Blackboard and Desire2Learn have formally ended their three-and-a-half-year legal dispute, a conflict that was triggered when Blackboard received a hotly disputed patent for electronic learning technologies and proceeded to enforce it through litigation against D2L.
Brown University in Providence, RI and IBM are sharing investment in a multimillion-dollar supercomputer at Brown's Center for Computation and Visualization. The supercomputer--the most powerful computational system in Rhode Island, according to IBM--will be used by researchers statewide to tackle "grand challenges" affecting residents in climate change, education, energy, and health.
rSmart, which develops open source applications for the education sector, has launched a new professional services offering to support the Kuali Financial System (KFS).
Two universities--one in New York City and the other in Switzerland--are adopting Sun Microsystems technologies. Columbia University will use an open source Sun solution to manage storage of assets in its digital preservation project, and the University of Zurich is deploying Project Wonderland projects as part of a global e-learning initiative.
Users at Northwestern University will be able to log into both Blackboard Learn and Google Apps with a single signon thanks to the efforts of the institution's IT development team. The code created by the team as a Blackboard Building Block and named Bboogle has also been released as open source to let other institutions use or build on the technology at no cost.
When Mark Van Dyke, Ph.D., signed on with Marist College five years ago, he knew that online education would play an integral role in his new position. Conversant in basic computer applications, Van Dyke had used technology as a management tool, but never for teaching or learning.
Moodlerooms has released Joule, a new course management system built on Moodle, an open source CMS.
Moodlerooms and Datatel have teamed to integrate learning management functionality with enterprise resource planning (ERP). The integration combines Moodlerooms' learning management "platform" with Datatel's Colleague ERP system to give institutions a more complete view of their students.
The proliferation of Web 2.0 social networking Web sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and even Flickr got some people thinking: Which scholarly disciplines need better ways of researching, collaborating, and communicating, and could a social networking model play a role?
Josh Baron's examination of two award-winning implementations of the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment.