Paul's Web Space 2.1

Who Invented E-Learning?

edweek.org has another blog, (In Other News...), that follows the education news reported on non-traditional web sites, blogs, journals — basically everything that's not a daily newspaper or broadcast media news site.

In this post we examine the case of Blackboard, Inc. (actually a local-hero tech company here in DC), which was recently awarded a patent on what appears to be a fairly broad conception of the ideas behind e-learning systems, that is, classroom systems in use by a large and growing majority of universities in the U.S. I'm opposed to overly broad intellectual property protections, as they tend to protect the powerful and their businesses rather than encouraging innovation, and this seems to be no exception. They have initiated legal action against at least one competitor, although they claim they won't threaten either educational institutions or open source software projects (but by reducing competition in the marketplace, they indirectly affect their customers regardless of what they say.)

The whole idea of business process patents (along with most software patents) seem to me to be areas better protected by other means — usually trade secrets in the case of business processes, and copyright in the case of software. This case seems no different, although I haven't examined it closely, and there is a concerted effort to research prior art and challenge this patent, as reported at O'Reilly Radar, and Ed Tech Post, and debated on Slashdot.

The prior art in the field is catalogued at Wikipedia's
History of Virtual Learning Environments and an Online Learning History gathered by Moodle, a popular open source course management system that Blackboard says it won't threaten with legal action. There is also an online petition urging people to Boycott Blackboard.    Link: http://www.edweek.org/edarchives/2006/09/who_invented_el.html

¶ 10:51 AM | Permalink | |
Sphere: Related Content

Links to this post:

  <$BlogBacklinkTitle$>  

<$BlogBacklinkSnippet$>
posted by <$BlogBacklinkAuthor$> @ <$BlogBacklinkDateTime$>

Create a Link

<< Home