Well, I suppose you’ve seen by now that Blackboard and Desire2Learn have settled their legal battles and cross-licensed their e-learning patent portfolios. Given that the respective press releases (Bb and D2L) were identical and extremely short, I don’t expect to hear much discussion from either company, although D2L did add some commentary on their patent [...]

Today the impressive slate of candidates for the Sakai Foundation Board were announced. You can find the candidate profiles and platform statements on the Sakai website. This year four new Board Members will be elected from the group of 13 candidates. Voting occurs by Sakai Foundation member representatives from October 31 – November 13 and [...]

A couple of tweets in the last few days mentioned blog posts about the University of Florida and Sakai. So I thought it was worth mentioning pointing to them here. First, Sakai Foundation Product Manager Clay Fenlason made the drive from Georgia Tech to visit the Sakai team at UF and wrote about it on [...]

As part of my recent trip to Amsterdam to present at the OpenIC symposium, I also spent some time with the good people of UvA and Edia (a small company that provides Sakai services). I learned a great deal about what they’ve been up to, which was more extensive than I expected. Sakai has really [...]

I spent part of last week in Amsterdam at the invitation of University of Amsterdam for the OpenIC Symposium (program in Dutch, running on Sakai). I learned a lot about what’s happening at UvA (great things!),  visited Edia, a consulting company that provides Sakai services, and the Vrije Universiteit. I even gave a lecture on [...]

I just returned from a great week in Australia, primarily for AuSakai 09. I also had meetings with many groups at Charles Sturt University (where the conference was held) and visited University of New England in Armidale.
Clay Fenlason and I arrived early Monday morning on the same flight from SFO and took the short flight [...]

I’m writing this blog post from Bathurst Australia, home of Charles Sturt University which is hosting AuSakai 09, the Australian Sakai Conference. I traveled here with Clay Fenlason, Sakai Project Manager, after he spent last week in Berkeley for the Sakai staff meetings. All the other staff members were in attendance, including Lance Speelmon who [...]

I spent Wednesday and Thursday of this week at the Open Educational Resources conference in (truly) beautiful Vancouver, Canada. It was my first time attending this event and I can highly recommend it for any one involved in the OER. A lot of good information and good people to meet. Here are a few of [...]

The Sakai Foundation Board of Directors is proposing two changes to the existing by-laws. To change the by-laws we need to circulate the proposed changes to the community for 30 days of commentary. In addition, for one of the changes we need approval of the Sakai Foundation Membership.
You can read all about the changes and [...]

So Blackboard has lost another battle in its patent war with Desire2Learn. The original patent claims been invalidated by the USPTO and the courts and yet, at the same time, there are still four other fronts open (see the good summary on D2L patent blog).
As things move forward, the question increasingly becomes “what is Blackboard [...]