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 […]
Desire2Learn
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 […]
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.
Blackboard, Inc., Loses Battle In EduPatent Venue Fight
According to a blog entry on Desire2Learn’s Patent blog, the US Patent and Trademark Office has denied Blackboard’s request to suspend the re-examination process. Bb and D2L have been fighting over the venue for the next round of the battle, with Blackboard asking the USPTO not to complete the re-examination process (despite having earlier said […]
Social Constructivists and eLearning
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer On July 15th Luke Fernandez, Weber State University and frequent Sakai contributor, posted “Moodle and Social Constructionism: Looking for the Individual in the Community” on Academic Commons. Broadly interpreting his post about attending the San Francisco MoodleMoot US 2008, he identified two issues: (1) How does the […]