Barry Dahl is asking the question, “Is Blackboard losing clients?” and has created a wiki for people to enter information on whether they are migrating to Blackboard, migrating from it, or re-evaluating their installation. In general, it would be great to see more visibility of information of this kind. I’d love to see a wiki […]
Blackboard-Inc.
Social Media, Social Activism, and Edupatents
Back when the Blackboard patent and lawsuit first surfaced in July of 2006, social software was still a pretty new thing. There was a fair bit of surprise in the community when the Wikipedia page on the History of the Virtual Learning Environment, created in large part to gather prior art for the suit, generated […]
Vote for the D2L Million$Mission on Facebook
Apparently, somebody started a Facebook group supporting D2L’s offer to Blackboard to donate a million dollars to schools in return for Blackboard dropping the patent suit. Facebook groups have become a way for people to express their support for an idea or an initiative. This is something that wasn’t in fashion yet when the original […]
Desire2Learn Challenges Blackboard With $1 Million Charity Pledge
There are two pieces of news here. First, Blackboard has apparently been granted a new patent and has filed suit for infringement against Desire2Learn in the East District of Texas—again. I have not read and will not read the new patent filing because to do so would put my employer in legal jeopardy, thanks to […]
Blackboard Now Suing USPTO
Update: The Patently-O blog has a short post on this issue. There’s not a lot of new information here, but at least the reporting is done by actual patent lawyers. According to Desire2Learn’s patent blog, Blackboard has now filed suit against the USPTO (technically against the Director of the USPTO) to stop the inter partes […]
Openness: Finally, We're Getting Somewhere
Update: The Sannier vs. Wheeler smackdown is available on video here. Microsoft Silverlight is required. As I sit on the flight home from the EDUCAUSE conference thinking back on the themes of the week, it is clear to me that various flavors of openness have finally arrived in a big way in higher education, with […]
Bizarre Chapter in Blackboard, Inc. v Desire2Learn
There’s a really…um…weird story posted up on D2L’s patent blog about how the court allowed Blackboard to send somebody to poke around D2L’s conference. D2L knew about it, but it was supposed to be kept secret from the conference attendees. Very strange.