Free Software Linux

Amy Stephen, OpenSourceCommunity.org, commented recently Blackboard's patent claims to the learning management system. Amy's comments and references are well worth reading in her post, Campus Technology: Interview with Blackboard Chief Legal Officer Matthew Small. Don't you just love it when Amy goes Groklaw on all of us? Hooray for Amy. Advertisement:

In a recently published decision (PDF file), the US patent office has declared US company Blackboard’s e-learning patent invalid. The patent office rejected all 44 claims in the disputed US patent number 6,988,138, (“Alcorn patent”) for a system for teaching in a virtual classroom using the internet, including chat, a virtual blackboard and provision of teaching materials.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Summer of Code application process is underway. Along with some good folks at The Oregon State Open Source Labs, we have put together a proposal to share content between Moodle and Drupal. In combination with the recently developed functionality to author and export content from Drupal in IMS LOM format, you could author courses in Drupal or Moodle, and use those courses interchangeably in Drupal, Moodle, or any other LMS that imported IMS LOM. The IMS code, and a detailed writeup, is freely available.