Here are my plain English interpretations of the 44 Blackboard patent claims. From what I can tell, the following Learning Management Systems have most or all of the features listed in the claims and therefore may infringe on the patent:
LMS & Learning Platforms
Everything you want to know about Learning Management Systems and whatever comes after them.
Blackboard Patents the LMS
I’m surprised there hasn’t been more uproar about this yet. The ever-brilliant US Patent and Trademark Office has apparently granted Blackboard a patent for…well…pretty much anything remotely related to learning management systems. As I read it, Blackboard basically owns the patent on any sort of groupware at all that is used for teaching purposes. This […]
Widgets, Gadgets, and the LMOS
Mark Oehlert has a great post up on the implications of the proliferation of tools like Apple Widgets, Yahoo! Widgets, Google Gadgets, and so on, for learning environment design. (Some of you may recall that Apple widgets figured prominently in one of my early LMOS posts.) Mark’s post is good enough to be worth quoting […]
Speaking at AACE Ed-Media Next Month
I’ll be participating in the Association for Advancement of Computing in Education‘s Ed-Media 2006 Conference on James Dalziel‘s panel as part of the Learning Management Systems Symposium. Here’s the description of the panel: It only took a decade for the LMS to go from being a good idea to being a software system used by […]
BRR Report Published
I am pleased to announce that our report on BRR and LMSs for the Observatory on Borderless higher education has been published. Here’s the description: Apples to Apples: Guidelines for Comparative Evaluation of Proprietary and Open Educational Technology Systems Ken Udas and Michael Feldstein, SUNY Learning Network at the State University of New York, USA […]
Wikis to Go
Speaking of Murugan, he has a great post up about making wikis work offline and points to the nice Wiki2Go tool. At SLN, we think having offline capabilities are valuable for faculty (and, personally, I think they are at least as valuable for students as well). As Murugan points out, there is some common ground […]
A Conversation About BRR and LMSs
I’ve been meaning to write this up for a couple of weeks now. Ken Udas and I recently had a great conversation with folks from OpenBRR and Edutools/WCET about creating a community and framework to evaluate both Open Source and proprietary LMSs, drawing on the knowledge and resources of both OpenBRR and Edutools. In attendance […]