e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Desire2Learn Responds to the Blackboard Pledge

    Here’s the meat from the full post:

    We at Desire2Learn are unwavering in our position that the patent claims are invalid and unenforceable against Open Source, our competitors, and us, and that we do not infringe on the claims. We look forward to a decision by the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) on our comprehensive petition for an Inter Partes re-examination of the patent. We will continue to invite Blackboard to dissipate the cloud that it has cast over innovation and the educational ecosystem. The “pledge” does not alter Blackboard’s attempt to dictate educational software business models. We will continue to resist Blackboard’s attempts to monopolize the methods by which universities, schools, libraries, and other entities build their educational platforms. Blackboard continues – with the “pledge” perhaps even to a greater degree – to decree with whom education and business worldwide may conduct business. The users – not the vendor – should determine which competitive offering best fits the needs at their institution. By attempting to dictate educational software business models, Blackboard appears to fear competition.

    In taking the “pledge,” Michael Chasen claimed: “[Blackboard is] committed to the open exchange of ideas, collaboration and innovation . . . [t]his pledge is part of that commitment and our continued efforts to work collaboratively with the e-Learning community to foster greater openness and interoperability.” In light of Blackboard’s purported change of heart it suggests in its “pledge”, and the USPTO’s decision to grant re-examination of the patent, we encourage Blackboard to give meaning to Mr. Chasen’s words, and to join us in requesting that the court stay the litigation until the USPTO has had an opportunity to complete its work. This action would enable all members of the community – including Blackboard – to focus on their primary objectives.

  • The Blackboard Patent Pledge

    I’m late to the party on the pledge news for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is a recalcitrant DNS server out there in the ether that denied me access to my new blog site for the better part of the last two days…grr). It is gratifying to see that my absence really didn’t matter much. A lot has been written about this in the past few days and I don’t really have anything new to add.

    If you’re playing catch-up on the issue, you’ll want to start with Blackboard’s own page on the patent pledge. Equally important to read and read carefully is the joint statement by the EDUCAUSE and Sakai Foundation boards in response. In posting the letter to the Saki listserv, Sakai Foundation Board Chairman John Norman introduced it with the following warning:

    Bb announced an Open Source Patent pledge today. www.blackboard.com

    In their press release they refer to ‘collaboration’ with Sakai and Educause. Our ‘collaboration’ was to try make it as useful as possible. Since Bb quote selectively from our statement, I reproduce it in full below. It will go up on the Sakai website later today.

    I recommend taking John at his word and read the whole letter, in part because it is very well-crafted and encapsulates a lot of the sentiments–both postive and negative–that have been expressed about the pledge since the announcement. For your convenience, I have reproduced the letter in its entirety “below the fold” in this post.

    Inside Higher Education has a good piece on the story this morning, with quotes from many of the usual suspects as well as a few unusual ones. THE Journal has some good, in-depth quotes from Sakai and Blackboard representatives. Slashdot has picked up the story as well, and includes a few interesting and informative comments. Not covered in any of these are comments from the bloggers you’ll always want to read on this topic, including (but not limited to) Seb, Barry, and Stephen. Also interesting is Elgg developer Ben Werdmuller’s (re)assertion that Bb’s patent wouldn’t cover Elgg anyway.

    Since the community as gotten so good at responding to these issues, I think we should take better advantage of the whole RSS thing and consolidate the various comments for easier consumption. If people blogging on this topic would include “edupatents” as a tag or somewhere in the body of their post text, I would be happy to set up an aggregator on e-Literate that scoops up those posts (and would encourage others to do the same). Let me know if there is interest in this; it would be pretty easy for me to do.

    Now, if you haven’t seen the EDUCAUSE/Sakai statement, keep reading:

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  • Web Analytics, Gaming Technology, and the LMOS

    A while back, a blog conversation between Mark Oehlert and Lee Kraus regarding how to knit together lots of embedded, widget/gadget like learning applications into a coherent picture of what and how learners are doing. To begin with, the idea they’re toying with is very similar to the LMOS but focused on a corporate market and workflow learning. What really got me thinking, though, was when they started talking about a dashboard somewhat like Google Analytics to track learner progress. (Those corporate folks sure do love their dashboards.) Something about this really clicked with me, but I couldn’t quite articulate how I would want to see this work in an academic environment.

    That is, until Raph Koster’s post put me onto VisitorVille–“Web Stats in Video Game Format!”

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  • Welcome to e-Literate 2.0

    At long last, I have managed to move my blog over to WordPress. Many thanks to Sarah Lewis at Blogging Expertise for helping me get my content out of ExpressionEngine, style the site the way I wanted, and make sure that old URLs didn’t break. She was able to head some problems off at the pass that probably would have taken somebody with less WordPress-specific experience days to figure out.

    There are a number of little issues I’m still working out (mostly small post formatting problems that I’m correcting by hand), but everything should work here. Please let me know if you spot any problems. All major URLs, including the RSS feed, should auto-forward, but just in case, you might want to update your RSS reader to the new feed URL, which is http://feeds.feedburner.com/mfeldstein/yyMY.

    In the meantime, I thought I would take the opportunity to point out a few features of the new blog that you might find useful:

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  • Oracle AEI at the Sakai Atlanta Conference

    Here, thanks to the magic of SlideShare, are the slides from one of the Academic Enterprise Initiative (AEI) presentations at the Atlanta conference:

    A few comments on the presentation are in order:

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  • Bodington at the Sakai Conference

    This is the first installment of my promised non-patent (and non-patented) coverage of the Sakai Atlanta conference. I’m going to start with Bodington, in part because I continue to be really impressed with these guys. In my opinion, they are doing some of the most interesting work in the LMS/VLE space today. They are also the furthest along of anyone in terms of realizing the kind of system design that my colleagues and I have been calling an LMOS.

    As you may know, Bodington is going to be using Sakai as the framework for the next generation of their platform. I wrote a few posts about Bodington a while back, shortly after the announcement. The conference gave me several opportunities to hear more from the Bod team about their thinking, their project, and their progress.

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  • Thanks to Guest Blogger Stephen Marshall

    In all my comings and goings, I failed to notice that Stephen has finished his run as a guest blogger here at e-Literate. If you missed his posts, I highly recommend checking them out:

    Also, be sure to check out (and subscribe to) Stephen’s blog.

    Thanks for visiting us here at e-Literate, Steve.