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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!