Blackboard (a company I'm all about hating for its immensely bad workflow and interface design) has apparently received a patent for its "Learning Management System." Slashdot has a short but useful roundup of links, including a long post on Michael Feldstein's e-Literate weblog breaking the story, some prior art, and more (as well as the usual /. flaming discussion, some of which is interesting).
Here's a small snip from the Summary section of the patent (there's much more at Feldstein's post—it's an alarmingly wide-ranging patent):
In accordance with these and other objects, provided is a system for providing to a community of users access to a plurality of online courses, comprising a plurality of user computers and a server computer in communication with each of the user computers over a network. Each user computer is associated with a user of the system having predefined characteristics indicative of a predetermined role in the system. Each role provides a level of access to data files associated with a course, and a level of control over data files associated with a course. The server computer has means for storing data files associated with a course, means for assigning a level of access to each file, wherein the level of access is associated with the ability of a user to access the file, means for determining an access level of a user requesting access to a file, and means for allowing access to a file associated with a course as a function of the access level of the user.
There's more text from the patent summary at Feldstein's weblog, although his link to the patent materials at uspto.gov is broken. I hit google news, and the story is being widely reported now, so apparently it's legit—I'll wait for the legal scholars to weigh in on the patent's scope, since sometimes these things look more alarming than they really are. Still, it's worrisome. As I mentioned above, Blackboard is an application with a user interface and workflow mired in 1980s-era applications, prettied up (very slightly). Adding events to a class calendar takes (at last calculation) something like eight clicks plus text entry per item—try creating a syllabus like that. Dialogue boxes are frequently downright perplexing (to the point that it's not clear if clicking "cancel" or "ok" is the choice you want).
[via Slashdot]
Posted by johndanseven at August 2, 2006 09:06 PM