A few of the usual suspects have pointed to this one already, but in case you haven’t seen it yet, Barry Dahl has a fantastic podcast interview up (about 30 minutes) with Michael C. Smith, an intellectual property lawyer in the district where the case was filed and author of EDTexweblog. Both interviewer and interviewee […]
Desire2Learn
Blackboard Fails Statistics 101
Blackboard has posted their response to the USPTO ruling. They make some claims about how this will impact the trial, which I’m not in a position to evaluate just yet. They mention that all of the claims in the re-examination request “were unsuccessfully raised by Desire2Learn during recent litigation,” which is irrelevant since these are […]
All 44 Blackboard Patent Claims Invalidated by USPTO
This just in: On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard’s claims. We caution that this is a NON-final action; both Blackboard and Desire2Learn will […]
Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for Moodle
The American Association of Community College’s Instructional Technology Council (ITC) has just published its 2007 Distance Education Survey Results, covering data from 154 U.S. community colleges. And there’s a lot of interesting stuff in it. Here are the headlines that I drew from it: Distance education continues to grow at a very healthy clip, particularly […]
Desire2Live
There’s a very interesting interview of Desire2Learn CEO John Baker and General Counsel Diane Lank in T.H.E. Journal. It’s a particularly good read if you haven’t been keeping up on the details of the trial, but there’s also good stuff in it for people who have been following closely. For me personally, the biggest bit […]
The Latest on the Edupatent Front
As I noted in an earlier post, I’m traveling this week, so this post is going to be relatively short and light on analysis. If you’re trying to get a comprehensive picture of what’s happening, I’d start with the article in The Chronicle. (Incidentally, Katherine Mangan, who is new to the edupatent beat at The […]
On Safety and Values
Barry Dahl has posted some comments from John Baker regarding whether the possible backlash against Blackboard for the suit will have universities tar all LMS vendors with the same brush and move to open source instead. John made two points in response. First, John expressed faith in the educational community (based on feedback that D2L […]