Desire2Learn’s challenge of Blackboard’s e-learning patents have resulted in an initial action by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that invalidated all 44 of the Blackboard patents questioned. The action is not final, yet, and both parties have 60 days to respond. But, as eSchool News points out, the ruling raises questions about the [...]

Blackboard Beyond’s Greg Ritter sent me a note announcing that “the issue [I] experienced with SafeAssign that enabled [me] to gain access to a SafeAssign user’s paper has been resolved. Blackboard released a new version of the SafeAssign central service as well as a new version of the SafeAssign Building Block last Tuesday, November 20.”
Since [...]

I received a call this afternoon from a third-party developer who confirmed the Blackboard Beyond Initiative is working aggressively on a fix for the critical flaw in its SafeAssign product reported at EF on Tuesday. The good news is that student data is no longer being distributed into the wild. This is a huge gain [...]

After reading yesterday’s post on SafeAssign at least 31 times today, Blackboard Beyond Initiative product director Greg Ritter (who also blogs) called me to voice Blackboard’s objections over sharing information on the software flaw that broadcasts submitted students’ papers across the Internet. I thought a personal call from the company was much better than receiving [...]

The cheerfulness among undergraduates at my institution has transformed suddenly into overt displays of despair and depression. This can only signal one thing: midterm grades are coming in.
Another sign midterms are being graded: the Education Futures access.log has been receiving many referral hits from websites claiming to thwart plagiarism.
Students, please note that submitting your papers [...]

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports their take of the top ten trends affecting education in 2005:

The browser-based application
Firefox
Wikipedia’s news reporting
The $100 laptop
Podcasting
A renewed debate on what students are doing on the Internet
OpenOffice.org 2.0
Web 2.0
Moodle
Blackboard’s takeover of WebCT

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