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 press release issued today indicates the IMS Global Learning Consortium is piloting the use of Creative Commons licensing for some of their standards. This is excellent news for proponents of open standards, and will hopefully lead to more openness from the IMS.
There are a great set links for free development tools (validation services, browser toolbars and plugins) posted on the Web Access Centre Blog today:
Here are some great blog posts regarding the Blackboard vs Desire2Learn lawsuit.
Blackboard won its lawsuit against Desire2Learn. This really bums me out! I wonder if Desire2Learn will appeal (please say yes) and if Blackboard will start going after other LMS vendors?
Excerpt from the jury instructions: […]
