With Reuters’ story last week that Blackboard is putting itself up for sale through an auction, one question to ask is ‘why now?’. As Michael has pointed out, Blackboard is in the midst of a significant, but incomplete and late, re-architecture of its product line. Bottom line: If you think that Ultra is all about […]
Chronicle-of-Higher-Education
NPR and Missed (Course) Signals
Anya Kamenetz has a piece up on NPR about learning analytics, highlighting Purdue’s Course Signals as its centerpiece. She does a good job of introducing the topic to a general audience and raising some relevant ethical questions. But she missed one of the biggest ethical questions surrounding Purdue’s product—namely, that some of its research claims […]
The Pirate Hoax
A friend asked me what I think about the story in the Chronicle about the professor who encouraged his students to create a hoax story about a pirate in order to teach them about students about vetting the quality of their sources as part of a history class. They created a blog about the fake history […]
The Blackboard Patent Crisis at Two and a Half Weeks
While marveling the events of the last several weeks, Jim Farmer suggested that it might be worthwhile to pause and reflect back on the sequence of events. I thought that was a good idea, so here it is. I don’t claim that it is any sense a definitive history. To the contrary, it’s just my […]
Blackboard by the Numbers
Update: Welcome, Chronicle readers. Since it wasn’t made clear in the Chronicle’s reference, I’d like to point out that the paper I’m quoting was written by Jim Farmer, who is the Coordinator of Georgetown University’s new Interoperability Center, formerly the Sakai SEPP Community Liaison and project administrator for the uPortal project. Jim has pretty impressive […]