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January 26, 2007

Entire BlackBoard Patent Under Review

Following a lot of debate, Websites created for this topic only, and a formal filing by the Software Freedom Law Center, the USPTO has ordered a full review of the BlackBoard patent.

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Posted by vvarvel at 01:15 PM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2007

UCLA chooses Moodle

"the UCLA Faculty Committee on Educational Technology decided that UCLA should converge on Moodle as the single open source platform for its common collaboration and learning environment (CCLE). "

This move represents yet another major campus moving away from course management systems that are costing more and more towards simple systems that get the job done and often done well.

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Posted by vvarvel at 08:03 AM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2007

The best $6 billion Microsoft ever spent?

Although I usually stick to items dealing with online education in my blog, today, I was reading a ZDNet article that caught my interest and thought the others that take the minimal time to read my blog might find interesting. At a reception, Bill Gates supposedly said that $6 billion investment in Windows Vista was the best money he had ever spent. I don't even know for sure how to respond to that. Not that it cost $6 billion so far in development, but that they will still make a profit off of it eventually. That is how big the operating system market is. Even when it was hitting a low in market share, no wonder Apple continued to make money.

Read the outtakes with links to Gates' recent keynote at ZDNet.

Posted by vvarvel at 03:20 PM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2007

Latest from the XO laptop

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (AP) -- Forget windows, folders and boxes that pop up with text. When students in Thailand, Libya and other developing countries get their $150 computers from the One Laptop Per Child project in 2007, their experience will be unlike anything on standard PCs.



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What many might find interesting is that just like the floppy drive before it, the hard disk might finally be starting to lose its preferential status. These computers will instead use flash drives with USB ports for additional memory as needed. Remind me of my first Commodore 64 computer, although 512 MB of RAM is a lot better than 64 KB. They will also run on a slim version of Linux.


Also, I have to admit that I like MS Office. For all of the flaws of Microsoft Corp., they have served to greatly further the usability of the computer. However, this quote from Negroponte still rings true, "In fact, one of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint," Negroponte wrote in an e-mail interview. "I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools."

Posted by vvarvel at 12:44 PM | Comments (0)