simply compiling and categorizing lists of plugins from the several WordPress plugin catalog sites (which is a worthwhile service in itself), but for about 20% of them, she provides more detailed overviews of their functionality in the context of other plugins in the category.

  • EduPatent Alerts

    Via Stephen Downes, I see that Mark Oehlert posted a list of Blackboard’s pending patents, 8 of which were filed for in the last year (6 of which were filed in October and November of last year), and many of which are not covered in Blackboard’s patent pledge. This has prompted me to invest a little time in creating a more–dare I say it?–Web 2.0ish edupatent alert system.

    You’ll notice that there is a new tab on the top of this blog labeled “EduPatents.” On that page you will find an RSS feed aggregator that displays any blog posts on the web that have been tagged by their authors with the word “edupatents”, any posts that use the word “edupatents” in the body of their texts, and any web pages that have been tagged “edupatents” on del.icio.us. (I took the liberty of tagging Mark’s post, so it shows up in the aggregator even though he didn’t tag it himself.) You can subscribe to the feed directly or, if you prefer, you can also subscribe by email. Equally importantly, you can contribute to the contents of the feed in a variety of ways. If we all make use of this system, then you won’t have to rely on just a couple of bloggers (e.g., me) to be able to see everything that’s relevant and post about it.

    If you’re interested in learning more about how to make the most out of this new system and how I created it, then read on.

    (more…)

  • IMS Report on Learning Technology Satisfaction and Trends

    The IMS has issued a new report with the somewhat imposing title, “IMS GLC Learning Technology Satisfaction and Trends, North American Higher Education, 05 February 2007 Update.” You can get it here, but first you’ll have to register with the site (if you haven’t done so already). It’s important to read Section 2 of the report (and particularly the “Survey Approach and Disclaimers” subhead) carefully; it is very difficult to get definitive data for this kind of research, and the authors of the report were very careful to spell out the limitations of their methods.

    Nevertheless, there’s lots of interesting stuff here. Here are some of my own observations, in no particular order:
    (more…)

  • Birthplace of Blackboard Comments on Patent Issue

    Here’s an interesting article (ironically titled “Suit Threatens Blackboard Inc.”) from the campus newspaper at Cornell University, the birthplace of Blackboard:

    Only time will tell how Blackboard Inc., Cornell’s course management software provider, will fare on campus and throughout the country.

    Amid a national legal debate over the scope of Blackboard’s “Internet-based education support system and methods” patent, Cornell technology staff members are moving forward with a preliminary assessment of whether Blackboard is the most appropriate software for Cornell professors and students.

    Stressing that the “legal issues aren’t having an impact on our commitment to Blackboard in the short run,” Jim Lombardi of CIT admitted that the controversy, “probably accelerated our plans to take a look at what the options are to Blackboard.”

    (Snip)

    “When Blackboard announced their patent it did cause us to begin an assessment of whether we wanted to move away from Blackboard … It did cause us to rethink whether we wanted to use their product,” said Polley McClure, Cornell’s vice president of Information Technologies.

    Lombardi and others described the assessment process as “due diligence” or “insurance.”

    “Whenever a company starts getting that many people annoyed at it, you sense some risk — that’s what it comes down to,” said Lombardi.

    Cornell officials were careful to emphasize that Blackboard is the right fit for Cornell at this time. They said that the assessment would have occurred this year even without the upset and anxiety elicited by Blackboard’s legal actions.

    I’ve heard similar comments from a handful of current Blackboard customers.