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from The Age: Melbourne Uni row over degrees

“If you take heads of departments somewhere and tell them we’re about to climb Mount Everest with one sherpa and no oxygen, they’ll say ‘of course’,” he said. “It’s only when you get to camp two they say, ‘Why are we doing this?’ and ‘I didn’t realise I was going to have to carry my own provisions.’ “
Professor Stuart MacIntyre - Professor of History

This quote captures the problem of corporate-style decision-making in the age of marketing and spin - who needs to worry about the details when the glossy brochures looks so good? Only nerds seem to read the fine print or worry about the substance of an argument these days, and then - shock !! horror !! - they are so surprised when things go pear-shaped in ways apparently noone could have foreseen - at least not while wearing their HHGTTG peril-sensitive sunglasses.

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 …

• A model for LMS presented in 1997 and published in 1999
• Stephen Downes’ response

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!