I screwed up. My recent post about Blackboard’s moves into open source was a particularly challenging one to organize coherently. While wrestling with that, I failed to give my usual attention to the tone. As a result of that oversight, I communicated a substantially different message than the one that I intended to communicate. I […]
The Blackboard Announcements, Part 1: What the Heck Happened?
For those of you who have been living under a rock, you may have missed a cluster of announcements from Blackboard this week: Blackboard Acquires Moodlerooms and Netspot Blackboard Appoints Sakai Foundation Board Member Charles Severence to Lead Company’s Sakai Initiatives Blackboard Announces Open Source Services Group Blackboard Announces Continued Support for ANGEL There has […]
Instructure Steps Up for Open Education
Friday evening, I wrote in a blog post: If you are a large for-profit education company—say, an LMS vendor or a textbook company—give $5,000 to the DS106 Kickstarter project. At that level of contribution, in addition to all the benefits of the lower levels, you’ll get a mention as doing a really swell thing on the […]
Some Things You Should Do
If you have any spare change, give a few dollars to the DS106 Kickstarter project. They may have exceeded their initial funding goal, but Jim is going to write up some ideas of what he would do if he had more money and post them to the Kickstarter site. I’m guessing he can come up with […]
Blackboard Confronts Erosion of Market Share, Makes a Major Change in Strategy
In a series of announcements that has the educational technology world buzzing, Blackboard reversed their strategy of their core LMS business. Blackboard acquired two Moodle hosting and service providers – MoodleRooms in the US and NetSpot in Australia. Blackboard created an Open Source Services Group, which includes helping “institutions successfully manage open source learning management […]
Blackboard Acquires Moodlerooms and Netspot
Press release is here. This is obviously a gob smacker of a story. I’m going to take a few days, talk to a few folks, and think about the implications before I write a reaction post. You may hear from other e-Literate bloggers on the subject in the meantime. Stay tuned.
The Ultimate Hack: Re-coding Textbooks and Other Learning Content (Introduction)
(This is an initial rough draft of the Introduction to my next book, The Ultimate Hack: Re-coding Textbooks and Other Learning Content. I will be posting drafts of all the chapters on this site, and will post final versions along with the accompanying open textbook project on my personal blog. Both the drafts and final […]