Bye-bye Blackboard Patent 6,988,138

The utility or futility of patenting software aside, a major breakthrough has been achieved. The E-Learning Management System Blackboard had obtained Patent Number 6,988,138 on what was obvious prior art to anyone but the patent office.

Desire2Learn had sued over the patent and lost, which got the open-source projects Sakai, Moodle and Atutor to start their own actions against Blackboard using the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). They argued that Blackboard was just implementing the IMS standard. And so the ruling handed down a few days ago by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected all of the Blackboard patents. Blackboard lied by not revealing well-known prior art.

The ruling can still be appealed, but it is wonderful to see the Patent office beginning to see that it was silly to have believed that Blackboard invented E-Learning Management Systems!

Blackboard is preparing for it's yearly conference by getting its toe wet in the Web 2.0 and has opened up a Facebook group for pre-conference communication. I just posted the link to the ruling there at 9:05pm Mar 31 local time. Wonder how long the link will remain posted :)

Update 1.4. (no April Fool's Joke): No longer than 16 hours. Jan Day writes:

Subject: Your post about the patent

Hi WiseWoman,

I wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know I saw your post about the recent USPTO ruling on the Blackboard Patent.  While it is timely information, I removed the post because it isn't related to BbWorld'08.  If you have any questions or would like to discuss this I'm happy to set up some time to chat.

Thanks for being part of the BbWorld'08 Facebook group.  I hope to see you in Las Vegas this July.

Jan

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Nope. Won't be there.

Blackboard doesn't play well with Vista

PC Mag is reporting on problems that Blackboard (BB) is having with Vista. Blackboard is a simple "Learning Management System" that supposedly offers lots of communication possibilities between teacher and student, but actually only offers enough basic functionality to put a check mark in each field while having extreme usability problems and not leveraging things that are already in use by people.

For example, people tend to have their own email accounts, but Blackboard insists on you writing emails from inside the Learning Managment System (LMS), thus not letting people access their address books or having these sent messages merged with their other sent messages.

Furthermore, the system is quite geared to the American syllabus-based method of college teaching, being a rather bad fit for many German schools. I've been saying this for years, but who listens to me?

Me? I use Moodle. It is open source (meaning you don't have to pay BB a steep yearly fee), it fits nicely into the teaching workflow (BB and others make you adapt your workflow to something comfortable for the programmers), understands what communication and collaboration is about, and leverages things you already have such as E-Mail Clients while offering a lot of flexibility for individual configuration. I like it more and more each semester, even if there are odd quirks, it is not a major hassle like BB. Oh, and it es so easy to use, even teachers without PhDs in computing can use it :)