Desire2Blog

Two new things appear on the Blackboard Patent Info page . The first is a second page of FAQs where they clearly are speaking to some of the information (they say it is misinformation of course) from the blogosphere. The second item is a transcript and comments from an interview between BB counsel Matthew Small and Paul Bacsich, Member of the ALT Board of Trustees (Association for Learning Technology) in the UK. On the BB page, they talk down to the audience rather severely and often. " A common misunderstanding is that the description in the abstract or specification governs what the patent covers. Focusing on the wrong section of the patent can be misleading and has caused some people to think that the Blackboard patent covers all of e-learning. To properly understand any patent, you must do a careful phrase-by-phrase reading of the claims." " This detailed element-by-element analysis is necessary to evaluate the scope of the patent. Be wary of any analysis of ...

The debate continues to rage, everywhere except Congress that is. Some people paint this as a non-partisan issue but it seems pretty clear to me that Dems are mainly on the side of net neutrality and Pubs are mainly on the opposite side. I seriously doubt that there are more than just a couple of issues left in the U.S. that don't split down party lines. Since the Republicans are largely against this, I'm somewhat surprised that the MnSCU Board of Trustees adopted a resolution supporting net neutrality at their June meeting. I can't find any proof of that yet in the form of official minutes, but I was there and saw the presentation and heard their vote of support. My surprise at this action is that all (or nearly all) of them are appointees of the MN Republican Governor who most likely does NOT support net neutrality. I say most likely because my research (web searching) hasn't turned up any evidence of his position at all. At any rate, I support net neutrality in gene...

I am planning to hold a series of conversations around the state this year to gather input regarding Minnesota Online . As chair of the MnOnline Council for the upcoming year, I want to make sure that all interested voices are heard as we work on determining agenda items throughout the year. As a first attempt, I hosted a 90 minute Skypecast on August 16. I was happy to have about 20 people join the conversation for part or all of the session. I also plan to hold open forums via ITV as well as by visiting some of the campuses during the year. One of my concerns about MnOnline is that not enough people know what has been going on with MnOnline and many people don’t feel that they have a voice at the table. During the course of a few blog posts, I will try to capture most of the conversation. This first post will deal with the input from only one of the participants. James from Metropolitan State said: MnOnline should develop a Common Media Server or ensure that med...

Last night I received a thorough response via email from the President of the Professional Investors Alliance . His message was sent in reply to my earlier post about the Patent Reform Act of 2005 that is currently being considered in D.C. I have invited Mr. Riley to join me in a recorded audio interview (or possibly a Skypecast) to address many of the points that he made in his note to me. I hope he replies affirmatively, and will post info here if there is any. Here is a brief snippet from the email: "... the patent system is timeless and works well, it is the patent office which has problems. We need to fix the office which needs management cleaned up and to triple the number of examiners." He points out a few of the PIA views about the corporations who are supporting the Reform Act (Deform Act, as they call it on their website) and what their motives are. About the PIA: " The Professional Inventors Alliance USA was created more than a decade ago to protect Amer...

So I'm sittin' on the couch Sunday night thinkin' bout the Blackboard vs. Desire2Learn debacle. I start thinkin' that it's not all that unusual for no one to have known about the patent granted back in January because it's not very likely that interested parties (e-learning types and similar rogues) are scanning the output of the USPTO on a regular basis looking for goofball approvals. Still I was curious about how this remained silent for approximately six months before they announced it in a press release and almost immediately sued D2L. So those thoughts are running through my head and slowly my head tilts slightly to one side (the left, it always seems to go that way, don't know why) and I say "Huh?!" Blackboard is a publicly traded corporation and they clearly are all about " enhancing shareholder value " (bottom of page 3, or you can just trust me), so why did they not leverage this news during the six months between patent approva...

Somebody had to do it. I was going to make a few jokes about this not being snakes on a blackboard, but rather the snakes at Blackboard, or maybe the latest group executive photo from them; but I don't think it would be appropriate for me to go down that road. It would be fine if you did though. You might also notice that I didn't really use their logo for this. The snakes came from Microsoft, of course (clip art, that is). BTW, I did see the movie at the sneak preview last night because I love that kind of crap, and yes, it was fun in a campy, no academy nomination sort-of-way.

In case you've been in a cave for the past three weeks (after all, it is summer break in higher ed), here is a short recap from the Education Technology Group of all the Blackboard vs. Desire2Learn patent dispute goings on. It includes links to many pertinent sites. For longer, more entertaining reading, the following three bloggers have lots of great info: Michael Feldstein: e-Literate Stephen Downes: Stephen's Web (use his search box for Blackboard) Al Essa: The NOSE Technorati Tags: D2L , Desire2Learn , Blackboard

Had an interesting evening sitting around the house by myself while the family is enjoying the last few days of their summer vacation out at the lake. I was just web surfin' a bit when I got a little beep from someone sending me a message in Desire2Chat. This guy was reading my blog and wants to know if I'm available to talk for awhile. I say sure so he Skypes me and we spend about the next 55 minutes talking about lots of cool things. He's just moved to an Asian country where he's taken a job with a company (I'm sworn to secrecy) that is developing a learning toolkit that is totally web-based. The concept revolves around informal learning and a no-geeks-required user interface that allows maximum creativity and flexibility with minimum structure/restrictions. He showed me an online demo of the work-in-progress and I liked what I saw. The more we talked about this the more it struck me how all of this technology and all of these web/informal learning opportunitie...

The Sleuth from Duluth. In the audio interview with John Baker ( see post below this) , he said I should use my "sleuthing abilities" to find which Big Twelve school had just signed on with Desire2Learn. Armed with my sleuthing toolkit (Google), I found that Oklahome State University (OSU) has announced signing a contract with D2L after they beat out Angel, WebCT, and Blackboard (See here, scroll down a little) in the RFP battle. Interestingly, the two finalists were D2L and Angel. Both Blackboard and WebCT were invited to give vendor demonstrations to the task force (did the same people show up twice?), but neither made it to the finalist stage even though both of these were (and still are) already in use at OSU. Another example of BlackCT not being able to compete effectively against more agile competitors, which is why they want to litigate them into oblivion. In case the post linked to above goes away, I'll quote the operative paragraph here: " The Course Manag...

Sorry, this took several days longer to post due to technical problems on my end.   I sat down with John Baker, CEO of Desire2Learn  (now D2L), late Tuesday night at the 2006  MERLOT Conference to talk about the Blackboard suit as well as a few other things about D2L such as their recent growth and even pandemic planning. (Photo courtesy of Al Essa under Creative Commons license.)  The interview was recorded and edited with Audacity, but I uploaded the final cut into Odeo so that there would be a nice player embedded into the blog post. I'm still having a problem finding a nice way to get an audio player into a Blogger post. NOTE: edited June 1, 2022. Replaced the Odeo embed (Odeo is in the Deadpool) with an embedded audio player from the Internet Archive. This was Desire2Pod - Podcast Episode #1.       0.00 Introduction and quick background  1:30 Support from competitors ( eCollege press release )  3:58 Al Essa's comments about copy...

Recently the Senate proposed sweeping changes to the systems and procedures for the U.S. Patent Office. The Patent Reform Act of 2005 (not 2006, sorry, my bad) has been two years in the making. Parts of it sound very good, but other parts make you shake your head (side-to-side, not up-and-down). This is still a long way from becoming law, but let's speculate about some of the aspects and how they would have affected BlackCT if they were already in place. 1. It would provide for a "postgrant opposition" system where those of us on the outside could bitch about the validity of the patent in front of a patent board without going to court and incurring enormous legal fees. This would be allowed for 12 months (9 months says the House) as a petition for cancellation of a newly granted patent. Apparently during this time the opposition would have a chance to provide evidence to the USPTO that they didn't bother to uncover themselves before granting the patent. In the Blackb...

I attended a session at MERLOT this morning about the Blackboard Beyond Initiative (BBI). A former WebCT employee was the presenter. She started the presentation with a slide saying the "The Tipping Point is Happening - Web 2.0" There are three main parts of this according to the BBI: (1) Rich User Experiences, (2) Architecture of Participation (better when more people are participating), and (3) Software as a Service. Sidebar: I just finished reading the Tipping Point about an hour before the session this morning. Interesting timing. I guarantee you that when I read Gladwell's book I never once thought of Blackboard as being part of a tipping point. I'll blog about the book later. BBI wants to help build relationships through social networks, using as examples Linkedin and MySpace. They want to enable the sharing of resources through social bookmarking, using del.icio.us as an example. They want to provide tools for creating content such as blogs & wikis. T...

MERLOT session presented by Unicon, a Sakai Commercial Affiliate. This was the second of two presenters for a 60 minute session. He only had 15 minutes after the first one just couldn't stop herself. Unicon is of the opinion that the vendors dealing with the higher education market are getting too much power over us .... and I totally agree. Unicon is an open source support provider. In other words, they will host your Sakai installation and provide technical support. They say that you get the benefits of open source software as well as the benefits associated with vended applications. The result is lower risk and more predictable costs. He talked about four potential steps down the path to using Sakai: 1. Test drive Sakai 2. Pilot Sakai in an ASP environment 3. Private-labeled hosted instance of Sakai for institutions 4. Deploy local instances of Sakai I'm hoping to find the time to take a free test drive of Sakai at Academus Open Campus. The brief look we got at the session l...

I am an eager and willing student. I want to learn. I am totally serious. I have been reviewing Blackboard's current patent application in Canada . It was apparently filed for on August 13, 2004, several years after they filed for the patent in the U.S. Here is the 4 page complaint against D2L and the 59 page patent granted in the U.S. In the Canadian application, the following people are listed as inventors: OERTER, LARA (United States) FINNEFROCK, JESSICA (United States) CHI, TIMOTHY ROTAU (United States) CHASEN, MICHAEL LEWIS (United States) EVERHART, DEBORAH (United States) CANE, DANIEL (United States) I'm sure that they are all upstanding and very fine people. So, good people of the Blackboard invention team, please educate me. WHAT EXACTLY DID EACH OF YOU INVENT? This is NOT a rhetorical question, I would really like an answer. Maybe even more important to the current litigation, here is the list of inventors on the June 2000 patent filing in the U.S. by Blackboard: ALCO...

Within the next few days I hope to be posting an audio interview between myself and John Baker, CEO of DesireLearn . I certainly don't expect him to expose any sensitive legal stuff, but I do hope to get some of his thoughts about the lawsuit and about how this will affect the future of D2L. Quoting from his email reply: "I would be pleased to do an audio interview with you ... thanks again for your invitation to participate on Desire2Blog." I've known John for at least three years now and expect that he will provide a good listen on this interview. I'll be at the MERLOT Conference all week but hope to catch up with him via Skype or cell phone within the first half of this week. Stay tuned. technorati tags: D2L , Blackboard , Desire2Learn

D2L has started using it's new blog tool as a way of informing the D2L community about the Blackboard lawsuit. Find the Desire2Learn Patent-Info Blog here . As D2L CEO JohnBaker shared with me in an email, "It is an external site using our blog tool within the community and allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed but we turned off comments. It certainly is not a fancy blog (remember it’s our 1.0 edition as you blogged ), but it does allow you to see public documents that have not hit other blogs yet. We may also download some other blogging tools in the future." They are asking for examples of Prior Art, which would help prove that the Blackboard patent is unwarranted since they were trying to patent code that already existed prior to the filing of the patent. There is also a growing Wikipedia site on prior art related to this lawsuit and the history of virtual learning environments. Some of the information currently on the blog is legalese and won't be decipherable b...

Earlier I said I was not a hater . Oops, turns out that I HATE Blackboard. From some very smart people: Jay Cross : "When I was a poker player in college days, the only table I refused to join was one where a player did not understand the rules. One guy could ruin a game for everyone by doing things so stupid that no one expected them. Which brings me to the U.S. Patent Office. This morning, Harold Jarche gave me the news that Blackboard has won a patent for the learning management system and sued a major competitor. The breadth of the patent is staggering. By the way, I'm filing a patent on learning . It's a process by which the brain of a human being connects neural pathways in response to outside stimuli. The patent includes, ipso facto , hearing, sight, smell, taste, talking and feeling. If you don't cease learning immediately, you will hear from my attorney, ab abusu ad usum non valet consequentia, ab irato, et audentes fortuna iuvat." Stephen Downes : ...

Here's the filing of the suit , dated July 26. Deep pockets versus shallow pockets. Desire2WakeUpFromABadDream "Blackboard demands a trial by jury on all issues so triable." Did they mean "terrible?" Here's a story with a couple of other interesting links.

Unbelievable. The U.S. Government continues to amaze me by taking stupidity to new heights. This time it's the patent office who takes a turn at making my head spin. BlackCT (Blackboard, if you must) was awarded Patent# 6,988,138 for " Internet-based education support system and methods." The Abstract says: " A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are available to the students over a network such as the Internet. Various levels of functionality are provided through a three-tiered licensing program that suits the needs of the institution offering the program. In addition, an open platform system is provided such that anyone with access to the Internet can create, manage, and ...