Via Stephen Downes, I see that Mark Oehlert posted a list of Blackboard’s pending patents, 8 of which were filed for in the last year (6 of which were filed in October and November of last year), and many of which are not covered in Blackboard’s patent pledge. This has prompted me to invest a little time in creating a more–dare I say it?–Web 2.0ish edupatent alert system.
You’ll notice that there is a new tab on the top of this blog labeled “EduPatents.” On that page you will find an RSS feed aggregator that displays any blog posts on the web that have been tagged by their authors with the word “edupatents”, any posts that use the word “edupatents” in the body of their texts, and any web pages that have been tagged “edupatents” on del.icio.us. (I took the liberty of tagging Mark’s post, so it shows up in the aggregator even though he didn’t tag it himself.) You can subscribe to the feed directly or, if you prefer, you can also subscribe by email. Equally importantly, you can contribute to the contents of the feed in a variety of ways. If we all make use of this system, then you won’t have to rely on just a couple of bloggers (e.g., me) to be able to see everything that’s relevant and post about it.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to make the most out of this new system and how I created it, then read on.