Running With OSCELOT
You can't get around the idea that schools are spending time and money on open source software. Of course, commercial vendors need to take note.
Blackboard has made several recent connections to the OS world. The most recent one I discovered is the creation of a non-profit organization called OSCELOT (Open Source Community for Educational Learning Objects and Tools) which came out of the Blackboard developer community. (* See clarification in comment#1 below) Their site is at EduGarage. It seems connected to their recent connections with Sakai and reportedly with Moodle. OSCELOT is supposed to work towards the development and sharing of OS plugins and extensions for "environments" (which includes Blackboard Building Blocks and Blackboard PowerLinks) so that users can customize and integrate their products using their open API.
There are a healthy number of projects on OSCELOT’s site and also free or open-source plugins contributed by the community. Of course, they are intended to be used with Blackboard products, so the question for me really is what will be developed for institutions using multiple learning management systems (including open source or home grown) and ultimately what (if anything) will come out of this community that has no direct connection to Blackboard.
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