I tried to take some time yesterday to distill the patent into plain english. Michael Feldstein did a much better job than I did, which should make it really easy to find relevant and defensible bits of prior art. Of course, the fun part will be finding prior art that hasn’t been purchased by Blackboard…
Blackboard Patent in Plain English
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My (non-lawyer's) understanding is that whether Blackboard owns the company that produced the prior art is irrelevant to the case. People who are smarter than I am have told me that, as long as the invention was public prior to the time of the filing, even Blackboard's own system would constitute prior art.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent
Also Groklaw has a primer on prior art.