If there was ever a reason for institutions of learning, especially publicly funded ones, to run screaming at full speed away from corporate, proprietary learning content management systems and start to seriously embrace open source solutions, this is it: Press Release: BlackBoard and WebCT announce agreement to merge
The combined Companies’ 3,700 academic clients will create an unparalleled Community of Practice enabling collaboration and innovation around the world
I believe the term they are looking for is not unparalleled Community of Practice, but captive market whose data is locked into our proprietary formats! See the Slashdot discussion of the BB-WebCT union for further incisive commentary.
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What a bunch of commie-talk. You should have joined Lighips eLearning Supremacy Inc. when you had the chance. I will make a fabulous sum of money on this deal — which is only fair, since it was entirely my doing. My minions will earn considerably less, but they are rolling in the long green as well, I assure you. Had you accepted my offer back when I extended it, today would be jackpot day for you. Instead, you can get up early tomorrow morning, get on the bus and work a steady job like all the other working stiffs. Don’t forget to pucker up to smooch up for all that backside kissing that is your eternal toil.
There’s still time to come to your senses. This is only the beginning. Soon you won’t be able to go to the school bathroom without tithing to Lighips. The lesson learned from the disappearance of pay toilets was that it was a mistake to allow free toilets elsewhere. We won’t make the same mistake twice.
Both companies’ stocks have dropped, but not sure about the pay toilet market
These elearning tech companies are interested in only one thing – selling more licenses. Good for them, but what about this whole learning thing? Neither Blackboard nor WebCT have really advanced the field of technology-assisted learning one bit in the past several years (WebCT did some good stuff early on, when it was still based out of UBC). The innovation is coming from academia and the open source community.
Rob, you may have noticed that Stephen Downes attributed our blog postings to each other. Good thing, because I liked yours more than mine!
Oops – sorry Rick. I e-mailed Stephen with the correction – I didn’t want my rant to damage your academic reputation! I think he has already corrected this.
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