Blackboard patent – a reply to David Jakes (and jeff utecht)

I was wandering through blackboard stuff and came across this post from David Jakes. In it he declares that he uses blackboard, he likes it and that they also take him out to nice dinners (his disclosure, which i appreciate) There’s a line of argument in it (and particularly in the first comment by mr. utecht) that i don’t know enough about to counter. It seems to go like this

Blackboard has a right to do this. And if they don’t have the right trying to get away with it anyway is what being american is all about.

  • Do I like what blackboard is doing? No. Can they? Yes. And all you can say is God Bless America. You might disagree with me but it’s things like this that make America great.(from comment one)

It was my understanding that, in America, making a monopoly was illegal(whether or not blackboard is doing this, David and Jeff seem to be acknowledging that blackboard is ‘cornering the market on elearning). There is a great deal of debate going on as to whether people being in a corporation gives them a right to stop being ‘ethical’, that somehow the making of money cancels out all other considerations – because business is all about making money. In the final analysis, I think i’d prefer the world if being ethical was something we did all the time, but as i can’t seem to even do that everyday in my own life, perhaps its unrealistic for me to expect corporations to do so.
In the rest of his post Mr. Jakes discusses other patents awarded in history, and that some of those patents were educational. He also mentions that other, more important things are going on in the world, and suggests that perhaps we should be focusing on them instead of on the blackboard patent.
lets walk back through the argument…

  • 1849, to find out that a future president who invented a mechanism for floating a ship through shallow water received a patent for that design. That man was Abraham Lincoln.
  • A simple search of the U.S. Patent Office database returns 11,747 patents that include the word “education.” Where are all the blog posts screaming hatred and damnation at these patent holders? Or is it just a Blackboard thing?

1. Are ‘software patents’ evil? which is the discussion that many people are having. A software patent is not like Lincoln’s water thingy or an airplane. And a patent is not like a copyright. Their product was already copyrighted. If you’d like a comparison… its more like Wells patenting the novel because he was writing science fiction. Or, more to the point, if Microsoft patented ‘the operating system’ and started suing mac and linux. One patent, or 11000 patents being awarded, does not make 11001 a good patent.

  • If it was me, I’d design some peace graphics for Israel and Lebanon, or make some graphics about how the oil companies (and all their patents!) are making obscene profits by ripping us all off by charging $3.50 a gallon for their product. I might think of all the servicemen and women the U.S. has lost in Iraq, and design some graphics for them. Or I might design some graphics about the terrorists who want to blow more planes up. You know, maybe some graphics about something really important….

2. I also find it confusing how because the American government went to Iraq, I somehow shouldn’t spend my time working on education issues. Should the whole world now only focus on American foreign policy?

3. No one is debating that the patent office dropped the ball on this. And not just the one in America. That’s why were collecting prior art.

  • I’ll even admit to being pretty upset after we received a significant cost increase for the product and then at their national conference in Phoenix in 2004, watching them load up motor coaches outside the client party downtown (which was also over the top) and truck off their 28-33 year old staff to a private closed party while over a 100 people stared in disbelief…not good business

4. I too think blackboard is in this for the money. As you say, they increased your fees in 2004. And that’s what they did when they had competition. Ask yourself what they will do if they have NO competition. How many programs will you have to cut in your district to keep your blackboard licence after it quadruples again? This is the problem.

  • OK, take a trip back in time with me to look at a little history. Let’s consider how outraged bloggers would have been in ____ …. (had blogging existed, of course…) . Fill in the blank with the date below:

5. And the american government broke up standard oil as well… for antitrust (see microsoft et al.)

6. Finally, as you are defending your product, many people are defending the one that they like… that has been good for their students and teachers. For many of us, these are projects that we’ve worked on – significantly for some, peripherally for others. We are defending a product we love and you are defending a product you pay for. We would also defend your right to use whatever product you want. We are trying to do the same for ourselves.

That being said, I’d love to discuss it with you further (edtechtalk.com Sunday night 9pm)

ps. i hope i’m wrong about the quadrupal thing… but it does concern me… as you say they are in it for a buck but with this patent, (and more importantly the next one (see michael feldstein)) there’s nothing to stop them.

Now, as for people ‘making fun of you in their posts’ I hope they don’t actually do that. But i would like to address one more issue. The subtitle of your blog is “Everyone participates. Everyone contributes. Leveraging the power of digital networks to connect people, resources and ideas to drive creativity and innovation forward…” I too would like this world. This patent does not support anything that you clearly wish to be representative of. Not universality, not connectivity, not creativity or innovation. Patents kill those things… particularly software patents.

(all bulleted items from http://jakespeak.blogspot.com/2006/08/blogging-blackboard-and-history-of.html)

The Edubloggypodlearnonlinosphere – Are we a ‘field’ and if so…

I’ve got my right foot on the front of oscar’s rocking chair, in the dark, trying to coax an hour of sleep out of the little tyke. Things have been a little busy here in potato land, and i haven’t gotten nearly all the things done that I would like to… but this has been spinning in my head for a while so…

If I was to ask you folks who were the leading people in our field (which i’ve so carefully defined in the title) a familiar list of names would probably pop up. A list of people who have affected our practice, who have given us the feeling that the things that we are trying to do, the changes we are trying to affect, are possible and worthwhile.
now…

I was wandering around wikipedia yesterday after the thought occured to me again that few of the people in our ‘field’ were actually in wikipedia. I was looking for an appropriate category for an entry on another valued member of our community and failed to find a point of reference for it. Will Richardson, who thousands of people a year come out to listen to speak, is not there. I came across Stephen Downes’ entry and was shocked to discover this

If we think that we have a field at all, then, agree or disagree with Mr. Downes, he is certainly “a widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in their specific field.” That is… if we are a field. Which we’d better be if we want people to listen to us.

My concern about this is linked to comments by michael feldstein “we all need to prepare and hunker down a bit. We’re in a trench war.” If we are indeed part of this ‘field’ and we expect to be listened to by folks at large, we need to do a better job in defining that field. Those are the folks that we will need in the blackboard issue, when we discuss DOPA or edublogging, questions of voice… all of it.
So…

I think we need some new wikipedia entries. I think we need to have an entry for edublogging that will give us the list of names that we can use to start getting those biographies out there. The posts on education that i see in wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELearning_2.0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_learning

are wholly inadequate to describe what is going on in our field. I have a strange feeling that the wiki-ers are not going to like me re-writing the entire field, so here is my call out to my peers. Support our Peeps. Go to wikipedia today and lets start getting the word out – outside our community.

Blackboard patent – The sky, my friends, is falling.

I read two not so cheery blog posts this morning that indicate that things are now actually starting to get seriously bad. Michael Feldstein is telling us about another patent pending for blackboard and i got this blog post dropped into a comment from my second post on blackboard.

So, it seems that blackboard is also trying to patent ““Content and portal systems and associated methods.” This would pretty much mean anything on the internet that’s associated with anything. Anyone who believes that their system is going to escape and all they have to do is wait around for the LMS industry to implode should really go over to michael’s blog and read his post.

How? This can’t happen. I’ll call my… well. It seems that that option isn’t looking so good either. A quick look at the shareholders of blackboard includes some rediculously heavy hitters, including the Carlyle Group. It would seem that blackboard has shareholders at THE highest level (check out political affiliations for the Carlyle group on that wikipedia page). I firmly stated during our rundown on this on Sunday night that i did not believe that there was any kind of conspiracy between DOPA, Net Neutrality and the Blackboard filing… I am here to say i’m no longer convinced.

If the next blackboard patent gives them rights over “content and portal systems and associated products” and DOPA cancels the personal voice and expression were talking about kids having in our classrooms and the ‘series of tubes’ (net neutrality thingy) makes it so that we have to pay for using bandwidth, essentially allowing the tube owners to turn on and off the taps according to how much big money you have… what, I ask you, is left?

Do we take our ball and go home? start a new net?

Michael was saying $1 to 2$ million dollars to fight the court case. Is that real money to the Carlyle Group? (not to mention the other shareholders in Blackboard).

If I wanted to control everything that was happening on the internet this is exactly what i’d do.
That’s not to say there is a conspiracy, just that if i was going to get a group of pals over to have a conspiracy and my conspiracy wanted to shut down free expression and voice on the internet… I’d probably do it this way.

  • I’d say “let’s stop the online predators”.
  • I’d say “lets lock down the websites that are violating legal patents”.
  • I’d say “people are essentially stealing bandwidth right now, lets put a tap on that hose”.

Are software patents evil? (an introduction by a man who MAY know what he’s talking about)

Is education as we know it going to be erased from the surface of the earth?

Will the interwebs asplode into a flaming ball of knowledge slurry?

Are we decending into the heart of an impenetrable darkness?

well… probably not. And, i imagine, the medieval imagery is lost on many people. As i tramp around the internet trying to get my mind around what all of this (Net Neutrality, DOPA, blackboard patent) is going to mean for education, I keep seeing one line over and over that I’d like to explore… “Software patents are evil.” I’d like to spend a couple of minutes explaining why i think people are saying that.
First of all, any software language is just that, its a language. There are people out there who speak PHP as well as they speak English or… Klingon. Since the dawn of the internet, people’s software code has been under the same protection as the language that people use, there’s even a whole big organization that deals with the fine tuning of licenses on the internet. So, if i wanted to publish some of the code for this website

/*
Theme Name: Connections
Theme URI: http://www.patriciamuller.com/
Version: 1.0
Description: A Theme from wpthemes.Info
Author: Patricia Muller
Author URI: http://www.vanillamist.com/blog/
*/
body {
margin:0;
padding:0;
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Georgia, Times, Times New Roman, sans-serif;
font-size: 0.9em;
text-align:center;
color:#29303B;
line-height:1.3em;
background: #F3F6ED;
}

I should really include Patricia’s name (not that i know her) as she designed the wordpress theme that i’m using. the difference between the software i’m using here (wordpress) and some like blackboard’s software is that this software is “open source software” which means (among other things) you and i can look at the code very easily… and no one minds. That does not mean i can steal the code… it just means i can see it. Her code is still protected by whatever copyright she chooses to put on it…

My own code, of which i’ve written precious little, is protected the same way anything i’ve written on this blog is… any way i damn well please. All you need to do is declare a copyright and its protected by law… the same way that all of the moodle software is protected by their copyright.

Now, moodle’s source code is open… anyone can see it. This is not true of blackboard. Their source is, as it were, closed. And all of their code is protected from theft already. No one can see the code and, if they could, it would be illegal to use it. Desire2learn is not being sued for stealing blackboards code… or work… directly.
What Blackboard has done is patent the the ideas involved in learning online. To use an oft used comparison…

The bricklin was an… interesting car built in New Brunswick in the 70’s. If we imagine the Bricklin as Blackboards software suite, as soon as they built it, they owned a copyright over the design and over all the decisions they made in the manufacture… Now, to carry on our analogy, imagine that the people at bricklin filed a patent on THE CAR. And in their patent application they said “we’ve spent alot of money designing these gull wing doors, therefore anyone who uses a DOOR is infringing on our copyright.”

This is what the blackboard patent does… it patents the learning management system equivalent of doors and windows. While Blackboard may have done different things with their software they did not invent the IDEA of ‘doors and windows’, they worked on ideas that already existed and added their own twist. Before they were granted this patent, their ‘twist’ was already protected. What they’ve done, people are arguing, is that the ideas that belong to the community of people who have worked together to develop those ideas… and that should never be patented… as it doesn’t really belong to anyone. Kinda like gravity or calculus.
That’s why, in a nutshell, i think people are so mad about this patent.

(those of you who understand this better (and those who just think you do 🙂 ) please feel free to add corrections…

Blackboard patent – community update.

well…

The blackboard patent fun continues. The first email i sent to the company to invite them to our meeting this weekend bounced back at me. I’ll continue to try and contact them. I was reading through ‘an explanation of the CMS patent‘ on their website (notice the use of the term CMS (course management system) as the one used by moodle) Anyone who is not in the US and thinks this is a US only issue might want to reconsider. The following from the Blackboard website.

  • What other countries are covered by the patent?
    Patents corresponding to the U.S. patent have been issued or are pending all over the world including in the European Union, China, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand India, Israel, Mexico, South Korea, Hong Kong and Brazil.
  • updated THIS IS THE ONE WAITING TO BE ISSUED IN CANADA

There are also many people in the community who have suggested that the ‘bad press’ that will come out of this will be bad for Blackboard inc. I would also ask that they reconsider their position. If someone has managed to secure a monopoly ‘bad press’ is not very relevant. Those of us who are familiar with the University CMS/LMS/VLE decision making process know that a secure solution is a VERY important part of that decision making process. If we can’t guarantee that it will be legal to use a given product, how can we guarantee the longevity of that product. Blackboard wins either way… all they need is the suggestion that they might sue…
The third thing that I am reading is that people are suggesting that this is an opportunity to move beyond the CMS into a brave new world of online education. It’s important to remember that the ‘series of tubes’ argument coupled with DOPA would make that difficult for many educators. However, i must agree, it is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for many agendas. It’s also an opportunity for those who have been resistant to the change to dig their heels in and point to this situation as a reason to stick to old ways of teaching.

Following my blog post yesterday… we’re going to cover three things on Sunday over at edtechtalk (link above). What is going on? What can we do to stop it? What do we do if we can’t stop it?

We’d like to finish that show with a community response statement.

Education After Blackboard (blackweb) and DOPA – A Conference

well…

In the span of a couple of weeks the educational landscape we’ve all come to know and care about has taken an awful beating. It seems that DOPA is taking away our open ed-web and blackweb is taking away our walled gardens. For DOPA discussions check out will richardson and for blackweb Harold Jarche and the post on the moodle forums (sign in required… but if you’re not signed up, sign up now, the more the merrier) The important thing to draw from that discussion is that Blackweb has already filed for patent infringement (desire2learn).

So here’s the thing. Individually we’re just a bunch of bloggers/educators/interested folks looking at a bunch of rapid fire legislation and going… wait. you can’t do this. What we really need is some kind of united response… we need to react in a way that is focused. We need to gather the experience and intelligence of the community and decide what needs to be done.

In the interests of this I suggest two things.

  1. Continue going over to weblogg-ed and posting about what you think we all need to do.
  2. Come to our planning conference this weekend at edtechtalk.com. 8pm EDT on Sunday.

During our conference we’re going to discuss the three issues.

  1. First, we’re going to want to understand exactly what the issues are
  2. Second, we’re going to want to talk about what we can do to oppose these two legal thingies (if necessary)
  3. Third, where do we go if we lose both. What happens to e-learning?

Everyone is invited. We’re gonna contact blackboard. We’ll contact moodle, desire2learn, and anyone else who wants a voice on the subject. Come out and make your voices heard.

cheers. dave.

educationbridges.net – An Elgg for Teacher collaboration

Alex and Arvind have set up an elgg at educationbridges.net. Go sign up. Join the party.

The thing that i’ve always loved about elgg is that the onus is on the participant. If you wish to join a community, you need to go and find that community and join it. If the community isn’t there, create it. If you need a private party, create a group.

Some quick notes for newbies

  1. If you want to know what going on right away (after you’ve signed up) click ‘my blog’ ‘view all posts’ that will give you all the public posts on the website
  2. Do not be afraid to form communities. They are the heart and soul of how the software works. If you find someone who has tagged something the same as you (which you can tell if your link becomes ‘clickable’) then start a community and contact them. Collaboration of this kind is what elgg is all about.
  3. Do not be afraid to join communities. If someone wants to keep a community exclusive (for whatever reason… i don’t really suggest this unless its necessary) they can just moderate it. Otherwise, they ARE LOOKING FOR PEOPLE. Feel free to drop in.
  4. You need to post to be noticed. If you find that you aren’t getting much out of your experience, its because you haven’t posted (and tagged)
  5. Tag everything, all the time. Don’t know how to tag? just write something in the tags box. If you think something’s a tag, odds are, someone else will too.
  6. Click all the buttons. Take some time to click everything on the site. Set aside a half an hour… its the best way to ‘get acquainted.’ Don’t start with a goal in mind, just wander through the software.
  7. And, as always, JUST ASK.
  8. anything else to add folks?

The worldbridges community (and edtechtalk) are very fortunate to have people like Alex and Arvind on the team (as well as twenty or so other people I can think of). I really think this plan has a great chance of going somewhere special. Join up.

My Space At School Watch – What should we teach?

The reality of the read/WRITE web is that students are now part of the discourse.
Steamy night here in c’town. The boy has been sleeping on and off, and tonight he’s not sleeping so much and it’s bon’s turn to put him off into sleep. I’m gonna try and sneak a post into the evening…

Art Gelwicks has been having a debate with a bunch of random students in a blog post that i made a few months ago. I’ve gotten about 1500 google hits from that post, which says MUCH more about how important it is for people than it says about my blog’s popularity. Reading through the comments gives you a sense of how desperate these students are to get to myspace… It’s not as if my blog post promised any support for their plight, and still, they posted. They are, as it were, using my blog as a means for interacting with each other, for passing information back and forth about how to crack through their school’s system.

So Art says

  • Rather than spending time trying to find ways to bypass your schools filtering and policies, wouldn’t it make more sense to pursue getting those policies changed?

The response is so typical it might have been put their on purpose to irritate him (and it might have been)

From Marlene

  • I NEED A MYSPACE

From Karla and Andrea

  • i need myspace at school

So Art responds by taking them to task for taking the easy way out and not applying their education to convince ‘teh autoritays’ to let them ‘make the case for the site you want access to.’ And I agree with him, that should be the kind of education that they have received… but have they?

I’ve often been taken to task for the title of my blog, a new acquaintance of mine (hopefully soon friend) asked me the other day what ‘post-structuralism’ was. I sent her this quote from wikipedia

  1. post-structuralism views culture as integral to every textual work. Essential elements of this cultural context include author(s), location, format, audience, and myriad social and economic factors. A typical post-structuralist position holds that the meaning of any work is itself a cultural phenomenon.

Lets take a step back and look at the comments in that blog post and ask ourselves… what’s going on?

Well… there’s my original post. I had intended to start a series of myspace watches of which this is the second. I was definetely speaking to an audience of peers, probably adults, a quick reference to the Simpsons, and my agenda message… teach them how to deal with a thing, don’t ban a thing out of hand. This with the implicit message that students will find it one way or the other.

Then there’s the responses by people I’ll call educators. They’re mostly in agreement with me, (dave says smugly, of course, it is my blog, so one would assume that they might) i believe, if i interpret it correctly, even Tom Hoffman didn’t completely disagree with me. And i believe that’s the only time that’s ever happened!

The response of the students, however, shows a completely different view of the post. They didn’t see the content, they had a completely different experience on the page. One interpretation might be that they saw an adult who was not wholely unsympathetic, and they dropped another coin in the well… posted here as they might have tens of other places. Another interpretation might be that they didn’t see anything, and we’re taking over my blog for their own conversation. Art’s encounters seem to support this position.

What the blog IS is very different depending on your culture, your feelings about format and who you are as an audience. While, to some degree, this has always been true, Shakespeare, for instance, is a painful experience to many teenagers and great fun to many other people. The reality of the read/WRITE web is that students are now part of the discourse.

We are no longer in a world where a single dominant discourse “shakespeare is good for you” can enforce its agenda. These students are going to subvert the system, and make themselves heard. But in looking at the posts from those subverters of the system, i have to agree with Art, but I’ll change the pronoun “is that the best WE can do?”

Lets break down what they’re looking for. It’s a piece of ‘knowledge’ that is in constant flux. What worked at the start of the comments, did not work for the student at the end (Alex Q). It’s not like looking for a date, or a physics equation… it might not even still be accurate by the time you try it. This is the knowledge that these students are going to need to be able to learn and access. This is how they are going to need to learn.

Simply posting “i need my space” on random blogs is not enough.

How then do we teach students the literacies that they need to be able to excel in a world where knowledge is so fleeting. Where an analysis of culture is necessary in order to get the things you want. Let’s take a slightly different example, as i wouldn’t really teach students how to break through the schools firewall, not because it wouldn’t be a good learning experience, but because they shouldn’t do that.
Lesson 1 

any suggestions? what exercise could they do that would teach them the literacies alluded to above? Something they should do.

My Space At School Watch – What should we teach?

The reality of the read/WRITE web is that students are now part of the discourse.
Steamy night here in c’town. The boy has been sleeping on and off, and tonight he’s not sleeping so much and it’s bon’s turn to put him off into sleep. I’m gonna try and sneak a post into the evening…

Art Gelwicks has been having a debate with a bunch of random students in a blog post that i made a few months ago. I’ve gotten about 1500 google hits from that post, which says MUCH more about how important it is for people than it says about my blog’s popularity. Reading through the comments gives you a sense of how desperate these students are to get to myspace… It’s not as if my blog post promised any support for their plight, and still, they posted. They are, as it were, using my blog as a means for interacting with each other, for passing information back and forth about how to crack through their school’s system.

So Art says

  • Rather than spending time trying to find ways to bypass your schools filtering and policies, wouldn’t it make more sense to pursue getting those policies changed?

The response is so typical it might have been put their on purpose to irritate him (and it might have been)

From Marlene

  • I NEED A MYSPACE

From Karla and Andrea

  • i need myspace at school

So Art responds by taking them to task for taking the easy way out and not applying their education to convince ‘teh autoritays’ to let them ‘make the case for the site you want access to.’ And I agree with him, that should be the kind of education that they have received… but have they?

I’ve often been taken to task for the title of my blog, a new acquaintance of mine (hopefully soon friend) asked me the other day what ‘post-structuralism’ was. I sent her this quote from wikipedia

  1. post-structuralism views culture as integral to every textual work. Essential elements of this cultural context include author(s), location, format, audience, and myriad social and economic factors. A typical post-structuralist position holds that the meaning of any work is itself a cultural phenomenon.

Lets take a step back and look at the comments in that blog post and ask ourselves… what’s going on?

Well… there’s my original post. I had intended to start a series of myspace watches of which this is the second. I was definetely speaking to an audience of peers, probably adults, a quick reference to the Simpsons, and my agenda message… teach them how to deal with a thing, don’t ban a thing out of hand. This with the implicit message that students will find it one way or the other.

Then there’s the responses by people I’ll call educators. They’re mostly in agreement with me, (dave says smugly, of course, it is my blog, so one would assume that they might) i believe, if i interpret it correctly, even Tom Hoffman didn’t completely disagree with me. And i believe that’s the only time that’s ever happened!

The response of the students, however, shows a completely different view of the post. They didn’t see the content, they had a completely different experience on the page. One interpretation might be that they saw an adult who was not wholely unsympathetic, and they dropped another coin in the well… posted here as they might have tens of other places. Another interpretation might be that they didn’t see anything, and we’re taking over my blog for their own conversation. Art’s encounters seem to support this position.

What the blog IS is very different depending on your culture, your feelings about format and who you are as an audience. While, to some degree, this has always been true, Shakespeare, for instance, is a painful experience to many teenagers and great fun to many other people. The reality of the read/WRITE web is that students are now part of the discourse.

We are no longer in a world where a single dominant discourse “shakespeare is good for you” can enforce its agenda. These students are going to subvert the system, and make themselves heard. But in looking at the posts from those subverters of the system, i have to agree with Art, but I’ll change the pronoun “is that the best WE can do?”

Lets break down what they’re looking for. It’s a piece of ‘knowledge’ that is in constant flux. What worked at the start of the comments, did not work for the student at the end (Alex Q). It’s not like looking for a date, or a physics equation… it might not even still be accurate by the time you try it. This is the knowledge that these students are going to need to be able to learn and access. This is how they are going to need to learn.

Simply posting “i need my space” on random blogs is not enough.

How then do we teach students the literacies that they need to be able to excel in a world where knowledge is so fleeting. Where an analysis of culture is necessary in order to get the things you want. Let’s take a slightly different example, as i wouldn’t really teach students how to break through the schools firewall, not because it wouldn’t be a good learning experience, but because they shouldn’t do that.
Lesson 1 

any suggestions? what exercise could they do that would teach them the literacies alluded to above? Something they should do.

blogevangelism part deux – stephen downes’ response

Wow. It’s a strangely comforting/discomforting confusing feeling when someone you respect takes so much time to deconstruct something you’ve written. Nice, in a sense, that what you wrote seemed worth the effort to respond to in such detail, not so comforting that I took such a thrashing! 🙂 But let me pick up on a couple of issues, and see if I can’t speak a little clearer on them, and why i think they’re important. Here’s Stephen’s post.

and now, an attempt to put enough here to make this understandable without making it 20 miles long… I want to be clear at the outset, that the orginal conversation that i was describing was a real one, and the arguments that I was refuting were genuine. I know the blogevangelist in question. And this was not meant to tar the name of some very good blogevangelists (which is why I changed the title of the last post) because most of them are perfectly reasoned in their promotion of blogging.
dave Blogging (in its wordpress type form) is probably a transitional technology.

  • Stephen Well yes, of course it is transitional technology. Name me one thing launched on the internet over the last ten years that isn’t transitional technology.
  • dave’s response agreed Stephen. But you and I are fully aware of the transitionality of technology, there are many, many people who are not aware of this. And, when they think of tools ‘for democracy’ or ‘for teaching’ they tend to compare them to things that have much longer lifespans. This is a very simple premise that can be layed on the floor of a discussion, you yourself agree that it’s true. When people are as fired up as my friend was, it never hurts to start with an easy premise.
  • Stephen continues “Blogging allows for only a pretty rudimentary interactivity.” Well yeah, but it allows for a whole lot more interactivity than, say, plain ordinary web pages (aka shovelware). and and people are working hard to make that possible. People, I might add, in the blogging community – and not their critics.
  • Dave’s response Agreed. But the comparison that you are making is between internet technologies… The discussion i was having was comparing it to a classroom and live discussion. I agree that people are working hard to make it possible, which is why i linked to ELGG. But again, the person i was debating with is not online at all now… so the comparison of ‘better’ was not super important. It was the legitimacy of his saying that it wasn’t perfect that I was acknowledging. And it isn’t perfect. It does many, many good things. But people who’ve been turned off will focus on the negative, which i acknowledged.

dave It can(blogs), very often, lack accountability

  • actually, i won’t really go into this one too far, I failed to link to the correct article in my post and Stephen assumed i meant Bill O’reilly and I meant Tim O’reilly. Stephen did make an excellent point about traditional media not exactly being perfectly accountable either. This is true, but they are, at least to some degree, more accountable. (I wish i was being ironic by mentioning Bill O’reilly, but i’m not that cool 🙂 )

dave It is not, by any means, a silver bullet

  • Stephen’s response  where is that pundit out there who is actually saying blogs will satisfy every need of every person?
  • dave’s response It was my conversation partner’s perception that he’d been told just that. That blogging was the key to democracy. I’m guessing he oversimplified, but again, simply agreeing to the fact that it isn’t, creates a comfort zone with the other participant that you aren’t a fanatic. And he was talking about a specific presentation and person. People do think that people say this. It ususally is said by detractors “Yeah, you blogging people just think that it will solve everything.” It’s a facile argument that needs a pat response. Just saying “i know that blogging won’t cure cancer,” is often enough to make people slow down long enough to listen to the good side of the story.

dave No one (at least not me) is suggesting that blogging should replace good teaching

  • stephen He wrote alot of stuff… I encourage you to read it. Essentially he said it can. And i think that he took my comments a little out of context (as well as suggesting that my comments weren’t HONEST. which is a little hard to take)
  • dave’s response yes. I agree. blogs are good for many things. A little more clarity on what i meant by ‘replace good teaching’. The person i was talking to is reputed by everyone to be a great teacher (better than good). What I was suggesting to him was not that blogging should replace the good teaching that he is currently doing. (i suggested ways it could be added)

The rest of his response covers many of the many good things that blogging (and associated techonologies) can do for people. Anyone familiar with my work will know that I can’t help but agree with him.

  1. Blogging (in its wordpress type form) is probably a transitional technology.
  2. It can, very often, lack accountability
  3. It is not, by any means, a silver bullet
  4. No one (at least not me) is suggesting that blogging should replace good teaching
  5. There are still a number of very important social justice issues around blogging that stop it from being the IDEAL democracy tool.
  6. Yes. Many of the most vocal bloggers will probably one day work for major media corps.

I think that, in response to my premises, stephen’s post gives a nice outline of the many nice things that blogging can do. I’m not entirely sure if he thinks that I’m being an apologist by using the above premises in a discussion. I hope not.

This sentence does concern me

  • I see no reason why supporters of blogs in learning should roll over before the critics in an effort to be reasonable.

By my count, Stephen actually agreed with 5 out of 6 of the premises (i think he disagreed with the number 4, but i could be wrong) He then went on to elaborate on the powers in blogging in almost exactly the same way that I did in the conversation that I had on Wednesday night. (not surprising considering how much of his work i read 🙂 )

So here’s my question back to you Stephen, as you agree with the premises (even consider some of them facile Well yes, of course it is transitional technology.) then why not just come out and say them in a conversation if it settles the ire and lets the second part of that conversation happen? Is that ‘rolling over’ or is it just a productive conversation style?

I do see the need to roll over to be reasonable, for the very reasons that you described the media revolution as useful. I would like to see more people get a voice, and the more people in decision making positions that I can convince, the more that might happen.

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