Update: Scott Wilson rightly pointed out to me that the IMS produces specifications, not standards. This week was the annual IMS Learning Impact conference, and it brought with it a slew of announcements about progress on education-specific technical standards: Learning Information Services v2.0 Public Draft Released: Well, this took waaay longer than expected, but the […]
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Blackboard's Progress Toward Standards Support
Coming out of this week’s IMS meeting, Ray Henderson has a good post up describing the progress Blackboard was able to demonstrate toward support of the IMS Common Cartridge (CC) and Basic Learning Tool Interoperability (BLTI) standards. Sometimes it’s hard to tell from a distance how committed a company is to implementing a standard—particularly one […]
Common Cartridge: e-Learning Made Easy
This is a guest blog post by Jim Farmer, Coordinator, Scholarly Systems Group at Georgetown University and editor at the eReSS project, University of Hull. On September 4, 2007, a summer morning in Adelphi, Maryland, the workgroup, breakfast in hand, slowly assembled into in a large conference room at the University of Maryland, University College […]
Why Teachers' Unions Should Demand Support for the IMS Common Cartridge Standard
I just got back from the EDUCAUSE conference and man, do I have a lot to write about. I’m going to start with the IMS’s announcement of the new Common Cartridge standard. Now, I know that technical standards aren’t always the stuff that gives you goosebumps. But if you are a teacher–particularly a unionized teacher–pay […]
Patents and IMS Common Cartridge
A while back, IMS CEO Rob Abel was kind enough to comment on my post regarding the potential impact of patents on educational technology standards. As part of his summary at the end of the comment, he wrote, It’s difficult for Blackboard or any other vendor to “game” the standards process in IMS due to […]
An Example of How the Blackboard Patent Could Chill Innovation
Blackboard’s General Counsel Matthew Small has said that their patent and lawsuit is “not about hindering innovation.” It’s important that we not allow this claim to go unchallenged. I’d like to start gathering concrete examples of initiatives that are beneficial to the educational community and could be directly harmed by Blackboard’s actions. I’ll start. The […]