As everybody in the education blog world has commented in the last few days, Blackboard won their case against Desire2Learn and this is a bad thing for eLearning. As I was busy reading the excellent summaries of commentary across the board provided by Stephen Downes, here, here, and here , Dave forwarded the reaction on Slashdot here.

As the bloggers I was reading were lamenting this for issues around patent law, IPR, trust in vendors and wider philosophical perspectives, all the comments on Slashdot were busy criticizing Blackboard as a system, by tutors, students and sys admins. Personally I have not used Blackboard since 2001 so I cannot comment on the truth of these crisicisms, but it was an interesting jolt back to the practicalities of it all.

It also reminded me about one of the best things of working in TALL, and actually how unusual it is, that we are a big enough team to represent most points of view in eLearning, but small enough that we all talk to each other and (hopefully) manage to avoid getting too caught up in our own perspectives….although I don’t think there is anyone on the team who would defend Blackboard just at the moment.