Archive for October, 2007



Blackboard’s Dirty Laundry Comes Out in Patent Trial

Desire2Learn has published some fairly tawdry details that have emerged during the discovery phase of the patent trial. (During discovery, both sides can demand to see relevant internal documents from the other side. Nasty confidential details can get exposed.) For one thing, Blackboard apparently sponsored a spy to go to the D2L user conference and […]

My Point Exactly

Inside Higher Ed has coverage of a Congressional hearing on “The Role of Federally Funded Research in the University Patent System.” Here’s the money quote:
Arti K. Rai, a professor of law at Duke University School of Law, agreed that there was no need for lawmakers to contemplate “a major overhaul of the current system” by […]

Must-Read: Campbell and Oblinger on Academic Analytics

John Campbell and Diana Oblinger have co-authored an EDUCAUSE paper on academic analytics that anyone with a practical interest in the topic should read. To begin with, it is a model of how to write a paper that addresses multiple institutional stakeholders across very different domains of expertise. It starts with a clear overview of […]

More on Software Licenses and Patents

Since my last post, I’ve gotten some good feedback from folks who are knowledgeable about the issues. I hope to write about this topic in more detail after I’ve gotten back from EDUCAUSE and had some time to do a little more research, but in the meantime, I want to at least mention two of […]

Backward University IP Polices Force Convoluted Sakai License

A couple of weeks back, I was somewhat disturbed to read a post by Unicon’s John Lewis on the forthcoming Version 2.0 of the Educational Commons License (ECL), which is used by both the Sakai and the Kuali projects. While pointing out some significant improvements over the previous version, John notes correctly that the proliferation […]





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