Blackboard has announced that it is acquiring Angel Learning. Whether this is a “good thing” or a “bad thing” of course depends on who you are and on what happens with the two companies. It is certainly another aggressive move by Blackboard to protect/increase it’s market share. When viewed in light of the acquisition of [...]

While Virginia Tech has been using Sakai for quite awhile and even hosted a (fantastic!) regional Sakai event last year, they recently made an official announcement that Scholar (their local name for Sakai) will fully replace Blackboard on Campus by Fall 2010.
You can download the announcement here: Scholar to replace Blackboard.
There are some great quotes [...]

The Sakai Foundation today issued the following official statement on the new Bb-D2L lawsuit:
As you may have already read, Blackboard has filed a new lawsuit against Desire2Learn for patent infringement. This recent lawsuit is based on a patent that Blackboard was awarded in February (#7,493,396). This new patent is actually a revised version of the [...]

The Blackboard/D2L patent fight seems to entered another chapter in recent weeks. Desire2Learn has recently announced that Blackboard has again brought suit against D2L in Texas.
The basis of this suit is a new patent that Blackboard was awarded recently. The patent isn’t really new but is a continuation patent based on the original one that [...]

The Chronicle of Higher Education just published an interesting article about Blackboard in which Sakai is mentioned several times (along with Moodle and D2L). Overall, the article is well written and balanced. It’s rare that I read news coverage about something I know well and end up feeling the reporter did a good job of [...]

This isn’t really an update on the overall progress of the D2L/Bb lawsuit or an update on the USPTO reexamination of the patent, but I was interested, technically, in what D2L would do to its latest version to render it non-infringing.
Basically, they’ve eliminated all roles from their system at the time of installation. The customer [...]

Well, I’m sure you’ve all seen the article about the Bb-Sakai connector in Inside Higher Education. Both Chuck and I were quoted and Chuck has since blogged about it.  I have a bit of additional perspective of my own I thought was worth sharing.
One of the questions on the email lists was “Is this a [...]

There's an elegantly articulated post in the Blackboard blog about educational choice and diversity and an interesting thread of conversation among the Sakai community commenting on it. Though the post is superficially supportive of choice, openness, and diversity, it seems to me that it's more a marketing attempt to lay claim to the platform on which scholarly technologies will run. In other words, choice and diversity as long as you get to it through the Blackboard platform and pay them for it.  

Hearing Chuck Severance's presentation at JA-SIG St Paul 2008 about work on the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0 (LTI) standard restarted some thinking I'd already been doing about where online learning technology is (should be?) headed.
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