Fortnightly Mailing

Report from Sheffield "Spotlight on Moodle" event with Martin Dougiamas (Moodle Lead Developer) and Jason Cole (Product Development Manager at the Open University)

Martin Dougiamas and Jason Cole (who is responsible for the OU's Moodle implementation) spoke in Sheffield on 27/7/2006.

The event was organised by South Yorkshire's e-Learning and Open Source Special Interest Groups, and sponsored by:

• Ufi/learndirect;
• the South Yorkshire branch of the British Computer Society (BCS);
• the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), South Yorkshire Branch;
• Tribal Technology.

The continuation post contains an unpolished precis of Martin's and Jason's talks, and a very brief summary of responses to 2 of the questions that were raised subsequently.  Slides for Martin and Jason's presentations will be available soon are available as a 4MB ZIP file, and I will link to them from this post. Responsibility for the whole of this piece rests with me, and I will gladly correct any errors that are pointed out to me.

Blackboard's US Patent 6988138 seems to cover most of the "commodity" features of a learning environment

On 26 July, Blackboard Inc, which last year took over WebCT, and is the dominant vendor of course management systems, announced that it has been granted a US patent "for technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods", and that patents corresponding to the US 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".

Here is an abstract of the patent itself, taken from the US Patent Office record for Patent 6988138.

A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are available to the students over a network such as the Internet. Various levels of functionality are provided through a three-tiered licensing program that suits the needs of the institution offering the program. In addition, an open platform system is provided such that anyone with access to the Internet can create, manage, and offer a course to anyone else with access to the Internet without the need for an affiliation with an institution, thus enabling the virtual classroom to extend worldwide.

Unsurprisingly, Blackboard is silent as to whether and if yes how and with (against?) whom it intends to make use of the patent; The day after its announcement, Blackboard filed a patent infringement claim against the Canadian company Desire2Learn [PDF file], hosted at this link by The Inquirer.  It will now be interesting to see how much "prior art" is claimed by others in the event that the patent is actually used in anger by Blackboard - the best place at the moment (2/8/2006) to put it and to find it especially the former looks to be this area of Wikipedia. From my own experience, thinking back to the early days of the Learning To Teach On-Line course in 1997 or 1998 (which I and several readers of Fortnightly Mailing had a hand in developing), I seem to recall:

• delivery over the Internet, with materials, tasks/assignments and discussion-board and chat system all accessible by browser;
• browser-based system for amending the materials;
• learners and tutors all over the world, with learners enroled to several of the institutions in the (then) South Yorkshire Further Education Consortium, and tutors employed by several different institutions.

We used the widely available ideas, knowhow, and Open Source and proprietary software that were available at the time, and nothing we did was particularly special. According to the US Patent Office web site, Blackboard's initial patent application was made in 1999.

More recent related Fortnightly Mailing posts include: 25 January 2007 - United States Patent & Trademark Office orders re-examination of Blackboard Patent; 9 December 2006 - Two contrasting views about software patents. A debate between Eben Moglen and Blackboard's Matt Small; 2 December 2006 - Blackboard: two separate re-examination requests to the US Patent and Trade Mark Office; and an application to the Court from Desire2Learn for a stay in proceedings; 27 October 2006 - EDUCAUSE on Blackboard: "patenting a community creation is anathema to our culture"; 16 October 2006 -  John Mayer interviews various lawyers with patent knowhow; 10 September 2006 - The new "post-patent" environment for e-learning: a perspective. Guest contribution by Jim Farmer; 9 September 2006 - Blackboard's work for IMS; 8 August 2006 - Did the US Department of Justice know about the patent when it cleared Blackboard's acquisition of Web CT?; 26 July 2006 - Blackboard's US Patent 6988138.

Minor change made to the final paragraphs: 27/7/2006; bigger changes (indicated by used of strike-out font above: 1/8/2006; link to Wikipedia page added 2/8/2006; link to Desire2Learn court response to Blackboard's patent infringement claim, and to more recent Fortnightly Mailing posts, added 15/9/2006, and 29/10/2006, and 27/1/2007.

If ever you need a new disclaimer

Thanks to Sarah Blandy for this terrific disclaimer, from the Peak District Weather web site.

This information is provided to the best of our knowledge. We have collected and collated it in good faith but we are not responsible for its accuracy and anyone intending to make use of this information is advised to check it out.

Well that's the legal stuff sorted.

Should you decline to comply with this warning, a leather winged demon of the night will soar from the deep malevolent caverns of the white peak into the shadowy moonlit sky and, with a thirst for blood on its salivating fangs, search the very threads of time for the throbbing of your heartbeat. Just thought you'd want to know that.

When did you last see your data, and who do you trust to keep it safe?

This 8/6/2006 article by SA Mathieson in the Technology Guardian struck a chord with me as I've always felt that if I wanted to trust my personal data (an ePortfolio, say....) to a third party, I'd prefer to let the Co-op Bank handle it, than an institution, or the Government. The article has the following introduction:

We trust banks far more than the government to protect our personal data, so plans to share files across departments should ring alarm bells.

You might think your personal data is safe, secured under computerised lock and key, and fenced by the Data Protection Act with its sanctions against release of private data. Especially, surely, that which the government holds.

The reality is that everything has its price. Last month, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the state-funded watchdog for personal data, published a report, What Price Privacy?. The title's question was answered with a price list of public-sector data: £17.50 for the address of someone who is on the electoral register but has opted out of the freely available edited version; £150 to £200 for a vehicle record held by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency; £500 for access to a criminal record. The private sector also leaks: £75 buys the address associated with a mobile phone number, and £750 will get the account details.

SA Mathieson's article in the Guardian.  Access page for the Information Commissioner's What Price Privacy? Report.

Palestine - surely it is Israel that must yield?

Amended on 13/5/2007; links updated 29/5/2011.

Between 11 and 14 June (and this is one reason why Fortnightly Mailing has had a hiatus) - just prior to the current crisis in Gaza - I was fortunate to go to East Jerusalem and Hebron, Ramallah, and Bethlehem in the West Bank.

The visit was my first to the Middle East. I went with John Cook, who is President of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), by which I am employed half-time. The visit was funded by the British Council and its focus was on how universities in the Palestinian Territories are using e-learning.

A short article will appear about the e-learning side of the visit in the ALT Newsletter. The continuation post is more of a personal reflection.

W3C Accessibility Guidelines - British Standards Institution response to consultation

The British Standards Institution (BSI) - the National Standards Body of the United Kingdom - has submitted 4 pages of solid comments in response to the World Wide Web Consortium's consultation on (the unsatisfactory!) version 2 of its Web Content Accessiblity Guidelines.  I have posted a copy of the response [23 kB PDF] on my web site, with BSI's permission.

Ray Ozzie will take over from Bill Gates in 2008

Concise piece from the 24/6/2006 Economist, set in the context of the threat posed to Microsoft by Google,  about Microsoft's plan for Ray Ozzie to take over from Bill Gates as "chief software architect" during 2008.  Ozzie, pictured, has had  long and illustrious career prior to joining Microsoft, in which he has concentrated on developing software to support collaboration and communication. Lotus Notes and Groove are two examples.

UKERNA SMS Survey - needs respondents

Thanks to Andy Black for pointing out that UKERNA is conducting an online survey about the provision and use of SMS, or text messaging, in UK education, the results of which will "help shape the requirement for a potential new SMS service for the (education) community". Complete the survey and you'll get a copy of the results.

E-learning trends - Kineo does some digging

Google Trends enable you to see how the frequency of common searches using particular terms changes over time.  I'd been meaning to use it to see if interest in e-learning (as measured by the number of web searches for the term)  may be on the wain. People at Kineo (a learning consultancy company in Brighton) got there first. The image above shows how the volume of searches with the term "podcasting" has varied over the last 2 years.   Thanks to Mark van Harmelen for spotting this.

Personal Learning Environments make a step forward. Guest Contribution from Mark van Harmelen.

Mark van Harmelen is an e-learning and a social software consultant, and also an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science.

The UK is increasingly focusing on the development of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) after a slow start that began with client systems such as Colloquia (2000) and the  Manchester PLE/VLE Framework (2004). This week saw a two-day meeting  (on 6 and 7 June) organised by CETIS and held in  Manchester. The meeting comprised an initial ‘experts’ only day, and a second public day.

What became apparent at the workshop is that the name PLE now encompasses two major flavours of architecture:

• Client systems such as CETIS’s own PLE, PLEX.
• Web-based server and browser systems, building on Web2.0 tools including aggregators, blogs and wikis.

Importantly, and picking up on threads that have been emerging in the Blogosphere over the last two and a half years, PLEs are increasingly seen as a vehicle for self-directed and group-based learning, where individual learners construct their own agendas and learning programmes to satisfy their own learning goals. As such, the PLE revolution harbours two important threads, a change in learning style in institutions, and a spilling over of learning technology from institutions to non-institutional life.

In that many of the more hard-line proponents of PLEs feel that even blogs and RSS aggregators can constitute a personal learning environment, we are already seeing wholesale adoption of PLEs in contexts outside of traditional institutional learning setting. This much is sweet news to those proponents of the original idea of PLEs, that PLEs are  needed to provide lifelong learning environments across different institutions and CPD suppliers.

In fact, PLEs, as generally agreed on in the CETIS meeting, are seen as making possible a fundamental shift that can be characterised in a number of dimensions; moving towards greater autonomy, diversity, openness and connectedness in education.

However, all is not rosy, and there was a general degree of concern about possible institutional responses to the coming PLE revolution: That PLEs in their most useful incarnations can only be used to full advantage with a fundamental change in pedagogic practice  and that  institutions may be wary of a consequent loss of  control of their teaching and learning processes. Perhaps, then, from an institutional point of view, it was no coincidence that the first day of the workshop was scheduled on the much touted date of 666.

Useful links:

CETIS PLEX Blog,  their  download page, and a selection of screenshots of PLEX in action.

Elgg, a PLE-like environment initially conceived as a response to increased institutionalisation of e-portfolios.

The half-hour PLE, a simple PLE built in half an hour.

A  resource on PLEs, still under some development -- "A great general resource containing numerous references and descriptions of resources on personal learning environments" Steven Downes (thanks Steven).

A useful  note from Graham Attwell who refers to  Derek Morrison  discussing the potential dissonance between PLE use and the industrialisation of education.

warwickblogs, the University of Warwick's bold experiment in student blogging.

To contact the author email: mark -a-t- cs.man.ac.uk