This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.
As you know, the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems program is funding states’ work to improve their data systems. Over the past four years, 41 states and the District of Columbia have received more than half a billion dollars from this program. It has supported states as they link data from preschool, K-12, and postsecondary education. In some states, it supports their work to track students into the workforce. We’re committed to helping all states.
Keynote presentation – Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan

You may have already heard a bit about NIXTY, since they have managed to make a significant media splash in the last few weeks. There have been a number of interesting analyses, both pro and con. I’d like to highlight a few aspects that haven’t gotten much coverage.
For starters, here’s a screencast that NIXTY CEO Glen Moriarty was kind enough to make for me:
Click here to view the embedded video.
(...)Read the rest of New LMS Entrant: NIXTY (611 words)

I wasn’t planning on writing this post, but I’ve become aware of several recent conversations that have led me to the conclusion that it would be useful to get this out.

I’m at the Desire2Learn conference this week and will have a couple of posts up soon about the astonishing progress the company is making on a number of fronts. But I’m writing this post in response to some news that’s coming out of BbWorld. I am delighted (though a little surprised) to hear that Blackboard has just committed to releasing support for the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) standard and will be testing interoperability with SunGard. I haven’t heard any details yet, although based on their announcements about supporting two other standards (BLTI and Common Cartridge) by the end of 2010, I’m guessing that they will get their LIS integration out some time in 2011.

photo credit: Kongharald
There’s a blog post update from Desire2Learn on the latest back and forth between them and Blackboard over the patents. (Remember, there’s more than one patent now.) Here’s the latest, as near as I can follow it:

photo credit: alles-schlumpf

Update: Patently-O blogger Dennis Crouch has posted a legal analysis of the ruling in which he concludes, “Defendant Desire2Learn wins a complete victory (after a few million in attorney fees).”

My buddy Patrick Masson is running his second annual 2-3-98 conference in Delhi, NY on August 6th and 7th. The first day is all about open source in higher education with a keynote by Bob Sutor, IBM’s Vice President of Open Source and Linux. The second day is a Moodlemoot. Last year’s conference was great—good presentations, interesting attendees, and good food. If you get a chance, you should go to this conference. It’s good—and good for you!

I have a terrible backblog of posts that I will try to catch up on over the next few days, starting with my obligatory Sakai conference summary. Since last conference represented something of a watershed, I wasn’t sure if I would use the same categories of comment or come up with something new. I think I will stick with the same categories for at least one more year, with more emphasis on the Sakai 3 effort.

Today, Blackboard Learn President Ray Henderson announced in his blog that Blackboard will be “ramping up its commitment” to standards support, starting with a pledge to support import and export of the IMS Common Cartridge standard. If Ray actually makes this happen, and happen in a timely manner, this would be a pretty big deal. It would mean that textbook publishers and faculty members alike would have an easier time sharing content across multiple systems and migrating from one system to another.