Fortnightly Mailing

The new "post-patent" environment for e-learning: a perspective. Guest contribution by Jim Farmer.

The simultaneous announcement of the Blackboard patent [3 MB PDF] and the issuing of the complaint [200 kB PDF] against Desire2Learn on July 26, 2006, is one of those events that immediately changes our perception of ourselves and what we do. The emotions - disbelief, anger, frustration, resignation, and denial - show how unexpected, shocking, and important this event was to higher education. As bloggers educate us on patents, Blackboard business strategy, and the history of e-learning, three sharply different issues are emerging:  policies to encourage innovation; the commercialization of teaching and learning;  and collaboration among higher education and its suppliers.

The Web 2.0 emperor is naked. Gavin Clarke reports in The Register on the views of Tim Berners-Lee and Eben Moglen.

Useful amunition in this 30/8/2006 article in the Register.

Five years after the first internet bubble burst, we're now witnessing the backlash against Web 2.0 and a plethora of me-too business plans, marketing pitches and analyst reports exploiting the nebulous phrase.

Tim Berners-Lee, the individual credited with inventing the web and giving so many of us jobs, has become the most prominent individual so-far to point out that the Web 2.0 emperor is naked. Berners-Lee has dismissed Web 2.0 as useless jargon nobody can explain,  and a set of technology that tries to achieve exactly the same thing as "Web 1.0."

For a slightly less sceptical view, see this March 2006 piece by Bill Thompson. For an entirely contrary view see this piece by Dion Hinchcliffe.

Note. Link to Dion Hinchcliffe's article added in response to comment from Mark van Harmelen.

Peter Norvig and Michelle Selinger will be keynote speakers at next September's ALT conference in Nottingham, England

Image from Scientific American

The new holding page for next year's 3 day Association for Learning Technology (ALT) conference, is at http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2007/. The conference will take place between 4 and 6 September 2007.

We (I work for ALT half time) have arranged some interesting keynote speakers, including Peter Norvig, Director or Research at Google (via whose web site I learnt that insects do $57 billion worth of free labour per year in the US...) , and Michelle Selinger, Education Strategist from Cisco Systems (there will be at least one more); and the main conference theme - Beyond Control - has a lot going for it.

From the holding page you can join a low volume mailing list which ALT will use to notify you of major changes to thes web site, last minute updates, key dates and deadlines.

CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion

From Autumn 2006, Harvard Law School and the Harvard Extension School are offering a course called Cyber One: Law in the Court of Public Opinion both to the Internet-using public, and to Harvard Extension students:

"If we do say so ourselves, the course will be unlike any that has ever been taught. It is a course in persuasive, empathic argument in the Internet space. Throughout the course we will be studying many different media technologies to understand how their inherent characteristics and modes of distribution affect the arguments that are made using them. Students will be immersed in this study through project-based assignments in which they will be using these technologies to make their own arguments."

The subject matter of the course is "the creation and delivery of persuasive argument in the new integrated media space constituted by the Internet and other new technologies". People doing the course as Harvard Extension students will experience parts of the course through a virtual world called Second Life.

Course web site. Flash movie in which Professor Charles Nesson and an "avatar" version of his daughter Rebecca Nesson explain the course. Text-based official description of the course.

Discovered via David Weinberger.

There is no such thing as a "next generation" learner....

..... well, that was one conclusion which seemed to emerge from the "learners" theme of the 2006 Association for Learning Technology conference in Edinburgh, which ended today. Phil Candy, who is Director of Education, Training and Development within "Connecting for Health", the National Health Service's National IT Programme, provided this summing up from the theme [0.3 MB PPT]. This contains plenty of nuggets from the conference as a whole. Here are a few which stood out for me:

"Schools are the supply chain for universities, and it therefore behoves academics to know more about the technology environments their incoming students are used to."

"Generational differences are relatively unimportant in explaining comfort with technologies and, in any case, are commonly ‘washed out’ within 6 months to a year."

"Game-playing in early life does not seem to be particularly influential in the use of ICT for learning purposes."

"Academics may be seeking to use technologies – both for teaching and for assessment –  to reproduce models of learning and social relationships that are in fact at odds with the real demands of most jobs and society at large (e.g., individual effort, circumspection, scholarly precision)."

Phil's summing up concluded with a super brief precis of his  2004 report for the Australian Government - Linking Thinking: Self-directed Learning in the Digital Age. 3 other summings up from the conference (by Chris Yap, Gilly Salmon, and Terry Anderson) will be available from the ALT web site in due course.

Blackboard's work for IMS

Note: 4/1/2011. Several of the links below are broken. I am working on this.

Last week, in my (paid) half-time role as Executive Secretary of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), I took part in ALT's teleconference with Matt Small, Blackboard's General Legal Counsel. The notes of the teleconference [110 kB PDF] are on the ALT web site.

Personally I do not think that software or business methods should be patentable, and I am glad that the position in the EU is different from that in the US and several other parts of the world.  (Interesting German article on the Blackboard patent.)  Whilst I can see why businesses feel compelled to take out patents in an environment in which if you do not do it someone else will, and harm you as a result, I am much less happy about the active use of patents against competitors, especially in contexts in which the ideas upon which a patent is based appear to be so widely drawn, with so much input from individual researchers and developers, from companies, and from institutions to whom the patented software is primarily sold.

One aspect of the Blackboard patent which I think is particularly interesting concerns Blackboard's involvement in 1997-1999 in the early stages of the IMS project.

Designing Usable, Self-Paced e-Learning Courses: A Practical Guide

eLearn Magazine has just published this In Depth Tutorial by Michael Feldstein and Lisa Neal.

"This guide was primarily designed to help teams of instructional designers and content experts create effective, self-paced e-learning. It teaches best practices for improving usability that can be applied by any instructional designers or content experts and was created so that no prior knowledge of usability is required to use the techniques."

Some readers will like the article's emphasis on "hueristic usability testing"  (that is when one or more evaluators systematically inspect online materials and judge their compliance with recognized usability principles).

I particularly support Michael and Lisa's reference to the value of choosing some personas of potential learners before you start, with a view to ensuring that the course will make sense to, and be usable by, all of them; and this is something that is written into the publicly available, wiki-based, TUC Online Course Development and Management Manual.

Readers who find this whole area of interest may be able to make use of Supporting eLearners [150 kB PDF]. I wrote this last year with David Jennings to show the practical application of the British Standards Institution's BS 8426 A code of practice for e-support in e-learning systems.  The handout, upon which feedback is welcome, contains an overview of the standard, details of how it has been applied to some specific courses, and some discussion questions.

"Come dance with me" whispers the neuroscientist to the teacher

Based on an original idea by Cath Tate Cards

In June 2004 I wrote in Fortnightly Mailing about Frank Coffield's soon-to-be influential demolition job on learning styles inventories and their widespread, baseless use in UK FHE. "Come dance with me" [20 Feb 2011 - link broken - here is a report from the meeting - PDF] is Coffield's slightly inconclusive reflection from a 2005 meeting in Japan on the contribution of neuroscience to our understanding of teaching and learning. Here is an extract from its seductive introduction:

Education is apparently about to be swept off her feet by the omniscient new god of neuroscience, who will answer all her questions and solve all her problems.  When?  How long shall education have to wait?  Five, ten, twenty years? I returned from Japan refreshed and invigorated by the Network meeting, but with a number of growing concerns: for example, if brain science does not learn from the past failures of psychologists, who promised teachers the moon and gave them instead such shoddy goods as intelligence tests, programmed learning and learning styles, then it may suffer the same fate of being ignored.  If teachers are turned off by premature claims that prove to be overblown and inaccurate, brain science is likely from then on to be overlooked, no matter what advances it continues to make. The first pitch, the first chat-up line, the invitation to the dance is all important; finding out what the main stresses are on teachers and how neuroscience can help may be a better starting point.

The piece is organised in five sections:

• findings from brain science;
• gaps in our knowledge base;
• general concerns;
• hopes for the future;
• suggestions for policy.

One point I strongly agree with is Coffield's call for some public statement from brain science

"about what is common ground among neuroscientists, what is currently disputed territory, what are the controversial claims of eccentric individuals or ‘rogue’ teams, and what can be safely dismissed as ‘neuromyths’."

It would be particularly useful for such a statement to deal with neuroplasticity, since reference to this term is now so frequent in discourse about the impact on computer games playing on learners' capabilities and preferences and in the (false, I think) debate about digital natives and digital immigrants.

Learning Spaces - 43 chapter Educause eBook edited by Diana Oblinger

Big and wide-ranging recent e-book from Educause, with 13 chapters on principles and practices, and 30 institutional case-studies.

"Space, whether physical or virtual, can have a significant impact on learning. Learning Spaces focuses on how learner expectations influence such spaces, the principles and activities that facilitate learning, and the role of technology from the perspective of those who create learning environments: faculty, learning technologists, librarians, and administrators. Information technology has brought unique capabilities to learning spaces, whether stimulating greater interaction through the use of collaborative tools, videoconferencing with international experts, or opening virtual worlds for exploration. This e-book represents an ongoing exploration as we bring together space, technology, and pedagogy to ensure learner success."

Many chapters have additional resources, for example the video interviews with Carol Burch-Brown [12091KB WMV] and Kerry J. Redican [4657KB WMV] that supplement the chapter about Torgersen Hall, an advanced student-centred communication and information technology centre at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Update - 10/9/2006. Andy Black of Becta has included links to a number of other, mainly UK, "learning space design" resources.

The Freedom Toaster. For when people generally cannot get on line to make downloads.

Freedom Toasters are conveniently located, self-contained, computer-based, 'Bring 'n Burn' facilities. Like vending machines, preloaded to dispense confectionery, Freedom Toasters are preloaded to dispense free digital products, including software, photography, music and literature. The Freedom Toaster project began as a means of overcoming the difficulty in obtaining Linux and Open Source software due to the restrictive telecommunications environment in South Africa, where the easy downloading of large pieces of software is just not possible for everyone.