Several important sources of information have quickly developed to collect evidence of "prior art" that will invalidate of Blackboard's LMS patent claims. The Wikipedia entry on the "History of Virtual Learning Environments" is a good place to start. (I was pleased to see a 1966 entry for IBM's Coursewriter, a course managment system that I used at UC Irvine way back in the 60s to teach Introductory Psychology via terminals and a mainframe computer.)
Gerd Kortemeyer korte@lite.msu.edu within the Sloan Consortium community has intititated a collection of documented prior art examples organized around each of Blackboard's 44 patent claims: "I have started a document at A Literature and Systems Review of Prior Art to US Patent 6,988,138 http://www.lon-capa.org/BBPriorArt.doc ;
as a community writing effort. It lists each claim and then leaves room for quotes from journal articles, etc, published prior to 2000. This is not intended as a diatribe, instead, it should be a literature and systems review, only quoting and referencing prior art. As each of you might have references to prior art, or knows of it, please fill in references and send the document back to me. I will compile them and keep the hyperlink updated. I have filled in a few as examples, but will also keep working on it."
Michael Feldstein has provided a plain English version of the Blackboard patent claims, "My understanding is that the Claims section of the patent is the area that really counts. I have posted a plain English translation of the claims at http://mfeldstein.com/images/uploads/Blackboard_Patent_Claims.pdf. What we are looking for is documentation of a system (real or hypothetical) that had most or all of the features listed in the claims section and was published (or deployed, if it was a working system)before June 30th, 1999."
Desire2Learn, the LMS company that has sued by Blackboard for patent infringement, has started a patent information page at http://www.desire2learn.com/patentinfo/.
Stephen Downes continues to provide valuable links and updates about the controversy on his Stephen's Web OLDaily pages http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm.
9:10:39 AM 
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