e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Ed Tech

The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.

  • The Creepy Treehouse

    There’s an article in NC State’s campus newspaper about Blackboard’s Facebook integration. I’m always interested to hear what actual students think about all the Web 2.0 for education stuff we tend to hyperventilate about. There isn’t a lot of new information in the piece, but I did love this classic piece of snarkiness:

    Blackboard won’t be the last education company attempting to break into Facebook’s user pool. It’s a phenomenon that [Associate Provost Lou] Harrison called the ‘creepy tree house effect,’ defined by technological education experts as an online environment created by instructors or institutions that mimics an established and trusted environment.

    The term arises from the concept that children can identify a ‘creepy tree house’ that adults built and will avoid it. Perhaps it explains why, when this issue went to press, Blackboard Sync had only 161 daily active users.

  • More Tech Radium v. Blackboard, Inc.

    I conferred with Jim Farmer on new patent infringement suit and a few interesting points came out:

    • Tech Radium is suing Blackboard for violating three patents, some but not all of which are education-specific. This may or may not matter to you, depending on how you feel about software patents in general versus edupatents in particular.
    • Tech Radium has held at least one of these patents for 2 years but is only filing suit now. It’s likely that NTI wasn’t big enough to go after from a financial perspective but that Blackboard is.
    • As is usually the case in these sorts of situations, Blackboard has a strong economic motive to settle quickly. They now have first-hand knowledge of how long and expensive a patent fight can be. They will want to eliminate any uncertainty in their market around their product, which has apparently been selling well, as quickly as possible. And they are big enough that they can probably afford to pay royalties.
    • Tech Radium also has strong incentive to settle quickly. Getting a settlement from Blackboard would strengthen their infringement case against any other challenger, effectively blocking other likely entrants–including open source entrants–into this market.

    Keep in mind that these are patents about unified messaging to mobile phones and the like. This is a critical growth area for educational technology. It is in the interest of higher education to see Blackboard fight this patent, just as it has been in the interest of higher education to see D2L fight the ‘138 patent.

  • Blackboard, Inc. Sued for Patent Infringement

    A company called TechRadium is suing Blackboard in East Texas (Marshall, not Lufkin) for allegedly infringing on their patent on mass notification systems. (Blackboard bought emergency notifications company NTI recently.) im+m has a copy of the complaint posted. We’ll try to get some analysis posted when we can. In the meantime, if you have a chance to read the complaint and notice anything noteworthy in it, please comment on it here so that we can consolidate these observations and follow up.

  • And Now a Word From Our Non-commercial Sponsor…

    This is just a reminder that you should register right away for the 2-3-98 Conference on open source in higher education at fabulous Delhi, NY on June 19th and 20th. The first day has tracks on quality, total cost of ownership, and external support, while the second day is a MoodleMoot. There are good speakers from a variety of schools and projects. I’ll be giving the dinner talk on the first night. If that doesn’t entice you, then consider that SUNY Delhi has an award-winning culinary arts program that regularly beats out the likes of the Culinary Institute of America. So even my dinner talk turns out to be a bomb, it’ll be worth it.

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  • Blackboard v. Desire2Learn: The First Final Judgment

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.

    Delayed several days by a database failure at the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas Friday, May 2nd, the Final Judgment and associated orders for Blackboard v. Desire2Learn are now publicly available.

    This text is based upon publicly available records. Because much of the record is “sealed” and not available to the public, and the transcript is available only upon payment to the court reporter, the complete record, as available to counsel, may provide a different perspective.

    (more…)

  • Stop the Madness!

    I’m at the IMS Learning Impact conference. Another conference, another T-shirt. I expect to get at least 5 conference bags and T-shirts this year. I already have way too many T-shirts and way too many bags. At this point, I am starting to use them to insulate my attic. It’s absurd.

    Therefore, I am hereby starting the Conference BYOB (Bring Your Own Bag) movement. Here’s how it works:

    If you’re a conference organizer, offer to give a gift card (Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble…whatever) to anyone who brings their own bag and shirt. Just put your pile of stuff out, with gift card on the top, and I’ll gladly cram it into one of my 57 existing bags. You save shipping costs on all that bulky stuff, I get something I actually want rather than extra stuff to haul home and stuff in my attic, and we both help to save the environment.

    Deal?

  • Cost of Exit

    A while back, I picked up on D’Arcy Norman’s complaint about how Moodle doesn’t export content to a standard. In a response to one of the comments on my post, I suggested that open source LMS communities like Moodle’s should encourage adopting institutions to consider the cost of exit as a selection criterion for their LMS. Doing so would encourage them to invest in export capabilities at the time when their commitment to the platform is high.

    Well, as Chuck Severence notes, Oxford is considering doing exactly that with Sakai. Check out his post for some good notes on the pros and cons of various export strategies.