Blackboard Sues US Patent Office

Blackboard is suing the US patent office - and by direct implication all US taxpayers. It seems they do not wish that office to review patents granted them already. Peek at

http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2008/12/01/daily28.html

Thomson Reuters vs. Zotero

Thomson Reuters has decided to sue Zotero, the open source reference management software. I do not know very much about the merits of the case, but I wonder what would happen if Thompson Reuters were to put money into improving their clunky EndNote program instead of paying lawyers to sue a taxpayer-supported university?

Zotero is sponsored by George Mason University and is available at www.zotero.org.

This story has been covered by Ars Technica and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Blackboard Market Power

My main issue with Blackboard is that I fear that how we teach, and our philosophy of pedagogy, is already, and will increasingly be, dictated by the marketing considerations, as played out in software design, of a purely for-profit entity.

This fear is exacerbated when I contemplate what we marketers lovingly refer to as "lock-in". Lock-in occurs when management arranges the product architecture such that the customer just can't afford the cost of switching brands (retraining, recoding, ...). This goes hand in hand with proprietary standards.

Wiley and DMEF

Wiley and the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation have come to an agreement. Hooray!

Wiley Textbooks

This is a tale of the Journal of Interactive Marketing, which is a publication of the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation. Under a prior contract, this journal was published by Wiley but now the DMEF has chosen Elsevier as its new publishing partner.

Wiley has the legal right to publish the journal for 2008, but has decided to do so without any input from the editors or editorial review board. Wiley's plan is to republish previous articles, a plan that could have a negative impact on the journal's reputation and which certainly will reduce the journal's impact factor.

While the above paragraphs recount the basic facts of the situation, what follows below represents my opinion, and it should not be assumed to represent the opinion of any other individual or entity associated, or not associated, with this matter.

I personally find Wiley's actions to be unconscionable.

Like many other academic journals, the authors and reviewers of the Journal of Interactive Marketing are not paid for their labor on behalf of the journal. Nevertheless, the former and current ERB members and authors, with the guiding help of the editors, have year by year raised the quality and reputation of this journal.

It is this free labor that Wiley now intends to take advantage of, milking the journal for an additional year with filler content, quite possibly damaging its name, but certainly its impact factor. This punishes anyone who has ever published in the journal.

It seems that Wiley believes that academics are too busy, apathetic and disorganized to matter in this case.

Interestingly enough, Wiley is also in the business of selling textbooks, and it is academics who choose textbooks on behalf of their classes.

If you have an opinion about this matter, and you are in the habit of ordering textbooks for your students, I suggest you express that opinion with your Wiley textbook representative. You can identify that person using the following form:

http://professor.wiley.com/CGI-BIN/LANSAWEB?PROCFUN+PROF1+PRFFN15

Fingernails on Blackboard

The taxpayers of the good state of Florida pay me a livable wage to produce PowerPoint slides for my students, among other things. The administrators at my university provide me with a way to store those slides online, which the taxpayers of course also pay for. The administration bought a product known as Blackboard, or Bb as it is usually written. You are going to have to take me at my word, because even if you are a Florida citizen who has paid for the slides, you can't see them. Sorry.

Even if I wanted to show them to you, I couldn't tell you how to get there anyway since my class micro-site does not have a URL! Now it turns out that there are various ways I can get around this, but you kind of have to know what you are doing, and these alternatives add work.

In a nutshell, Bb was designed for university administrators with some help for teaching classes tossed in as an afterthought. In fact, Blackboard was around for the better part of a decade before you could use it to create an internal hypertext link from one Blackboard page to another! It takes 12 different mouseclicks to create a page that says"hello world".

I wonder why they don't use Moodle, or the Sakai Project, both of which are free?