Lounge

This is a great board, but the patent discussion is in no way harming us socially! The patent thread is but one of the many fun discussions happening right now. No reason to ask people to stop pursuing that particular topic...

Don, there are facts like the patent that Blackboard has been granted or the way they sued Desire2Learn because of that patent. Thinks like that right now they are not going to go after Moodle do not make me feel better. Surely they will after they sue everyone else in the commercial e-learning market. Moodle is, right now, their closest competitor.

There are simple things we can do not to let them achieve their goals to become a monopoly in the e-learning market. Things like building together the History of Virtual Learning Environments to prove that the things in that patent were not invented by Blackboard, but were common things that were built by lots of other companies. We can also update the information about Blackboard at wikipedia and so on. Many of us have been working on that lately.

I think it IS an important thing to work on right now, and it is not a mere "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" thing, but a real hazard for the e-learning market.

One of the best things we can do is keep an open dialogue. I could very well see folks who are on the fence use these kinds of things to keep sitting on the fence, to keep what they have, or to not moodle.

I have one fellow here, who is a colleague, friend, and fellow program chair, but he hates moodle the way I hate blackboard- I think partially because I'm such an advocate. Because he's a marketing guy, everything for him is hyberbole, so he'll say things like "of those 10,000 moodle sites, half don't work or go anywhere" or "Sakai is the only one supported by all the big schools" or "Microsoft is buying blackboard" (waittaminute.....).

Anyway, people like that get the FUD around, and people listen to them and believe them. The only way to counteract that is to send out notifications like the D2L folks did - let em know we know, that we're not terribly worried about it, but we're not going to roll over - and also explain why the threat is not as big as some would have it.

Throw in a little fud their way (Blackboard founders have cashed out and retired, or are doing so now, they are losing money, their implementation is impossibly complicated ) in an informative fashion - and go from there.

Putting heads in the sand a'la an ostrich and pretending it's not happening is not a solution.

d.i.