I’ll be attending Thanos Partners’ OPEN Forum for Higher Education Executives next week. If anybody wants to catch up with me there, you can ping me or just find me at the session.

According to Desire2Learn’s patent blog, Blackboard has now filed suit against the USPTO (technically against the Director of the USPTO) to stop the inter partes re-exam from proceeding. Their argument is that the law states the USPTO cannot order a re-exam after a final judgment has been rendered by the courts upholding the patent.

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.
“Learning, education, and HR standards communities have very little to show in terms of cross-domain standards interoperability and convergence despite significant investments over a period of more than a decade.” Chuck Allen, Executive Director of the HR-XML Consortium, made this assessment of standards that cross the boundaries of standards-setting bodies in a “White Paper” submitted to the LETSI SCORM 2.0 Workshop held October 15-17, 2008 in Pensacola, Florida. As learning systems exchange data with various administrative, ERP and human resources systems, standards are needed to avoid expensive continuous redundant software maintenance.

As I sit on the flight home from the EDUCAUSE conference thinking back on the themes of the week, it is clear to me that various flavors of openness have finally arrived in a big way in higher education, with more on the way. Certainly, a critical mass of universities are recognizing the value of open standards and accepting that open source is a viable and important approach. Open access and open educational resources are coming on too, although they are much earlier in their adoption cycle. Further down the road, open governance and open business practices are looming on the horizon.
(...)Read the rest of Openness: Finally, We’re Getting Somewhere (2,096 words)

My fellow SUNY escapees Patrick Masson and Ken Udas are up to some good stuff now. They’ve started an EDUCAUSE constituent group on Openness–open source, open standards, open educational resources, open content, open management practices, etc. Their hope is that the disparate groups that tend to care about each of these strands will identify the common strands of philosophy and practice that will help universities develop more coherent policies and ways of doing business that are both practically beneficial and consistent with the values that universities ought to support.

Just want to give a quick shoutout to my friends Steven Zucker and Beth Harris for their beautiful work on the newly redesigned smARThistory web site. When I think about Open Educational Resources, this is the sort of thing that I want to see. The site is clean and well-organized with an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio. They also have links out to useful Web 2.0 tools like a Dipity timeline and annotated photos at Flickr. It would be nice to see those sorts of resources even more tightly and pervasively integrated with the main assets of the site going forward, but that would really be icing on the cake.
Good stuff.

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Stephen Downes and Scott Leslie have both expressed concern that my original post regarding the Zotero lawsuit was possibly too charitable toward Thomson Reuters. Sadly, as more information comes in, it’s beginning to look like they were right.
(...)Read the rest of Thomson Suing Zotero: More Info and More Thoughts (809 words)

There’s been a fair bit of buzz, both on some edublogs I respect and in the Sakai listserv, about Thomson Reuters suing George Mason University, alleging that the Zotero team illegally reverse engineered EndNote. My initial reaction to Thomson’s move was very negative and my final reaction may be equally negative. Even casual readers of this blog know that I am not a big fan of using intellectual property as an anti-competitive bludgeon in an already thin educational software market. I’m also not a big fan of the DMCA, a draconian law that goes way too far in an effort to stop piracy.

In my previous??posts??on this topic, I outlined the mundate yet important core use cases that LIS is intended to address. Now I’d like to start looking at some of the sexier possibilities that the spec enables.