e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: versionlessness

  • Some Court Documents

    Well, it’s later than we expected, but we did finally get a copy of the jury questionnaire as well as Blackboard’s motion for prejudgment interest. (Both of these were provided by instructional media + magic and acquired from public sources.) And there are a few interesting details.

    Update: At the request of Blackboard’s legal counsel, we have removed the link to the motion for pre-judgment interest.

    Later Update: A link to the redacted version of the motion has been added back. In answer to some of the questions that I’ve been getting, the reason that Blackboard requested that the document be taken down in the first place is that there was a clerical error in which Exhibit D (referenced in the post below) should have been submitted under seal since it contained D2L’s client list. (Both companies have a right to keep their client lists confidential, and the customers of both companies have the right not to publicize which platform they use.) Blackboard’s legal counsel corrected the error through official channels and asked that we take down the part of the document that shouldn’t have been released in the first place. No threats were made. After thinking about it a bit and seeking a second opinion, I came to the conclusion that it was a reasonable request and took appropriate action. With Jim’s help, I got a copy of the filing minus Exhibit D and reposted it as soon as I had the chance.
    As to the question of why the instructional media + magic web site is down, it is undergoing maintenance for unrelated reasons.

    (more…)

  • What Version of Yahoo Are You Using?

    This great question was posed by Patrick Masson, SUNY Learning Environments’ Director of Technology Projects, to make a point about the next generation of course management systems. The design of the current generation of systems is that of old-fashioned monolitic systems. Blackboard, WebCT, Angel–even Moodle (albeit to a somewhat lesser degree)–they are all built on this model. To improve the system, you have to upgrade to the next version.

    But web services such as Yahoo, Jotspot, and Salesforce.com are versionless. We don’t know what version of the product is running and we don’t care. New features are added from time to time, but that all happens seamlessly for the user. There’s no migration…no “flipping of the switch.”

    So what does a course management platform need to have in order to support this kind of versionlessness? In a word, “services.” (more…)