Author: Clint Lalonde

by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Capilano University embraces OpenCourseWare

This is pretty exciting. I just came across Capilano University’s OpenCourseWare site where anyone can access and reuse Capilano University course material. Like the MIT version, Capilano has made learning resources available for free to anyone in the world.

What this means for faculty at other institutions is that Capilano has released this material with a Creative Commons attribution license meaning other faculty can reuse and modify any of the content for use in their courses providing they follow a few simple rules – give attribution, do not use the content for commercial work and share alike.

There are currently about 20 courses available from Capilano, but the long-term goal of the program is to have most of Capilano’s courses available using the OCW model.

As far as I know, Capilano is the first institution in BC to adopt OpenCourseWare.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Camosun

My Camosun – 30+ videos and counting

Just a couple of weeks left in the My Camosun video contest (that I first wrote about a few weeks back) and right now there are over 30 student and community produced videos posted on YouTube.

I’ve been watching the videos come in. Many of the entries take a fairly light approach to life at Camosun. Most are produced by current students and are aimed at potential students. But there have been a couple of very personal, very touching stories.

If you are an educator and have sometimes felt bogged down in the day to day battles, here are 2 stories that I hope will help you regain the sense that we are part of something bigger and that the work we do truly changes lives.

These videos have certainly renewed my commitment to the minor role I play in the process. I may sometimes feel like a small cog in the education machine, but it’s nice to have reminders like these that the machine is vitally important as an agent of social change. I thank both Amanda and Andria for sharing their stories.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

14 Tips for Better Web Surfing

If you’ve been a power user of the web for years, then some of the tips on NY Times writer David Pogue’s list of Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User may seem old hat. But quite often I come across seasoned veterans who haven’t heard about time saving tips, like using the keyboard controls Ctrl-x, Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v to cut, copy and paste.

There are over 1000 comments from readers adding in their technology tips, both common and obscure. That’s a lot of tips, covering a wide range of technology from cell phones to Office. The sheer volume makes it tough to glean out the really useful web ones.

So, to save you having to sift through the list, here are 14 tips that might save you some time, make you more productive, or just generally lower your frustration level when surfing. Some of them are Windows tips that would work in other Windows programs (like the above mentioned cut, copy and paste keyboard commands), others are browser specific. Feel free to add your faves.

  1. Just about every faculty I work with has had this complaint at some point – text on the web is too small. Needless to say, they love this tip when I show them. You can enlarge text on a web page by hitting the Ctrl and plus sign (+). Make text smaller by hitting Ctrl and minus sign (-). Mac users can substitute Command for Ctrl.
  2. Ctrl and mouse scroll will also increase or decrease the size of a web page.
  3. “http://www” is not needed in your browser. The domain name will do. For example, enter camosun.ca instead of http://www.camosun.ca into your Web browser address bar and save yourself a few keystrokes each time.
  4. The space bar will scroll down one screen on a web page. Shift spacebar goes up one screen.
  5. Tab will move you from field to field when you fill out a web form. You don’t have to mouse click in each text box.
  6. Google does math. Type an equation into Google and hit enter. Voila!
  7. Google also does time and weather. Enter the word “time” or “weather” followed by a major city and get the time and weather for that location. For example, “time Vancouver” or “weather Vancouver” gives you the local time or weather forecast for Vancouver, BC.
  8. Alt+D pops your cursor up to the address bar
  9. Alt+left arrow takes you back a page in your browser. Alt+right arrow moves you ahead.
  10. Ctrl+Tab moves you from tab to tab in a browser.
  11. F5 wil refresh/reload a page – handy when you make a change to a page and it isn’t showing up in your browser like you are expecting it to.
  12. Ctrl+F let’s you search for text on a web page.
  13. Ctrl+T opens a new browser tab
  14. F1 opens Help

For more tips, check out the keyboard shortcuts for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google.

via tweet from The Clever Sheep

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Posterous is the easiest way to publish content to the web

There is a multitude of ways and methods to post content on the web, but I have never come across one so easy as Posterous. Simply email the content you wanted posted on the web to an email address and, uh, we’ll, that’s about it. A few moments pass and you get an email back with a link to your webpage. You don’t even need to create an account.

For something that is so simple, the application is surprisingly feature rich when it comes to multimedia. Attach photos, documents, video, presentations and MP3’s to your email and they will be converted, resized and embedded into your web page. Include URL’s and they become links. Include a YouTube link, and the video will be embedded in your final page. That is slick.

Here is an example of a page I created. I sent an email to post@posterous.com. Attached to the email was a PDF document and an image. The subject of the email becomes the page title, while the email itself became the post.

There are options once the page is created to then create an account, which then let’s you have a permanent website to post content to. But that isn’t necessary. You can one off publish content quickly and easily just by firing off an email. Doesn’t get much easier than that.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Splicd lets you edit YouTube videos

Video is great, but the linear storytelling format sometimes forces you to watch a lot of irrelevant content before getting to the meat of the clip. Which is where a handy tool like Splicd comes in. Splicd let’s you edit the start and end points of a YouTube video. Enter in the url of the video and a start time and end time.

It feels a bit like a quick and dirty implementation, but it works. Here is an example I took from the recent video of our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, copying word for word a speech given by Australian Prime Minister John Howard on the eve of the Iraq war. The original video is about 3 minutes long (and well worth a look, imho). With Splicd I was able to isolate 30 seconds that really illustrates the the point.

There are limitations. Splicd only works with YouTube videos and there is no method to embed the edited video into a website. Only allowing increments of seconds as opposed to tenths of seconds makes some pretty jagged start and end points. Allowing smaller time increments would make the edits a bit smoother. But this simple little tool does the trick.

via Webware

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Why you shouldn't post your PowerPoint slides online (and the alternatives available)

This is not going to be a PowerPoint is Evil rant. Heck, some people have even won Academy Awards and Nobel Prizes with their PowerPoint presentations, so there is no denying that, when used correctly, can be a powerful tool to convey meaning to a live audience.

But that is it’s place – in front of a live audience. PowerPoint is a presentation tool and was never intended to be a web friendly format. So you should avoid putting your PowerPoint presentations online and here is why.

It doesn’t work

There are 3 technical reasons why you don’t want to put your PowerPoint files on the web.

  • The files are big, especially if you use lots of animations and fancy transitions.
  • They require students to have PowerPoint or the PowerPoint viewer installed on their computer.
  • Depending on the browser, how it is configured and the security settings, PowerPoint files can cause strange and unexpected behaviours. One user may have that PowerPoint file open in their browser, another may be prompted to download the file while a third may get a security warning that a potentially malicious file is about to be opened.

These are barriers for students and should be reason enough to shy away from putting your PowerPoint presentations online.

What do these slides mean?

For me, however, the overriding reason to avoid putting your PowerPoint presentation online is that your students are missing a fundamental piece to help them truly understand the content- you.

In order to be a useful methods of delivering information, PowerPoint requires someone at the helm to guide the viewer and fill in the space between the bullet points. Without you, PowerPoint slides are just disjointed bullet points of facts and images with no context as to what those facts and images really mean. You provide the context that is critical to understanding. Take you out of the picture and the presentation is useless.

The design problem

You approach different mediums in different ways. Decisions on how you craft your message needs to factor in the medium you use to deliver that message.

Designing for presenting is completely different than designing for the web, just like designing for print is different than designing for video. In order to effectively communicate meaning, you need to structure your content in a way that correctly uses the medium you are designing for. Each medium requires different strategies to be used effectively.

Solutions

The first solution is the one that takes the most effort, but has the biggest payoff in terms of making sure your content is both understood and technically accessible. Recreate the content in your PowerPoint presentations in a web friendly format. Rewrite your bullet points in HTML, convert your images to jpeg or gif, and build some web friendly pages of content. It fixes all the problems mentioned above. You can do this in Powerpoint by saving your presentation as a web page.

I am not a big fan of this method for a couple of reasons. For one, it is still content that has been designed for Powerpoint and brings with it all the constraints and none of the benefits of that format. The second is the geeky reason – the code is poor and it tends to create whacks of files and folders that all need to be uploaded for the pages to work correctly. For more tech savvy faculty, this may not be a problem. But if you are the type of faculty who can’t find or organize files and folders on your computer, this may be a challenge. It’s better to use other HTML editing tools (like the built in editor and content manager in Desire2Learn) to do this.

If you absolutely must post PowerPoint presentations on the web, at least do your students a favour and don’t force them to download large files or the PowerPoint viewer. Chances are they already have a PDF reader installed on their computer, so convert your PowerPoint to PDF and post that instead. PDF is a much more web friendly format than PowerPoint.

An option that is becoming more popular is using a web service and posting your PowerPoint online. A service like Slideshare works like YouTube for PowerPoint. You can create an account and upload your presentation. The presentation is converted to the (close to) ubiquitous Flash format which you can then embed in a web page, blog post or D2L course content page. No downloads for students.

There are also online presentation tools, like Preezo, SlideRocket and Google Presentations that you can either use as a starting point for creating web friendly presentations, or will convert your existing PowerPoint presentations to something you can easily embed into your course. While not as feature rich as PowerPoint (and who really uses all those features anyway?), these are still powerful tools for creating web friendly presentation that won’t make your students curse you as they wait for your 100 meg PowerPoint file to download.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Camosun

Encouraging citizen filmmaking

This is a bit of a plug for our College Relations people as well as a nod of the cap lens to people powered media. My Camosun is a video contest open to anyone in the community. The idea is to create a 1 minute that answers the question “what does Camosun mean to you?”

A couple of interesting notes about the contest is that it is open to everyone and anyone, regardless of your involvement (or lack of) with Camosun. The second notable is that the videos will be posted on YouTube. The College marketing department obviously has their eye on the fact that prospective students search for their potential college’s on YouTube as part of their decision making process on what school they will attend, so why not try to flood it with feel good positive vibes about Camosun?

Imagine you are a potential student and you do a quick search on YouTube for Camosun. Right now, the results are pretty sparse and don’t tell you much about the college or its culture. Do the same search in January after these videos have all been posted and I am sure you will have a good idea of what Camosun is all about – a third party picture of our institution, completely created by Joe Q. Public.

I am very interested to see the results of this contest. I suspect we will see quite a few entries from our Applied Communication Program and Visual Arts program, which has a strong filmmaking component to it. But hopefully we will see some general community members contribute as well. With $1500 in prizes out there, I am hoping that the general public will be encouraged to pick up their camcorders and tell some great stories.

Deadline for entries is October 31st. And even our President is getting in on it. Check out her moves in this entry…she’s grooving in the Paul Building around 37 seconds in.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Using Swurl to aggregate my life

Not surprisingly, I live much of my life online and there are digital artifacts of me floating around all over the place. There is this blog, my other blog, and then my other blog, Facebook, del.icio.us, Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Picasa, Amazon, YouTube – I have accounts with all and I use them all on a (somewhat) regular basis. For someone who may want to follow my life, that’s a lot of content to keep track of. Which is where Swurl comes in.

Swurl is an aggregation service that allows me to pull all the information from the other services I use and display them in a central location. It’s a powerful example of the small pieces, loosely joined philosophy that strongly resonates with me.

Swurl is dead simple to use, thanks to the magic of RSS (which I think should really stand for Radical Societal Shift for it’s massive contribution in reshaping how we interact with information). I created a mini-site pulling in my most recent activity from my blogs, Twitter, del.icious, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and Amazon in less than 5 minutes. Swurl displays this information chronologically with my most recent activity first.

I agree with Alan that one of the more interesting features of Swurl is the timeline feature. It’s a nice way to handle the archiving of my digital life (although that Twitter post from December 31, 1969 is quite strange. But then again, it’s Twitter.).

I suspect that services like Swurl will become quite common as more people begin to use more web based services. There is going to be demand for a central place to pull all this information together, and Swurl does this very nicely, without being forced into a walled garden like Facebook.

 
by Clint Lalonde on For Fun

Best spam I've ever received

Wow. I am honoured. This may be the single highest mark of achievement in my life.

Clint Lalonde

It is my pleasure to inform you that you are being considered for inclusion into the 2008-2009 Princeton Premier Business Leaders and Professionals Honors Edition section of the registry.

The 2008-2009 edition of the registry will include biographies of the world’s most accomplished individuals. Recognition of this kind is an honor shared by thousands of executives and professionals throughout the world each year. Inclusion is considered by many as the single highest mark of achievement.

You may access our application form using the following link:

<yeah right>

On behalf of the Executive Publisher, we wish you continued success.

Sincerely,
Jason Harris
Managing Director
Princeton Premier

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Imeem – a YouTube for audio?

A few days ago, Alan Levine fired off a tweet looking for a “YouTube-ish” web service for audio. I’ve also wondered if there was also a service out there that would allow users to upload audio and provide something as handy as the embed feature of YouTube to allow that audio to live in a number of locations . Today I discovered imeem, which is an audio sharing site that gives you the ability to embed the audio clips you upload using a flash player.

At it’s heart, imeem is a music sharing social network site. But an mp3 is an mp3, so your audio doesn’t have to be music. Any audio you upload can be embedded into a blog/wiki/LMS page. And the flash player is about as close to a cross platform media format as you get these days.

Here’s what the embedded player looks like.

The Heart Of Saturday Night – Tom Waits

If you head to the page for this song, you’ll see the interface is very YouTube inspired with a lot of YouTube features. Imeem is probably the closest to YouTube for audio that I have seen.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Annotate Jing videos with ZoomIt

I really like Jing. Sure, you could dish out hundreds of dollars for Captivate or Camtasia and get a bit more robust set of features (including the ability to create videos over 5 minutes and post production editing), but in terms of value, it’s hard to beat this free, simple and easy to use piece of software for creating videos of screen captures.

One feature I would like to see in Jing that it currently doesn’t have is the ability annotate content on the screen as I create screenshot videos. Well, this week I came across a free tool called ZoomIt from the Sysinternals group at Microsoft. Here is another handy, free tool that allows you to do simple annotations on the screen, and also allows you to zoom in. Put Jing and ZoomIt together and you’ve got a handy screen video capture that allows you to annotate videos. Here’s a quick example of what you can do with Jing and ZoomIt.

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://clintlalonde.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/jingzoomit2.swf” height=”400″ width=”500″ /]

 
by Clint Lalonde on Camosun

Note to world: Stephen Downes, not Stephen Hawking

Well, hopefully my last minute editorial decision to have Stephen Downes memorable quote about Brian Lamb’s presentation style read by a screen reader doesn’t get me off Stephen’s Christmas card list before I ever had the chance to get on. But it’s quite humbling to see your work noticed by folks like Stephen and Alan Levine who, along with other folks, have had really nice things to say about the Brian Lamb intro mashup I put together to introduce Brian’s keynote at Walls Optional, our annual in house Distributed Education conference. Thanks for all your comments. It was such a hoot to put together, and gave me a great excuse to dive into the collected/ive works of Brian Lamb.

I’ll have a proper post mortum about the event in a few days once I collect my thoughts, but suffice to say that the words coming back to us about Brian’s presentation have been words like “inspiring”, “eye opening”, “thought provoking” and “excellent”. It was all we could have hoped for and more in a keynote.

So, if you haven’t seen it, here is the intro that never was because, as fate would have it, technology intervened and it borked in front of the live studio audience. As Scott noted, it’s time to replace the 286’s on our rolling rack.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Camosun

Countdown to Walls Optional Tuesday

Just a couple days left before Walls Optional hits Camosun on Tuesday and I am trying to put a few finishing touches on my parts of the conference.

I’ve set up a video feed page on our site where we are going to try to capture the video live from CC124, which is where Brian Lamb will be delivering his keynote Tuesday morning.

Following Brian we’ve got Scott Leslie talking about the 2008 Horizon Report, Dominic Bergeron presenting on Student Created Content and Paul Stacey talking about Dare2bDigital. So, we should be giving our new Flash server a bit of a workout.

In addition, we’re going to try to capture some of the other events via webcams and portable MP3 players, so even if we can’t stream all the presentations live, we’re still hoping to create a decent resource site for after the conference.

Right now I’ve got 2 priorities left before Tuesday. Get my workshop on Netvibes put together and get over this cold. Isn’t that always the case – right before a big event is when the body is most likely to go “whoa, cool your jets buddy!”

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Podcasting in Plain English

Another gem from Common Craft and their excellent “In Plain English” series, this time about podcasting.

The trouble I tend to experience with faculty, especially faculty who are fairly new users of technology, is explaining the key difference between a podcast and traditional streaming audio, which is subscription. I often find that until people actually see a podcatcher in action, they sometimes can’t wrap their head around what that subscription model looks like, especially if they have never been exposed to RSS feeds before. This video will help.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

3 months of Twitter

I was about to add my name to Alan Levine’s Twitter Life Cycle when I realized I have been using Twitter for 3 months now. Has it really been 3 months since I hopped on board the Twitter train? Wow. Time flies when you are having fun. And Twitter is fun.

But beyond fun, in the past 3 months Twitter has quickly become an indispensable tool for me. It is allowing me to connect with people at a completely different level. Clive Thompson at Wired puts it well when he says Twitter creates a social sixth sense.

It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

I experienced one of those “feats of coordination” a few days after I signed up for Twitter. Northern Voice was happening in Vancouver. I was unable to attend, but was able to virtually attend as my network kept feeding me information via Twitter. Links to supplemental materials and live videocasts of keynotes were popping up, allowing me watch and listening real time. I followed the backchannel conversations and was able to get a sense of what was happening, from multiple independent sources. People who did not know each other, but happened to be at the same conference in the same room all commenting on the same points. It was incredibly rich – an aha moment for me that convinced me there was something to this Twitter thing.

Since then my delicious account has been filling with Twitter specific content – how academics are using it, both professionally and pedagogically. Tools and mashups to leverage it, and guides and resources I can use to help me convince others to join in.

So, after 3 months with Twitter I can say that there is something there, despite the frequent outages. If you want to find me I’ll be at twitter.com/clintlalonde.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Camosun

Walls Optional: The 2008 DE Conference at Camosun College

Just wrapped up a planning meeting for our annual in house distributed education conference. Walls Optional: Promoting Excellence in Teaching and Learning through Technology is going to happen on May 6th at Camosun College. It’s a good opportunity for both our faculty and our department to showcase some of the work we have been doing in the past year, and setting the groundwork for the year to come.

I’m very happy that both Brian Lamb and Scott Leslie have agreed to present. The 2008 Horizon Project has caught the attention of some fairly high level administrators here, so it’s great to have someone like Scott here to speak directly to the report. And I’m very excited to meet Brian in person after having followed his work for the past few years.

I’ve got a space to present and am kicking around a couple of workshop ideas. Being more “Tech” than “Ed”, I’m leaning towards something hands on. I like the idea of doing a session on personal homepages and aggregation services (ala Netvibes or Pageflakes). Not only would many people find it useful to help organize their online life, but it would give me an opportunity to toss out a whole bunch of other technologies – blogs, RSS, podcasts, Flickr, widgets, delicious, and so on.

There is also a part of me that wants to do something around embed and how powerful and revolutionary I think that idea is.

But the session that will probably win out is the less than glamorous PowerPoint is Evil as a web content delivery tool. Judging from the number of PowerPoint presentations I see being posted online, I think this is something that will yield the biggest immediate bang for the buck. And I can still hang some Web 2.0 goodness onto this, showing off tools like Google Presentations and Slideshare.

So, if you were going to do a presentation to faculty about why they shouldn’t use PowerPoint on the web, what would you talk about? What alternatives are there to PowerPoint? Can you point me to any good resources? And, most importantly, should I use PowerPoint to do the presentation 🙂

 
by Clint Lalonde on Desire2Learn

Patent Office rejects Blackboard patent & D2L releases workaround

The D2L patent blog has been humming the past few days.

First, it looks like the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office has rejected all 44 of Blackboard’s patent claims. The patent office released a non-final action, which means it ain’t over yet as both parties can still comment before the final decision is made.

However, regardless of the claim, D2L has gone ahead and released a new version of their LE, 8.3, which President & CEO John Baker says works around the patent issues.

Our Learning Environment 8.3 underwent external third-party review
after we devoted significant resources to ensuring that 8.3 was outside
the scope of the method claims of the patent. We are confident that
this version does not infringe the asserted claims.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

My morning with Google Sites/Apps

Well, it took a lot of effort this morning, but I’m finally taking a look at Google Sites, which is rising from the ashes of the Jotspot wiki acquisition by Google last year.

I almost bailed on the process before I even started. I couldn’t use my existing Google account to log in. Seems that in order to try out Google Sites I needed to enter an email address of a work or school domain. Huh?

Upon further examination, it looked like I was actually signing up for Google Apps and not just Google Sites. Double huh?

I reread the Google Sites page and realized that Google has bundled Sites with Google Apps. If you want Sites, you need to have an Apps account. I couldn’t find any way to tie Google Sites to my existing single Google account.

So, if my first impression is correct, it doesn’t look like creating a wiki is going to be easy for your average user. I suspect individual users aren’t even on the radar for Google with respect to Sites. By bundling it with Google Apps, Google has sent a clear signal that they are targeting organizational IT departments moreso than individual users.

That’s not a bad thing. But don’t expect Google Sites to compete with PBWiki, Wetpaint or Wikispaces in the “hey I can get a wiki up and running in 5 minutes” department. It appears that’s not the purpose. It looks like Google Sites has become one little piece of a bigger puzzle for Google as they take aim at domain wide collaborative applications like SharePoint.

I did plunge in and sign up for a Google Apps account. I control a domain name so I used an email address from that domain to sign up and have now spent the better part of the morning getting distracted by Google Apps (and getting WAAAAAAY more functionality and services than I wanted). But for many of the people I am trying to convince to use wiki’s as a learning and teaching tool, this won’t be the first one out of my mouth.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Desire2Learn

Desire2Learn loses Blackboard patent case

D2L President John Baker posted the news on the D2L patent blog late Friday afternoon. Blackboard has won the patent lawsuit against D2L. D2L has been ordered to pay Blackboard $3 million US in damages.

Now, I’m no lawyer. And even though I have been following this case with interest partly because we are a D2L institution, I don’t know all the intricacies of the patent claim beyond the what I have read at places like No Education Patents, the D2L patent blog and various blog postings. But in my mind, this really stinks, and I am not alone in this sentiment.

This worries me on a number of fronts. First, being a D2L customer this may have implications. Perhaps not immediately, but unless D2L can find some sympathetic and sane ears at the US Patent Office (who will be reviewing the patent claim), there could be rough times ahead for D2L. In his letter, John Baker has made an assurance that:

There is no immediate threat to you our clients. We will work with you
to ensure there are no future issues. We are financially sound and are
confident of our ability to work through this matter.

Maybe I am reading too much into the word “immediate” in that statement and my FUD-ish tendencies are showing. But as a client, I am concerned and troubled by this turn. (update: maybe I don’t have to worry too much, being in Canada, according to this article.)

After my self serving interest, I’m really astonished that Blackboard can now claim it “invented” many of the features of an LMS, which, as this excellent analysis by Alfred H. Essa at Minnesota State College clearly shows is a folly. If this is the case, then can we soon expect to see a number of other software companies in other industries launch similar claims using this decision as the basis?

For example, one of the patent claims upheld was the claim that says Blackboard created a method that allows instructors to post a student grade to a file on a server accessible only to that student (claim #39 for those of you keeping track). Well, what Student Records System doesn’t have a web interface that allows that? Can we now expect to see Blackboard sue Datatel or another SRS that allows that functionality?

Claim #40 that allows instructors to perform a statistical analysis on a student or group of students grades? Maybe Microsoft should be worried because I know a heck of a lot of instructors that do grade analysis using Excel.

Claim #43 that says Blackboard provides “…an asynchronous communication tool accessible to student users enrolled in the course for enabling asynchronous communication amongst student users.” Insert ANY bloody email or discussion group software provider here. And the next claim says the same thing for synchronous products.

The list goes on. It’s a crock. Plain and simple.

Who first invented the idea of authenticated users having access to specific resources? Quick, sue Blackboard! Judging from this farce you have a strong case.