So by now you’ve heard – Blackboard is buying WebCT, and in 18 months or so there will be one uberproduct. We all saw this coming, but still – wow.

Why am I mad? Because the state of Utah just completed a bid process to license and buy support for an LMS to be used at all state schools. And after phone calls and emails with a company who will remain un-named (why do we protect the guilty?) who assured me they would put in a bid to install / configure / support Sakai for the state, today I heard that they never bothered submitting a bid. I could spit I’m so angry. I could have worked with any of a handful of companies to get this OSS solution in the competition, but I naively believed this vendor’s word that they would put in a bid. And now it’s all said and done, and Sakai wasn’t even in the mix. I actually threw something across the room today when I heard.

Our only hope now is that the whole Bb/WebCT conglomerate madness will force the state to reevaluate its position and open another bid. You can bet I’ll be following up a lot closer with the next vendor I choose to encourage to apply. (And since when do businesses need convincing that a statewide, multimillion dollar contract is a thing they should want???)

I’m seeing double.

Lots of folks responded rather strongly to my suggestion that talking about and focusing on scalability is immoral. As usual, I appear to have done a poor job articulating my feelings.

The focus on scalability scares me because it only focuses on reaching lots of people, on reaching large numbers of people, on reaching the majority of people.

The amount of commitment necessary to reach all as opposed to many seems qualitatively different to me. I’m afraid that the focus on scaling, and talk about how great and worthy reaching the majority of people is, will allow instructional technologists to feel like they’re off the hook for reaching the few, the small numbers of people, the minority.

So yes, the work we are all doing on scaling is important. It’s foundational. But lately the people I’ve heard talk about scaling are talking about it like its the end goal. It’s not. It gets us to the majority of people. These same methods don’t get us to the minority. Things like eGranery get us to the minority.

We have to go beyond scalability in our thinking. Beyond reaching the majority. We have to think about reaching everyone. And its going to require very different thinking than the scalability thinking going on right now.

Back in August of 2003 I proposed that rather than create a new education license, we rebrand the By-NC-SA license as the cc.edu. The idea had lots of traction on the list – Stephen even agreed eventually – as did many others (see August – December 2003 posts). However, because of some push back from CC about rebranding as a strategy, the discussion moved another direction and to the frustration of many eventually fizzled out.

The rebranding strategy has become increasingly common for CC (c .f. the new wiki license beta), and rebranding is now an option for us. I therefore propose we rebrand the By-NC-SA as the Creative Commons Education License, and create a special commons deed for anyone using the license (i.e., add some contextual language to the human readable part of the license – e.g., the way the new wiki license beta has been handled).

Thoughts? Please send them to the listserv at http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-education.