Those of us distraught by the turn suggested by Blackboard's patent announcement and suit against Desire2Learn can take heart from the following announcement from OpenAcademic:

"We are happy to announce the launch of the OpenAcademic project. This project is dedicated to integrating Elgg, Drupal, Moodle, and Mediawiki. All code developed under this project will be released back to the respective communities under an open source license, and it will be freely available to download and distribute."

The project's home page is at www.openacademic.org.

 Blackboard today announced that the US Patent Office had awarded it a patent "for technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods." Things covered by this patent include client-server online courses in which users are defined as either students or instructors, the use of online drop boxes in an instructional setting, online grade books, online assessments, and many other common systems and methods that folks in higher education have utilized for years before the June 30, 2000 filing date of Blackboard's patent request.

After purchasing and killing Prometheus in 2002 and WebCT last year (and many other companies, though not strictly speaking CMS/LMS companies), Blackboard seems to have a long-term strategy of not developing good or original technology but buying competitors and, now it is clear, trying to keep others out of the field by getting an absurdly broad patent for common uses of technology if that technology is employed in the context of education. Not only do we need to worry about the future of open source initiatives such as Moodle and Sakai, but we also need to worry about using a blog or wiki with a class of students. In fact, simple networking protocols, authentication practices, and the like, if undertaken by a school could well be jeapordized by this patent

Bernard Lunn writes on ReadWriteWeb about the three trends that will change the book publishing industry: Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business. Specifically, he considers the business model of the contemporary book industry and wonders how the digitization of catalogs (Google Books), ebooks (the Kindle), and on-demand-publishing will eliminate the need for publishers.

In case you missed this in Nature, Ars reports that the ACS will begin online-only publications for most of its journals next year. Ars reports that the publishers realized that it no longer made economic sense to print journals. In addition, from the perspective of students, if the material is not online, it does not exist. Willing to wager how long it will take the rest of the academy to realize the same thing?