I noticed this link to Michael Feldstein’s post in Stephen Downes OLDaily – apparently Blackboard has been granted a patent for anything remotely related to LMS!!
All I can say is “QUE ??????”
(perhaps I will be able to say more when I read the details and the other commentary … and hopefully our LMS Governance Report has it right that Blackboard-style LMS will be increasingly irrelevant to online learning … but I doubt that the patent is only for Blackboard’s current LMS model …)
Meanwhile, there is a discussion thread at Moodle.org, since Moodle is the obvious Blackboard threat …
… and in that discussion thread which began by assuming Blackboard was doing it for a bit of publicity rather than with intent to pursue competition is the copy of a letter to Desire2Learn suing them for infringement of copyright – sounds like it might all get a bit nasty.
And obviously I posted this prematurely, but these two posts give the more food for thought …
And this one is a link to Wikipedia where the history of Virtual Learning Environments is being documented.
- Wikipedia LMS entry
- History of VLEs (establishing prior art) – this is a good thing to build on!