I am delighted to note that the IMS has endorsed the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust Act and urged its members to support it. As I described in a previous post, this legislation would create a trust that would generate a billion dollars annually–money that would be spent on the creation of non-proprietary digital educational content […]
IMS
Blackboard's Answers to the IMS Blogged
Stuart Sim has live-blogged the IMS Q&A session with Blackboard regarding their patent. For those of you who don’t know him, Stuart is no wild-eyed long-haired academic commie pinko. He’s the Chief Architect at Sun Microsystems’ Global Education and Research Group. Although there doesn’t appear to be much news out of the conversation, I think […]
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 […]
Why We Need More Standards
I almost missed this post by Scott Leslie expressing his mixed feelings about the standards talk coming out of Alt-i-Labs. Lucky for me, Stephen picked it up in OLDaily. Scott writes: Part of me really wants some of these developments to come true, to deliver the promised ‘plug and play’ elearning environments described herein, and […]
Now, That's What I'm Talkin' 'bout!
An excerpt from Sakai’s press release regarding a demonstration of the IMS Tool Interoperability (TI) standard: The demonstration included four LMS systems including BlackBoard, WebCT, Sakai, and Moodle. The demonstration included three applications: Concept Tutor, Samigo(Sakai), and QuestionMark. All LMS/Application combinations worked and were demonstrated at the meeting which validates the interoperability of the IMS […]