Dave’s Educational Blog

A break from all the craziness of patents and rhizomes. I’ve been playing around with geosense.net and thinking that there are about a gazillion uses for it. Not that I’m a huge believer that geography should eat up massive amounts of time in the school day. More that I think that this is the kind of thing that doesn’t require a teacher, at least not in terms of learning where all the countries are. We should be, amongst other things, be training autodidacts. And this is a fantastic site for teaching that.

http://geosense.net/

edit: This does not mean, of course, that i think that geography without context makes bunches of sense. Just that, like memorizing multiplication tables makes math discussions easier, having a good sense of where the countries are, makes the discussion about geopolitics (for instance) easier.

I’m listening to Matt Small right now talking about the blackboard patent in a webex seminar. It’s the first of three such talks.

http://www.blackboard.com/patent/FAQ2 the links to the conversations are on the right hand side of this conversation

He’s started by describing what a patent is, and explaining the difference between dependent and independant claims. He’s saying that unless you fall under one of the indedpendent claims you don’t need to worry about a patent. And that blackboard isn’t patenting white boards etc…

Is this patent any good? Involves a number of different things. prior art etc.

People are saying that blackboard is claiming to have invented chatrooms etc… and that they have seen other things with chatrooms, therefore there is prior art.
“We did alot of due diligence. (blackboard did) we are not aware of any prior art ”

“single user can have multiple roles across multiple courses. before us, each course was an island onto itself. although there was some central databasing that pulled it together… for the most part, if you were in two classes, you had a different logon different calendar for each class. You needed to replicate for each class.”
“we took a gamble, to change our architecture to allow members to change their roles from student to instructor, from class to class, under the same login”

Blackboards intent

“this is an isolated lawsuit between two competitors. We are not focusing on universities, professors, students, open source etc…”

My question “is it possible to get a legal guarantee protecting OS software?”

we’d need to sit down with the OS community, and it might be worse for them if we did that. We might entertain this as a solution. (not direct quote) “I’m not saying that there isn’t a potential”
“it is difficult for a patent holder that is in litigation that “i will not do X with my patent” because it would devalue the worth of the patent.”

Just talking to Michael Hotrum on the phone, and he says to me “yeah… what about SAP?” Dave stares blankly at the screen. What’s that dave says? And i check out michael’s website and find this link.

I’m a very naive person. Can’t wait ’till Feldstein and Essa come on the show to tell me how to feel better for myself.

I realize that many of you have probably seen this, but, man oh man, the 26th of July was a busy day. This report should be the lynchpin of any argument for open source in higher education. It addresses many of the main concerns that people have about OSS, refutes many of the misconceptions about TPO (total price of ownership) and… well… here are a few bits

Here is a link to the report

• We believe that software projects (both in higher education and more generally) work best when there is claer mutual understanding between the users and the developers regarding how the software is to be used and what is important for it to accomplish. The success of many community-based open source projects derives from just such a confluence. p. 23
• (1)Commercial products are often not well tailored to higher education… (2) College and university leaders are concerned that consolidation could result in commercial vendors having excessive leverage to raise prices for the software used in higher education… (3)Commercial software tends to require frequent and costly upgrades… upgrades that are more frequesnt than would have been chosen and that have functionality that differs from what the customer would most value. p. 9.
• Crucially, the supply and demand sides are present in OSS projects from the beginning via the developers themselves. This is a feature of the Moodle example, in which the founder, Martin Dougiamas, is both a programmer and an educator, and thus was able to execute his particular visi9on of what course management software would do. p. 21.
• We have good reason to believe to believe that universities and colleges could collectively produce open source software that meets their needs better than commercial products.p.22 (added – it was too sweet not to edit in)

Not all the report makes such a glowing report of the possibilities for OSS. There is a section, for instance, that suggests that for mission critical systems like payroll, CIOs would prefer having a company that they could sue if the software failed. A quick response to this of course, is that if you have hired a services company to support your open source software, then you have someone to sue, but that neither here nor there.

For those of us who’ve been looking for nice, solid research that supports the positions we already hold ourselves, about open source being a perfectly fine, safe reasonable option, I advise the following

1. chill fine belgian beer
2. open and pour in nice glass
3. read article
4. smile in a satisfied manner
5. repeat 1-4 as needed

warning – dave is feeling a little tickled with himself today… humour him please. that is all.

I always pay a little closer attention to my stats numbers at the start of the month as they are a little easier to navigate through (they update monthly on the package that i usually use). I came across this article from the European Journal of Open, Distance and E-learning.

• English AbstractThe article argues that it is necessary to move e-learning beyond learning management systems and engage students in an active use of the web as a resource for their self-governed, problem-based and collaborative activities. The purpose of the article is to discuss the potential of social software to move e-learning beyond learning management systems. An approach to use of social software in support of a social constructivist approach to e-learning is presented, and it is argued that learning management systems do not support a social constructivist approach which emphasizes self-governed learning activities of students. The article suggests a limitation of the use of learning management systems to cover only administrative issues. Further, it is argued that students’ self-governed learning processes are supported by providing students with personal tools and engaging them in different kinds of social networks.

If you scroll down and check out the references, you’ll notice this little blog hangin’ out with some of the cool guys of the edubloggypodonlineosphere.

• Leigh Blackall
• Scott Wilson
• Will Richardson
• George Siemens
• Stephen Downes
• Alan Levine
• Terry Anderson

All referenced for the work they’ve been doing on their blogs. Partially for a conversation we all got into a few months ago around the long-term viability of LMSs. It opposes many of the views I’ve seen from some people at my University and many people elsewhere that blogging is the province of the lunatic fringe. That does not, of course, mean that all blogs are interesting, factual or useful to a large number of people… just that they can be.

As for a review of the article itself? Let me read it a few more times.

woohoo.

Well… Doug Belshaw through my name on his list of people he would like to have answer ‘the book meme.’ It’s now 6:08 here on the East Coast, and i thought i might do a little book history on myself. Funny, I had my students do this for themselves this spring, and now realize that i never did one myself. This is mostly going to be stream of consciousness, and probably not terribly compelling reading for most of you… but… hey. I like navel gazing. 🙂

1) One book that changed your life?

Steppenwolf – I come from a very small town in Northern New Brunswick. My parents are wonderful, pragmatic people. Acadians who broke molds in their society – my mother was my baseball and hockey coach, my father… well… lets just say that the one motto that I’ve stopped having to repeat to myself, that i learned from him is simple – If it can be done, i can do it. I took this pragmatism to university with me and started in Computer science (programming). I hated it. There was a point in my second year of university where i read this book, cover to cover, twice. Haller’s fate, of the tortured writer yearning for a cut off point for his life, was one that in the mellodrama of a 19 year old, was very present indeed. My writing was supposed to be the outlet for that confused time in my life, to balance off the pragmatic work that i was trying to force myself to like. That was a strange, transitional year, and this book probably takes a chunck of credit for moving me out of the cold science of programming (as it was being presented to me) and on towards philosophy.

2) One book you have read more than once?

Ha. I have a bit of a book rereading problem so this is gonna be a bit of a toss up. By shear volume, i suppose LOTR is the book I’ve read many more times than once. One book i find myself going back to just to get my mind around what it might mean is John Keegan’s ‘History of Warfare‘. There’s some link between the evolution of war and the evolution of education (of society as a whole) that i’m still trying to come to terms with. Just for fun, I’ll throw a phil book in too… The blue and brown books. Wittgenstein is the most… useful philosopher on my shelf.

3) One book you would want on a desert island?

Maybe this one? If it has to be one that’s already on my shelf… Millman’s Gibbon’s Rome, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. i particularly like Millman’s edition, as he is quite stodgy about Gibbon’s fantastic sense of humour.

4) One book that made you laugh?

The one book that can make me laugh when i pick it up, at any point in the book, at any time is Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Douglas Adams is one of my heroes. Here’s a guy who put his hand to everything, wrote some very entertaining and philosophically interesting books… and was a real lover of his fellow person. His is the kind of soul that makes you wish for an afterlife.

5) One book that made you cry?

Log from the Sea of Cortez this book starts with a 50 dedication to a close friend. Some of the best writing of the twentieth century IMHO. For fun, I’ll throw in another Steinbeck. East of Eden.

6) One book you wish had been written?

I’d go in for a little “Lets Go’s guide to the ancient world copyright 500 AF (after flood)”.

Ack! edit. I read this as “you wish you had written”.  Here’s the old text for that.

Ha. Any book would do. 🙂 I actually did write one i suppose, but it was never released. (fortunately, in retrospect it was pretty… um… come to think of it, like this. navel gazing) Foucault’s Pendulum. That would make me Umberto Eco. And that’s cool. And it would mean that i actually understood all the stuff in that book, which i clearly don’t. Still… a fantastic novel. If you’re not familiar with it… it deals with the same material as the Davinci code, except, if it was turned into a film, it would look more like Nouvelle Vague.

7) One book you wish had never been written?

I’ll let aside the freedom of speech, all texts are good texts argument and play along with this one. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say Plato’s Republic. That book has been the cause of alot of bad government, his ideas of ‘governance by the philosopher king’ sounds nice (maybe) but in practice, everyone always thinks that THEY are the people who should be ‘taking care of everyone else’. Plato also, if i remember correctly, believed that plays etc… should be banned as they only stir up unrest and don’t support the bettermeant of the state. I should add… assuming anyone has gotten this far in this post, that the Socratic Plato is some of my favorite reading.

8) One book you are currently reading?

The one, the only, the incredibly long, fantastically well written (maybe TOO well written, ‘In Search of Lost Time’. (Otherwise known as the Remembrance of things past) I love the novel, but get so caught up in the descriptions i spend more time rereading than I do finishing it. If you’re not familiar with it, read through some of those amazon reviews… no need for me to gush.

9) One book you have been meaning to read?

Too much stuff to catelog. Let’s say Ulysses, Deleuze and that damn friedman book that i feel like i know cover to cover but have not read.

10) Now tag five people.

Again, too many people to name. I’ll say bonnie stewart, by partner and best pal. Let’s try , Josie Fraser, bud hunt, Michael Feldstein and Leigh Blackall. There are bunches more, but some, like Barbara Ganley have been picked already :(. cheerio.

I’ll start with the correction. In returning to David Jakes’ post from a few days ago I saw a comment from a reader of my blog saying that he thought I’d made an unfair representation of David’s position. While i did say that i agreed that the patent office had dropped the ball, I forgot to include this text…

• I think Mark Oehlert gets it right in his post title about the situation, appropriately entitled “LMS Patented!! Is anyone home at the Patent Office?” (my emphasis)
  Shouldn’t we be blaming the patent office for allowing the patent? Isn’t Blackboard, Inc. just taking advantage of what is available to them as a corporation?

above my third comment… which, in retrospect, makes David’s position much clearer. He’s saying (I guess) that if fault their is, it lies in the system. A publicly traded corporation must, by its structure, take advantage of every legal opportunity. And it is the fault of the patent office for offering this legal opportunity. I’m not sure i agree, and i’m not sure that it counters the majority position taken up in the edubloggosphere, but I apologize for not fully representing his position. (As Cory Doctorow says, that’s the great advantage of blogs

• Blogs, Wikipedia, and other online media fail gracefully indeed. When a newspaper gets a story wrong, it can take 24 hours to get a correction out – if it corrects it at all. There’s no ready way to link criticism of a newspaper article with the article itself. Certainly, you can’t make the edits yourself.

Props to Stephen Downes for highlighting the fact that this is not exactly the first time that educators (and edubloggers) have been talking about this for a while in response to the claim of some edubloggers that the community has been sitting idly by ignoring patents until a few weeks ago.

I would very much like, speaking of edubloggers, to get a community activity together for creating that page on wikipedia.  Should be pretty simple, all we need to do is go there and create the page. The problem is, my creations have been getting deleted lately, (the first ones i’ve made) and i’m thinking i’ll need more people around to make it happen. Anyone interested…? (Not like i’ll be obsessively checking the page or anything)

We’re ramping up our edu-projects for the fall over in the worldbridges community. We’re being much more careful about how much we take on this year, but if you are interested in taking part, drop by on of our shows , come to the edu-elgg or send us an email.

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)

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

• “The subject of this article seems to fail Wikipedia’s consensually-accepted criteria for inclusion of biographies. If you are familiar with the subject, please expand the article to establish its notability, citing reliable sources, so as to avoid it being considered for deletion. If notability cannot be established, the article is more likely to be considered for deletion, as per Wikipedia:Guide to deletion. If this article has no assertion of importance, then it may be speedy deleted under criterion A7 (unremarkable people). :

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.