Archive for the 'Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!)' Category



I Want More

The EDUCAUSE webinar on edupatents today was very good. (The archived event is available.) James Hilton, University of Virginia’s CIO, did a great job of laying out the fundamental conflict between the academic endeavor and the United States’ obsession with ideas as property—an idea that has infused academia through technology transfer departments among many other […]

Blackboard’s Response to the USPTO Office Action

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Blackboard has responded to the non-final invalidation of their patent by the USPTO. I’ve only had time to scan it quickly, but here are my preliminary observations.
First, Blackboard has added a bunch of new dependent claims, bringing the total up to 57. (There’s a Steve Martin joke in […]

What I Want from the EDUCAUSE Seminar on Edupatents

Seb has a good post up raising some questions for the free EDUCAUSE webinar on edupatents tomorrow at 1 PM Eastern time. I’ll add a few of my own (which in some ways are just extensions of Seb’s):

What are the various edupatents being litigated in the United States today and what is the potential impact […]

Didn’t See This One Coming

The business processes of Blackboard as interpreted through Bollywood movies.
And if that doesn’t get you curious enough to click on a hyperlink, then you’re a lost cause.

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addthis_title = ‘Didn%27t+See+This+One+Coming’;
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The Creepy Treehouse

There’s an article in NC State’s campus newspaper about Blackboard’s Facebook integration. I’m always interested to hear what actual students think about all the Web 2.0 for education stuff we tend to hyperventilate about. There isn’t a lot of new information in the piece, but I did love this classic piece of snarkiness:
Blackboard won’t be […]





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