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.

  • Real-time College and University Transcripts Coming

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.

    “Today the four firms providing electronic transcript services [to U.S. colleges and universities and school districts] have agreed to form a network so transcripts will be delivered to any user of their service regardless of where the transcript originated.” Speaking from hastily-written text, Larry Furth, Executive Director of the School Interoperability Framework Association (SAIFA) announced the agreement at the 5th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards in Washington, DC. The panel discussion on Emerging Standardization was delayed fifteen minutes as the four panelists reached agreement. The agreement is expected to be announced formally later this week. Mark Johnson, President of the National Transcript Center, John O’Connell, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Docufide, Craig Powell, President of ConnectEdu Inc., and J. Michael Thompson, Chief Executive Officer of XAP Corporation were speaking on Emerging Standardization Efforts and Trends.

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  • At the JA-SIG Conference Next Week

    I’ll be traveling to St. Paul, MN on Sunday for the JA-SIG conference. I’ll be there all week, including the post-conference Sakai planning sessions on Thursday and Friday. I’m a co-presenter for one session with Unicon’s Cris Holdorph on integrating Sakai with Peoplesoft. Other than that, the most likely place you will find me during the day is in the sessions from the “Community Source Management/Governance” track.

    Feel free to ping me or just track me down if you want to meet up and chat.

  • Is Blackboard's Lawyer Calling D2L's Customers?

    Here’s an interesting bit from D2L’s patent blog:

    Clients have been calling us to let us know that Matthew Small, General Counsel of Blackboard, has been calling them. From what we understand, his purpose appears to be twofold: (1) to encourage clients to switch to Blackboard ; and (2) to create FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) with respect to alternative products and services in the eLearning space.

    From what we gather, he has been making statements that are not supported by the record in the Court or by the actions of the Patent & Trademark Office. If your organization is called, we invite you to suggest to Mr. Small that we are always willing to engage in an open dialogue with you and him.

    We remain confident that Learning Environment version 8.3 is an appropriate design-around to the patent claims – as we announced nearly one month ago. We also remain confident that the patent’s claims are invalid and that the Courts and the PTO will ultimately invalidate the patent.

    As there is no www.factcheck.org for this litigation, we continue to encourage you to review the documents and the facts. We are happy to discuss any questions that any client, or other interested people, may have. Just let us know!

    John Baker, President and CEO ([email protected])
    Diane Lank, General Counsel and Director, Legal Services ([email protected])
    John McLeod, Director of Marketing ([email protected])

    It’s unsurprising that an aggressive company engaged in a lawsuit with its competitor would use the suit to try to poach customers. But I’ve never heard of a company having their lawyer act as a sales guy. If it’s true, it certainly demonstrates a pretty high level of chutzpah.

    I’m very curious to find out more.  If you’ve received a call like this or know anybody who has, let me know. I’m particularly interested in who called and in what factual claims they made about the legal situation.

  • SpikeSource Supporting Moodle on the Microsoft Stack

    Jim Farmer has an interesting guest post over at Seb’s blog about SpikeSource supporting Moodle on Windows/IIS. Both the creation of supported softwares stack for higher education and the mixture of proprietary and open source software in at least some of those stacks strike me as natural steps. I expect that we’ll see more of this kind of thing.

  • Great Open Source Conference in Upstate New York

    Update: The dates of the conference are actually June 19-20. Sorry about that.

    (Patrick will never let me live this down.)

    My friend Patrick Masson has put together a two-day conference at Delhi, NY on May 23-24 that looks terrific. The first day, which is about open source in higher education in general, has tracks on quality, total cost of ownership, and external support. The second day is a Moodle Moot. I’ll be one of the speakers.

    Be there or be rectangular, as they say.

  • What the Sakai Announcement Means

    Barry Dahl read the Sakai Foundation’s recent announcement about the Blackboard patent pretty closely and is concerned that it sounds like they think the fight is over. I completely understand why he interpreted it that way, but I read it a little differently. If you look closely at the specifics of the legal situation, the Foundation’s position begins to make a lot more sense.

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  • Interview with an East Texas IP Lawyer on Blackboard v Desire2Learn

    A few of the usual suspects have pointed to this one already, but in case you haven’t seen it yet, Barry Dahl has a fantastic podcast interview up (about 30 minutes) with Michael C. Smith, an intellectual property lawyer in the district where the case was filed and author of EDTexweblog. Both interviewer and interviewee did a terrific job of really illuminating some of the legal nuances.

    There is one point that bears revisiting, though. Michael, in answering Barry’s questions about the USPTO re-examination, appeared to assume that the re-exam was ex parte. This is a perfectly reasonable assumption, since ex parte is far more common a challenge type than inter partes. Nevertheless, the D2L/SFLC challenge is actually inter partes (or, to be more specific a weird hybrid of ex parte and inter partes that mostly follows inter partes rules). Some of Michael’s answers would probably be unaffected by this difference, e.g., the likelihood that the USPTO ruling will affect the prior court ruling. But some, like the probability of a successful USPTO challenge, how this challenge fits into a larger litigation strategy, and how the judge might react to the challenge going forward, could. I’d be really interested to hear whether any of Michael’s answers change based on this information.