Justice seems to finally be on the way to prevailing - the PTO has found all of the 44 Blackboard patent claims to be invalid. It is however a non-final action - not sure what this means in legal terms. I hope it won’t be too long before a final verdict is made.

Wondering what impact this will have on the BB vs D2L Trial?

My happiest career moments have come from developing add-on’s for Learning Management Systems, so it is not hard to see why Michael Feldstein’s post on Widgets used to extend the LMS brought a smile to my face. The truth is that there has been a need for a non-proprietary extension framework for the LMS for a long long time. …Even better if the API allows for data persistence.

I hope to build a few simple Facebook apps and then plan to look at Sakai again. I last looked at Sakai a few years ago and this is a good sign that it is moving ahead in leaps and bounds.

Read "Anatomy of a Bogus Patent" and then feel sick with disbelief if you actually build applications to help people "learn". C’mon this is EDUCATION!

Feel sick??? OK now read "Desire2Infringe" and I guarantee, you’ll be even more disillusioned!!!

Time to start reading the Desire2Learn patent blog….

It’s a trial by Jury and will take approx 2 weeks!

Can’t wait till March for the verdict!

It’s not often that I read an edu blog and agree 100% with the authors views.  Well I am pleased to say that I agree 100% with Michael Staton’s views on the current state of blast from the past edu tools and why refreshing change is about to occur. Micheal’s Blog is Edumorphology - I highly recommend that you add it to your feed reader now! I should mention that Micheal Staton is also the creater of Courses on Facebook - an LMS built on the Facebook platform.

I had to read Michael Feldstein’s post on Blackboard appearing in ads with search keywords of “open source lms” twice. Hard to believe that this could be true! Blackboard and all of the other LMS’s that appears in the ads are not Open Source!

Blackboard has been making acquisitions: Xythos, a content management system that already powers the Blackboard Content System and an Emergency-Notification system. I have a problem with an LMS needing to purchase a content system, because I thought an LMS was already a specialized content system. I’d really like the LMS world to evolve to include Activities as first class citizens. No more activities that sit in the Tools area, no more a single activity types (eg Forum, Chat room) for a whole course with weak links from content that break each time your course needs to rollover to the next semester. Lecturers and Students need to be empowered and the only way this can happen is with flexible content and activity authoring tools. It is not only the Lecturer that needs to add content to a course, why can’t we move to a more collaborative decentralized authoring system - Students should be given control of selected areas in an LMS. The question for Blackboard is whether the purchase of Xythos will make this happen?

In many ways Blackboard already has the key to re-usable Learning Objects. I’ve not struggled with the definition of a Learning Object. A Learning Object is a sequenced collection (linear or hierarchical) of content (text, media, etc) and embedded activities (forums, blogs, quizzes). A course withing Blackboard can contain both content and embedded activities to a certain extent. Some activity tools in Blackboard lend themselves better to being embedded within content in Blackboard. The activities/tools available from Learning Objects (the company) are all instance based as multiple tools can be embedded within a course - an example of a Building Block (extension/addon) being more flexible then the in-built tools. A course in Blackboard can be exported to an IMS-CP zip file, which can then be imported to another Blackboard course on either the same Blackboard server or another Blackboard server with the same Building Blocks installed. This is Learning Object sharing at a course level.

Blackboard could make this sharing much more fine grained by simply allowing any node (ie sub folder) in a content/activity hierarchy to be exported. The same goes for importing. At the moment content can only be imported at the Table of Content level. It should be allowed at any point in a content/activity hierarchy (ie any sub-folder level). In other words it would be quite easy for Blackboard to make reusable learning objects that incorporate both Content and Activities, by simply tweaking there current import/export code and establishing a repository to store and tag the IMS-CP zips.

I spent a good deal of time, migrating content with embedded activities from an in-house LMS to Blackboard. Migration was achieved via the IMS-CP Blackboard import/export format. Essentially I built a tool to export entire courses to the IMS-CP format, which then got imported into Blackboard. This in part proves that the theory of using the Blackboard IMS-CP zip as a re-usable learning object will work!

BTW - All my Blackboard knowledge and news comes from Micheal Feldstein’s Blog.

The University of Adelaide has a situational project underway. So what exactly is situational learning? I’ve not heard the term before! It seems to encompass all things Learning Designer cool - simulations, case studies, scenario based learning and online role plays.

The situational learning site has examples. The Mekong eSim  seems to be implemented entirely in Blackboard — at least thats what I can tell from the screen grabs.

You may also find Project EnRoLE of interest. EnRoLE as in Encouraging Roleplay based Learning Environments.

I have worked with learning applications and Learning Management Systems for the majority of my career. First I worked on an in-house LMS, called OLT that was developed, enhanced and maintained by QUT. It was a great experience - there is nothing like being able to access every bit of code and make the enhancements/customisations that your users require. When the transition was finally made to Blackboard, as a Developer I found it hard to work within its extension framework (Building blocks).  The mindset was different - you could plug in tools buts not interact with other tools. The only way to change terminology was via the language pack. Simple things like adding a field to a form were just not possible. My impression was that you had to adapt your institution to the LMS. …and this lead to me having a tainted view of commercial software and a general view that off-the-shelf can’t be customizable.

I have since moved on - still in edu land, but away from the LMS. I now have an opportunity to learn and implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I have spent the last few days reading and experimenting with the software. It has been a big eye opener for me. Dynamics CRM from the ground up has been built to be customised. The business world is not content to adapt their process to off-the-shelf software! I can’t help but think that learning management systems would be much more useful (educationally sound), if they allowed the 11 ways that Dynamics CRM can be customised. 11 is not enough, but its like 11 more than the LMS allows today!

…. and fingers crossed that Dynamics CRM will one day soon run in FireFox. So I guess thats 1 thing Dynamics CRM can learn from the LMS.

Some resolution seems finally to be on its way from the Blackboard Vs Desire2Learn patent infringement trial. The trial starts Feb 11, 2008 and will run for approximately 2 weeks.

Good luck Desire2Learn!