Alfred Essa posted this tidbit today:
An Important Correction to the Blackboard Patent Story
A number of us, including this blog, have gotten this story wrong. It’s time for a correction.
The USPTO has NOT invalidated the Blackboard patent. Instead the USPTO is proposing to invalidate the patent and has issued some preliminary documents for review and comment. [...]
For those who are willing to give it a shot, I present to you a simple HTML and JavaScript template for inductive learning-style questions (ungraded, customized feedback for each answer selected).
Being an idealist, I eagerly bought into what was being covered in grad school. I believed (and still do, to a point) that every project should follow ADDIE or a similar model. C’mon, it makes sense, doesn’t it? The line in the sand had been drawn: skip these principles at your own peril. Now that I’ve spent a few years working full-time as an instructional designer-slash-eLearning developer, I’ve learned first-hand that the instructional design ideals taught in grad school are quickly thrown out the window when you get a ‘real’ job.
All 44 of Blackboard’s patent claims have been thrown out by the US Patent & Trademark Office. It’s not 100% official (this is the first step in the process), but things are looking up… for everyone except Blackboard. I really think they shot themselves in the foot by trying to establish a monopoly via patents and lawsuits. The negative PR will haunt them for years.
I read not one, but three great blog posts today regarding what kinds of questions you should asking yourself when working on a project. Two of the blogs were not specific to the e-learning industry, but they apply nonetheless.
You may be familiar with the famous “Captivate variables” (see page 201 in PDF link), but did you know about “rdcmndHidePlaybar”? It isn’t mentioned by Adobe in their documentation, but it’s a handy one to know about.
Adobe has a short but useful article detailing how to make your Adobe Captivate movies more accessible.
These are pretty simple (borderline “no-brainer”) steps a Captivate author can easily implement.
Geoff Stearns and Bobby van der Sluis have finalized SWFObject 2.0. It is no longer beta, and SWFObject 1.5 is now considered deprecated.
A number of people emailed me reporting problems using the demonstration files for the ActionScript 3 SCORM class. Turns out the imsmanifest.xml file was causing the problems; apparently, one of the supporting XML files was corrupt. After creating a new imsmanifest.xml file and bringing in fresh copies of all the supporting XML files (the [...]
I decided to create a simple forum dedicated to e-learning development. I’m not saying I have the answers, but I’m hoping I can at least foster some good conversations and maybe get some of my peers talking and helping each other out. I’m also hoping to use the forum to promote web standards in e-learning development (as Martha says, “it’s a good thing”).