e-Literate

Blackboard v. Desire2Learn: The First Final Judgment

Jim Farmer — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:05:58 +0000

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.

Delayed several days by a database failure at the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas Friday, May 2nd, the Final Judgment and associated orders for Blackboard v. Desire2Learn are now publicly available.

This text is based upon publicly available records. Because much of the record is “sealed” and not available to the public, and the transcript is available only upon payment to the court reporter, the complete record, as available to counsel, may provide a different perspective.

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Read the rest of Blackboard v. Desire2Learn: The First Final Judgment (2,254 words)

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Stop the Madness!

Michael Feldstein — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:17:08 +0000

I’m at the IMS Learning Impact conference. Another conference, another T-shirt. I expect to get at least 5 conference bags and T-shirts this year. I already have way too many T-shirts and way too many bags. At this point, I am starting to use them to insulate my attic. It’s absurd.

Therefore, I am hereby starting the Conference BYOB (Bring Your Own Bag) movement. Here’s how it works:

If you’re a conference organizer, offer to give a gift card (Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble…whatever) to anyone who brings their own bag and shirt. Just put your pile of stuff out, with gift card on the top, and I’ll gladly cram it into one of my 57 existing bags. You save shipping costs on all that bulky stuff, I get something I actually want rather than extra stuff to haul home and stuff in my attic, and we both help to save the environment.

Deal?

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Going to IMS Learning Impact This Week

Michael Feldstein — Sat, 10 May 2008 22:49:09 +0000

Ugh. I have so much to say about the JA-SIG conference and had just dug out enough from my work backlog to think about writing a few blog posts. Now I’m going away again and will have my head crammed full of even more stuff to blog about.I’m going to try to get to at least some of the JA-SIG stuff before it fades from my memory, but in the meantime, Sakai Foundation Executive Director Michael Korcuska has a few good posts up about it on his blog.

At any rate, if you’re going to Learning Impact, look me up. I’ll be around for the entire conference (including Thursday morning) and will be participating in the “Analytics and Learning Outcomes” panel on Tuesday at 1 PM.

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Cost of Exit

Michael Feldstein — Sat, 10 May 2008 22:44:38 +0000

A while back, I picked up on D’Arcy Norman’s complaint about how Moodle doesn’t export content to a standard. In a response to one of the comments on my post, I suggested that open source LMS communities like Moodle’s should encourage adopting institutions to consider the cost of exit as a selection criterion for their LMS. Doing so would encourage them to invest in export capabilities at the time when their commitment to the platform is high.

Well, as Chuck Severence notes, Oxford is considering doing exactly that with Sakai. Check out his post for some good notes on the pros and cons of various export strategies.

Chuck Severence, Oxford, Sakai

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Real-time College and University Transcripts Coming

Jim Farmer — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:22:15 +0000

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.

“Today the four firms providing electronic transcript services [to U.S. colleges and universities and school districts] have agreed to form a network so transcripts will be delivered to any user of their service regardless of where the transcript originated.” Speaking from hastily-written text, Larry Furth, Executive Director of the School Interoperability Framework Association (SAIFA) announced the agreement at the 5th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards in Washington, DC. The panel discussion on Emerging Standardization was delayed fifteen minutes as the four panelists reached agreement. The agreement is expected to be announced formally later this week. Mark Johnson, President of the National Transcript Center, John O’Connell, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Docufide, Craig Powell, President of ConnectEdu Inc., and J. Michael Thompson, Chief Executive Officer of XAP Corporation were speaking on Emerging Standardization Efforts and Trends.

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At the JA-SIG Conference Next Week

Michael Feldstein — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:39:33 +0000

I’ll be traveling to St. Paul, MN on Sunday for the JA-SIG conference. I’ll be there all week, including the post-conference Sakai planning sessions on Thursday and Friday. I’m a co-presenter for one session with Unicon’s Cris Holdorph on integrating Sakai with Peoplesoft. Other than that, the most likely place you will find me during the day is in the sessions from the “Community Source Management/Governance” track.

Feel free to ping me or just track me down if you want to meet up and chat.

JA SIG, Sakai, Unicon

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Is Blackboard’s Lawyer Calling D2L’s Customers?

Michael Feldstein — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:45:29 +0000

Here’s an interesting bit from D2L’s patent blog:

Clients have been calling us to let us know that Matthew Small, General Counsel of Blackboard, has been calling them. From what we understand, his purpose appears to be twofold: (1) to encourage clients to switch to Blackboard ; and (2) to create FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) with respect to alternative products and services in the eLearning space.

From what we gather, he has been making statements that are not supported by the record in the Court or by the actions of the Patent & Trademark Office. If your organization is called, we invite you to suggest to Mr. Small that we are always willing to engage in an open dialogue with you and him.

We remain confident that Learning Environment version 8.3 is an appropriate design-around to the patent claims – as we announced nearly one month ago. We also remain confident that the patent’s claims are invalid and that the Courts and the PTO will ultimately invalidate the patent.

As there is no www.factcheck.org for this litigation, we continue to encourage you to review the documents and the facts. We are happy to discuss any questions that any client, or other interested people, may have. Just let us know!

John Baker, President and CEO (John.Baker@Desire2Learn.com)
Diane Lank, General Counsel and Director, Legal Services (Diane.Lank@Desire2Learn.com)
John McLeod, Director of Marketing (John.McLeod@Desire2Learn.com)

It’s unsurprising that an aggressive company engaged in a lawsuit with its competitor would use the suit to try to poach customers. But I’ve never heard of a company having their lawyer act as a sales guy. If it’s true, it certainly demonstrates a pretty high level of chutzpah.

I’m very curious to find out more. If you’ve received a call like this or know anybody who has, let me know. I’m particularly interested in who called and in what factual claims they made about the legal situation.

Blackboard Inc., Desire2Learn, edupatents, Matthew Small

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SpikeSource Supporting Moodle on the Microsoft Stack

Michael Feldstein — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:32:27 +0000

Jim Farmer has an interesting guest post over at Seb’s blog about SpikeSource supporting Moodle on Windows/IIS. Both the creation of supported softwares stack for higher education and the mixture of proprietary and open source software in at least some of those stacks strike me as natural steps. I expect that we’ll see more of this kind of thing.

Jim Farmer, Moodle, SpikeSource

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Great Open Source Conference in Upstate New York

Michael Feldstein — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:29:04 +0000

Update: The dates of the conference are actually June 19-20. Sorry about that.

(Patrick will never let me live this down.)

My friend Patrick Masson has put together a two-day conference at Delhi, NY on May 23-24 that looks terrific. The first day, which is about open source in higher education in general, has tracks on quality, total cost of ownership, and external support. The second day is a Moodle Moot. I’ll be one of the speakers.

Be there or be rectangular, as they say.

Moodle, Patrick Masson, SUNY

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What the Sakai Announcement Means

Michael Feldstein — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:25:07 +0000

Barry Dahl read the Sakai Foundation’s recent announcement about the Blackboard patent pretty closely and is concerned that it sounds like they think the fight is over. I completely understand why he interpreted it that way, but I read it a little differently. If you look closely at the specifics of the legal situation, the Foundation’s position begins to make a lot more sense.

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