Emerging Trends in LMS / Ed Tech Market
"For the past decade, the LMS market has evolved from providing tools that were purchased at the departmental level to enterprise-class systems purchased at the institutional or even system-wide level. However, since about 2004 the market has been fairly consistent, dominated by Blackboard corporate strategy.
Blackboard went public in 2004, signaling a real market worth of investors' attention. In 2005 – 2006, the market was dominated by Blackboard's acquisition of WebCT, the number 2 player in LMS, resulting in a somewhat extended Department of Justice approval cycle. Starting in 2006, Blackboard was awarded the infamous '138 patent and subsequently filed suit against Desire2Learn, the new number 2 player in LMS. About this same time, open source started to become a viable alternative to proprietary systems in general, and Blackboard in particular, in the form of Moodle and Sakai. From 2006 – 2009, open source became fully established for campus-wide or system-wide LMS deployments. In late 2009, Desire2Learn successfully fended off Blackboard patent lawsuits, ultimately resulting in all 38 claims being ruled invalid by a US Court of Appeals. On the heels of these efforts in 2009, Blackboard purchased Angel, taking another competitor out of the market."
(Phil Hill, 4 August 2011, e-Literatee-Literate)
Fig.1 "LMS Market Share", [http://www.deltainitiative.com/higher-education/lms-strategy]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Citations and impact factors are old hat: the Web 2.0 generation needs metrics to match today's scholarship
"As a young academic, I am reliably informed that the landscape of scholarly communication is not what it was 20 years ago. But, despite all that has changed, it seems that we still largely rely upon the same tired and narrow measures of quality and academic impact - namely, citation counts and journal impact factors.
As someone who has used the internet in almost every aspect of their academic work to date, it's hard for me to ignore the fact that these mechanisms, in predating the web, largely ignore its effects.
By holding up these measures as incentives, we appear to have our eye firmly fixed on the hammer and not the nail, adjusting our research habits in order to maximise scores and ignoring issues such as why we publish in the first place."
(Matthew Gamble, 28 July 2011, Times Higher Education)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Zootool: a social bookmarking tool
"Zootool is about collecting, organizing and sharing your favorite images, videos, documents and links from all over the internet.
We are a small, bootstrapped startup, located in Mannheim, Germany. Driven by a passion for design, web, code and all kind of nerdery, we are working hard to built the most awesome bookmark tool for geeks like us and people who love the web."
(Bastian Allgeier, Hartmut Wöhlbier and Nicolas Cormier)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Retaggr: sharing your portable online profile across social networks
"retaggr [was before it closed] a widget-based service that enables active web users to link all their various site-based profiles into a single, always updated, interactive business card that can be attached to virtually any type of content or interaction the user has on the web.
The interactive profile card can be linked to or embedded anywhere online, including in email signatures, blog entries, other text, or as part of online profiles on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter, and others. It lets you leave a summary of the way you define yourself on the web anywhere you want to share it."
(Retaggr, CrunchBase Profile)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Idle Together: rich internet applications blog
"IdleTogether is a technology blog oriented towards good design and impressive web applications. We explore Flash and Flex as well as Web2.0 Ajax based application. We promote the useful, the usable and the pretty rich internet applications."
(Nicolas Noben)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
