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.
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.
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: […]
By popular demand, the SCORM API Wrapper for JavaScript has a new feature: the ability to specify what version of the SCORM API should be used.
Also, I converted the AS2 demonstration FLA to Flash 8 format and posted it as a separate ZIP file.
Blackboard‘s lawsuit against Desire2Learn just went to trial. This lawsuit has the potential to bring a lot of LMS vendors to their knees. Good luck, Desire2Learn. Hope you win!
The pipwerks SCORM wrapper examples have been successfully tested in SumTotal TotalLMS 7.6. FYI, the examples’ imsmanifest.xml files required some modifications (the old manifests worked fine in the ADL test suites, but coughed a little when used in SumTotal TotalLMS 7.6). The JavaScript, ActionScript and HTML in the examples remain unchanged. If you’ve previously downloaded the examples, I suggest you download the updated versions to get the newer manifests. Of course, if you’re a pro at manifests (Aaron?), you could always make better ones… making the imsmanifest is my least favorite part of working with SCORM. As always, if you test these in your LMS, please let me know — even if it doesn’t work! Thanks 🙂
I looked up the QTI specs on the IMS site and couldn’t believe the boldfaced notice I saw on the page: “HTML documents may be viewed online, but may not be printed without permission” (emphasis added).
Can you believe that? IMS is in the business of creating standards they want the whole world to use. These standards should be open, easily accessible and free from licensing constraints. Why on earth do they want to put silly notices like this on their site?
Two small but important edits.
I just converted my AS2 SCORM class to AS3.
