You may not have noticed, but e-Literate had a brief outage yesterday which was fixed for me by the good folks at my ISP, SiteGround. Meanwhile, e-Literate‘s operator (i.e., me) has been experiencing a longer outage due to a nasty bout of bronchitis. I am starting to feel slightly more human today and will begin […]
How to Understand and Follow the Sakai Foundation
My friend Patrick Masson has started an EDUCAUSE wiki page to develop a working definition of “openness”. I’m going to sidestep the hot debate around that topic and focus instead on the distinction he makes between openness and transparency, which he defines as “provid[ing] the stakeholder community access to–and perhaps even a platform to inform–the […]
A Brief Word about the Mellon Foundation and Sakai
Update: Sakai Executive Korcuska has a more detailed blog post about what the Mellon Foundation is actually doing and the impact (or lack thereof) on Sakai. There’s been a fair bit of hand wringing online about today’s piece in the Chronicle indicating that the Mellon Foundation will be “eliminating” it’s Research in Information Technology grant […]
End of an Era
Now that the Blackboard/D2L patent fight is over, I am taking down the edupatent feed harvester, which never worked particularly well anyway. Mostly what showed up in the feed were my own posts, which you can still access by going to the edupatents tag.
Blackboard v. Desire2Learn Is Over
All lawsuits have been dropped by both sides. The companies will cross-license each others’ patent portfolios under undisclosed terms, which gives both companies an opportunity to save face. After three and a half years, higher education can move on. Left unresolved is the larger question of the role of patents in higher education, but that […]
Blackboard Contributing Code to Open Source Project
According to Scott Rosenbaum, a business intelligence consultant, Blackboard has given him permission to contribute code back back to the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project (or, more accurately, they are contributing the code as separate open source projects that can be “used by the community”). The project that generated this contribution is […]
Sakai 3: What It Is and When To Move To It
I have been getting a lot of questions from the Sakai-curious lately about the whole Sakai 2 vs. Sakai 3 question. When will Sakai 3 be “ready”? When is a good time to migrate? If I’m under pressure to migrate in the short term, what should I do? Should I go to Sakai 2 and […]