Fortnightly Mailing

Hal Abelson on Google's "App Inventor for Android"

14 July 2010 update - see also this post about the launch of App Inventor as a publicly available beta product.

Hal Varian is not the only academic (nor Hal...) seconded to Google. Hal Abelson is an eminent professor of computer science and engineering at MIT, and a very influential figure in the field. He was founding director of Creative Commons and of the Free Software Foundation. Over the last year he has been working on secondment to Google on a project about using the Android Open Source operating system as platform for learning computer science. He now reports on this in the Google Research Blog. This excerpt is about as succinct a summary as you will find of the "architectural shift" that is taking place:

"Mobile applications are triggering a fundamental shift in the way people experience computing and use mobile phones. Ten years ago, people "went to the computer" to perform tasks and access the Internet, and they used a cell phone only to make calls. Today, smartphones let us carry computing with us, have become central to servicing our communication and information needs, and have made the web part of all that we do. Ten years ago, people's use of computing was largely dissociated from real life. With the ubiquity of social networking, online and offline life are becoming fused."

Abelson goes on to announce App Inventor for Android, which "lets people assemble Android applications by arranging 'components' using a graphical drag-and-drop-interface", and which will be trialled with students in a group of around a dozen universities (all in the US bar the University of Queensland) in Autumn 2009. The rationale for the development of App Inventor for Android is that the architectural shift needs to be matched by a shift in the computer science curriculum "to make it more about people and their interactions with others and with the world around them", so that people "can engage the world of mobile services and applications as creators, not just consumers".

Abelson concludes:

"Through this work, we hope to do the following:

• make mobile application development accessible to anyone;
• enhance introductory learning experiences in computing through the vehicle of Android’s open platform;
• encourage a community of faculty and students to share material and ideas for teaching and exploring."

For me, this development raises several interesting issues:

1. Where are UK (on Indian, for that matter) Universities in developments of this kind? Are they not involved because there have been no opportunities, or because they've responded to calls and failed?

2. Openness (of approach, software etc) as a key vehicle to support innovation. It is hard to see an equivalent initiative being taken using the software components that the iPhone relies on.

3. Users as creators of applications. Note the broadening of emphasis from users as creators of content to users as creators of tools.

Blackboard v Desire2Learn: lawyerly views on the Court of Appeal decision

Occasionally updated with links to comments from patent lawyers from 30 July onwards

"In summary, we affirm the district court’s decision that claims 1-35 are invalid as indefinite. Because we hold that under the proper construction of claim 36, claims 36-38 are anticipated as a matter of law, we reverse the district court’s failure to grant JMOL (Judgment as a Matter of Law) on that issue. We do not reach Desire2Learn’s assertion that claims 36-38 are obvious. We also do not address the parties’ contentions with respect to infringement of those claims. Based on our rulings in appeals No. 2008-1368 and 2008-1396, Blackboard’s appeal in No. 2008-1548, which pertains to the award of costs in the district court, is dismissed as moot. Each party shall bear its own costs for these appeals. AFFIRMED IN PART, REVERSED IN PART, and DISMISSED IN PART."

Desire2Learn reports on today's Court of Appeal decision, from which the above excerpt is the conclusion, arguing that the judgement represents an across-the-board ruling in favour of D2L. Though I do not doubt that the decision represents at least a bit of a setback for Blackboard, I have a "wait and see" feeling about what the full implications of the decision are; and it is patent lawyer commentary that I am now most interested in reading. [30/7/2009. Below are some links to such commentary.]

• 28/7/2009 - Bruce T Weider, of DowLohnes PLLC;
• 29/7/2009 - by Jim Singer, a partner in the Intellectual Property Practice Group of Pepper Hamilton LLP;
• 30/7/2009 - detailed explanation as to why the Court of Appeal found against Blackboard in "Patents and the Financial Services Industry", edited by Christopher Hilberg, Patent Attorney with Oppenheimer Wolff and Donnelly;
• 31/7/2009 - Michael C. Smith of Siebman, Reynolds, Burg, Phillips and Smith, LLP - a brief and intelligible summary.

Après Wave, le déluge. Google Wave assessed in Dick Moore's new "Tools and Taxonomy".

Dick Moore (whom I know of old, through Ufi, and through ALT) has started Tools and Taxonomy. His first piece is an informative one about Google Wave which summarises why Google Wave is likely to be a "next big thing". Note also Dick's use of CommentPress, a "theme" for the  Wordpress blog software that allows for commenting on individual chunks of text. I've had my eye on CommentPress (which anticipates one of the features that Google Wave will support) for some time, and ALT has it in mind to use it when putting drafts of responses to public consultation out for comment by our members or the wider learning technology community. So it is interesting to see it in use in this way.

Online education experiment in Alabama's schools helps raise attainment

Alabama Connecting Classrooms Educators and Students Statewide - ACCESS - is a large-scale (USD10m) online education experiment begun in 2005, and using Moodle, to overcome the relative scarcity of specialised teachers in Alabama's numerous small rural schools. The 18 July 2009 Economist reports on the success of ACCESS, which will now be extended to all of the state's schools. Excerpt:

"There were sceptics. The pilot programme cost $10m, not pocket change in a poor state. Teachers worried about how they would connect to their virtual students. But ACCESS quickly became a hit. In 2006 students took more than 4,000 courses at 24 schools. In 2008, with ACCESS now in more schools, the number exceeded 22,000. [...] Mark Dixon, the governor’s adviser for education, says that several years ago fewer than half of Alabama’s public high schools offered any college-level Advanced Placement (AP) courses. As of this summer, they all will; ACCESS is being extended to all the state’s schools. Joe Morton, the state superintendent of schools, points to the number of black students taking AP courses. In 2003, according to the College Board, just 4.5% of Alabama’s successful AP students (those who passed the subject exam) were black. In 2008 the number was up to 7.1%. There is still a staggering gap—almost a third of the state’s students are black—but the improvement in Alabama was the largest in the country over that period."

Using Second Life to help mentally impaired people give informed medical consent

Image from Imperial College

Interesting piece in the Economist about research by Suzanne Conboy-Hill of the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, in collaboration with Imperial College, and using the latter's virtual postgraduate medical school, built in SciLands, a large scale Second Life user community devoted exclusively to science and technology.

The purpose of the research is to establish determine whether or not simulations of this kind can provide an improved way of obtaining informed (and real, rather than led-by-a-nurse) consent.

See also Millions being wasted in a deserted Second Life, October 2007

Oxford Internet Institute's "The Internet in Britain 2009" sheds important light on the attitudes of non-users

Today the OII published The Internet in Britain 2009 [2 MB PDF], its fourth biennial survey into Internet access, use and attitudes in Britain. The survey covers digital and social inclusion and exclusion; regulation and governance of the Internet; privacy, trust and risk concerns; and uses of the Internet, including networking, content creation, entertainment and learning.

Digital Britain "closing down the open internet"

Updated 20 June 2009

The Open Rights Group does not dispute that artists need paying and that copyright needs to function well. However it criticises this week's Digital Britain report for the way it proposes to "tackle piracy", arguing that the proposed legislation to reduce unlawful peer-to-peer file sharing - summarised here - will blur Ofcom's role from "protecting competition and the public interest" to one of "altering market access and conditions in favour of incumbent players".

Meanwhile:

•  (via David Weinberger) File-Sharing and Copyright by Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard University, and Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas, published on 15 May 2009, argues that weak copyright protection benefits society overall - see Michael Geist's summary;
• Donald Clark attacks Digital Britain for the way that old-world telco and media interests have dominated the line taken "BBC is mentioned 169 times, Google gets 6, FaceBook 5, Twitter 3, YouTube 2,  iTunes 1, Games 0, Xbox 0, Playstation 0, Second Life 0, Wikipedia 0. It’s as if the internet doesn't really exist and that the digital future is an issue for broadcasters.";
• here is the remit [67 kB PDF] given to the Digital Inclusion Task Force, whose task is, apparently, breathtakingly, "to be our conscience, on behalf of those citizens who are disadvantaged due to digital exclusion".

1992 - when I got switched on to online distance learning, and why

Click picture to enlarge

In 1992, before the Web, before the likes of you and I had email, in the days when a 2400 baud modem costing £300 in today's money felt like a terrific deal, when people not in big companies or universities could only connect to each other by dialing at great expense into a BT-run "point of presence", I was lucky to run a TUC project that investigated the use of computer conferencing in distance learning.

The project involved making and running an on-line distance course (about the EU, oh joy!) for union representatives in Denmark, Sweden and the UK, and then assessing the impact. The design of the course was much influenced by my reading of work by Robin Mason, who died on Monday, and who 12 years later I got to know through her involvement as a trustee of ALT and as Chair of our Research Committee.

Today, prompted by discussion about Robin's contribution, I dug out a box file in my attic with some stuff from the project. I was particularly struck by the piece above by a learner, that I used in an overhead projector transparency for a talk I gave at the time.

For a pretty astonishing mixture of views about Robin, here is the Memorial Page on the OU's web site.

Progressive austerity - a term to watch

You know things have come to a pretty pass when a term like "progressive austerity" come into use, especially when an egalitarian (?) think tank originates it. See this 21 May 2009 Financial Times piece by Richard Reeves, head of Demos. Excerpt:

Second, progressive austerity means giving the public sector more than just a hard squeeze. The principal lesson from Canada – where spending was cut by 10 per cent in the mid-1990s – is that whole budgets, agencies and departments should be axed. The default assumption in spending rounds is that money will continue to flow towards an activity. Expenditure must address a clear need, through demonstrably effective policies.

Much of the quangocracy that has sprouted under Labour will fail one or both of these tests. Regional development agencies, sector skills councils and the communities and local government department should all go. Any agency with the word “improvement” in its title could probably disappear without discernible negative effects. Middle-class welfare should end. Child benefit should be abolished. Subsidised higher education ought to be targeted at low-income students.

Device diversity. More blurring of the boundary between phone and PC.

Succinct article in the Economist which properly credits One Laptop Per Child with triggering the development of the netbook and points out that several PC-makers are now working on devices relying on a chip designed by ARM (i.e. neither Intel nor AMD) and running Android, a Linux-based "software stack" (operating system, middleware and key applications) for phones developed by/with the support of Google.