{"id":396,"date":"2010-07-08T16:48:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-08T16:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/what-is-blackboard-building-now\/"},"modified":"2010-07-08T16:48:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-08T16:48:00","slug":"what-is-blackboard-building-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/what-is-blackboard-building-now\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Blackboard Building Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>Image via Wikipedia<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

There is a notice in Inside Higher Ed on Blackboard’s purchase of Elluminate and Wimba entitled “Blackboard’s Big Buy<\/a>.” It begins: <\/p>\n

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<\/i><\/a>Blackboard announced<\/a><\/i> on Wednesday it is buying out two software companies in an effort to bolster its real-time collaboration features and satisfy a generation of professors and students increasingly shaped by social media.<\/i><\/div>\n

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How kind of them. They are not doing it to further squelch competition and wring more money out of its customers, but to satisfy a generation of students and professors. If anything proves that capitalism’s relationship to innovation is a myth, this is it. I used to hear the lack of innovation argument as an argument against opensource. Monopolies destroy innovation by removing competition. A free market needs to support a free play of ideas and invention. Even Blackboard benefits from that.<\/div>\n
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The cost of these tools in this economy is unconscionable. All that “vendor lock-in” does is drive costs up because there is no incentive for making the tools widely available. <\/div>\n
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We had a year long pilot with Wimba Voice Tools and could never get it to work. They then wanted to charge us for a year to further test it. We asked “why would we pay for a pilot of something that is not working?” They are a perfect fit into the Blackboard juggernaut.<\/div>\n
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Blackboard has a history of acquiring tools and then either not supporting them fully and letting them die or causing them to disappear altogether. I am a former user of Blackboard and the two things they just don’t get are customer service and collaboration. In their attempt to created a social bookmarking tool ala Delicious Bookmarks, they took this beautiful idea of sharing and tagging bookmarks and subscribing to other user’s bookmarks, and turned it into a locked-down, password protected proprietary tool: utterly useless. They did not acquire Delicious Bookmarks as a tool – they just copied the idea, something for which Blackboard would have sued anyone else back into the Stone Age.<\/div>\n
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Here in California we have a state-wide licence with Elluminate through CCC Confer. I will be watching Blackboard closely on how they work with Elluminate while keeping a weather eye on <\/a>BigBlueButton<\/a> (which, coincidentally integrates with Sakai) and other open source options.<\/div>\n
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If I sound bitter it is because I was a really big fan of Angel Learning:
http:\/\/cain.blogspot.com\/2009\/05\/fallen-angel.html<\/a><\/div>\n
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