Blackboard, Inc., Loses Battle In EduPatent Venue Fight

By Michael Feldstein | August 26, 2008

According to a blog entry on Desire2Learn’s Patent blog, the US Patent and Trademark Office has denied Blackboard’s request to suspend the re-examination process. Bb and D2L have been fighting over the venue for the next round of the battle, with Blackboard asking the USPTO not to complete the re-examination process (despite having earlier said that a re-exam would only make their patent stronger) and D2L asking the US Court of Appeals not to hear Blackboard’s case until the USPTO issues a final ruling. D2L has won the first of these two battles.

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IMS Learning Information Services: The Motivating Pain

By Michael Feldstein | August 18, 2008

Today Oracle announced the release of the Student Administration Integration Pack, or SAIP. It’s the first product that I have worked on as an Oracle employee, and I’m proud of it for a number of reasons. It’s not a particularly glamorous piece of software, but I think it’s going to be important. This is my first post in a planned series about it.

I’m going to start the series with a few posts about the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) specification that the SAIP implements. Because, really, the specification is at the heart of the product. Now, let me get one thing out of the way, because some of you are going to complain ask. A draft of the LIS specification has just left the working group and is currently available to IMS members only. It will be made available to non-IMS members by December, after which there will be a better part of a year when it will be open to public comment and further revision from the working group before it is finalized. I know that this schedule makes some of you unhappy. I have complained about it myself. I’m going to tell you as much as I can now and let you know the moment that more information becomes available to the general public.

Anyway….

Today’s post will focus on describing the main pains schools have been experiencing that motivated the creation of the specification in the first place. In later posts, I’ll talk about how the LIS attempts to relieve those pains (again, not glamorous but still important), and then I’ll write a little bit about some of the moderately sexier possibilities that LIS will also enable.
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Bring On Da Noise: The Backchannel Panel

By Michael Feldstein | August 13, 2008

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. Barry Dahl has a great post analyzing the back-channel comments from our recent panel discussion with Stephen Downes and Robbie Melton. He concludes that only 31% of the posts were productive, by which he means on-topic questions or comments. This issue came up during the panel discussion itself, and Robbie (brilliantly, in my opinion) characterized it as a “teachable moment.”

I think a big reason why there was so much off-topic chatter is that we didn’t really establish clear patterns or norms for how the back-channel would be encorporated into the larger dialog. The audience treated it like an experiment because we treated it like an experiment. I heard some suggestions from audience members afterward about how the technology could be modified to improve the experience (e.g., disallow anonymous posting, shut off the flow when the panelists are talking, have a moderator filter the comments, etc.), but before I would want to try imposing any of those hard limits on the participants, I would first want to try having a little more preparatory dialog with them about the most productive ways to use the backchannel and how we all would like to interact with it.

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Blackboard, Inc. Analysis, Part 1: Software Licenses

By Jim Farmer | August 11, 2008

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.

As the dominant supplier of learning system software, Blackboard Inc. is “mission critical” to colleges and universities in the U.S. It has been more than two years since Blackboard completed the acquisition of WebCT. Reviewing Blackboard’s performance may provide some insight.

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Social Constructivists and eLearning

By Jim Farmer | August 7, 2008

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer

On July 15th Luke Fernandez, Weber State University and frequent Sakai contributor, posted “Moodle and Social Constructionism: Looking for the Individual in the Community” on Academic Commons. Broadly interpreting his post about attending the San Francisco MoodleMoot US 2008, he identified two issues: (1) How does the choice of an instructional method impact the design, development, or choice and use of a learning system? (2) And implicitly from his response to this conference, what conferences and conference programs increase the adoption and use of education methodologies and technologies? Both have been topics of discussion since the San Francisco MoodleMoot; this post responds to those issues.

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