Seb Schmoller has posted an insightful, moving, and rather depressing reflection piece by Jim Farmer on the impact that the patent wars will have on education in general. Here’s a sample: Education patents and the new licensing environment may further commercialize teaching and learning. The Blackboard patent is not alone, but representative of many that […]
edunomics
Why Desire2Learn CEO John Baker is Our Hero
While most folks paying attention to the Blackboard patent scandal have sympathy for Desire2Learn, I’m not sure how many people realize just how altruistic the company is being by fighting the patent. From a purely financial perspective, it is clearly in D2L’s interest to settle and pay a royalty, even though doing so would harm […]
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 […]
The Economics of the LMOS
Jim Farmer has posted a slide stack (in PDF format) on the economics of interoperability. There’s a lot of good general stuff here about service-oriented architecture (SOA) and interoperability issues from a business perspective, but 90%+ can also be read to apply directly to the LMOS concept. Here are some highlights:
BRR Report Published
I am pleased to announce that our report on BRR and LMSs for the Observatory on Borderless higher education has been published. Here’s the description: Apples to Apples: Guidelines for Comparative Evaluation of Proprietary and Open Educational Technology Systems Ken Udas and Michael Feldstein, SUNY Learning Network at the State University of New York, USA […]
A Conversation About BRR and LMSs
I’ve been meaning to write this up for a couple of weeks now. Ken Udas and I recently had a great conversation with folks from OpenBRR and Edutools/WCET about creating a community and framework to evaluate both Open Source and proprietary LMSs, drawing on the knowledge and resources of both OpenBRR and Edutools. In attendance […]
Who's Afraid of iTunes U?
This is part 4 of a series of posts documenting a vist to Apple headquarters in February, 2005. For the full series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. and part 6. In my last post, I outlined Apple’s business model, particularly as it relates to the higher education market. You […]