Fortnightly Mailing

Google Wave - plenty to think about in this 90 minute overview

Updated 4 June 2009

I'm not that easily impressed by new ways of using the Web - because I think there is no shortage of useful tools: instead there is a shortage of useful tools put to good use.

If you've got 90 minutes to spare, and can tolerate the self-congratulatory tone, which measured about 5 on the Wolfram scale, the presentation below explains Google Wave, a very sophisticated "rendered-in-your-browser" but "running-in-the-cloud" collaboration environment, which Google says it will launch later in 2009, and which makes Google Docs (and a lot of other collaboration products, VLEs, e-portfolios, social networking environments) look extremely primitive. 

Blackboard's acquisition of ANGEL: thoughtful post by Hannah Whaley

Hannah Waley comments cogently on Blackboard's acquisition of ANGEL, from the perspectives of a Blackboard-using learning technologist in a Scottish university. Hannah concludes:

"Maybe they have learnt nothing at all from the WebCT merger, but I don’t believe that could be the case. However, learning is not enough alone, and they must act on what they have learnt. I hope they do, as it could benefit many institutions. I’m possibly too optimistic, but I feel that a focus on the negatives helps no-one. There will be opportunities to come from bbplusangel - perhaps people should focus on providing a strong community voice to guide them."

The rest of Hannah's newish blog is well worth a look.

More rationalisation amongst e-learning businesses - Blackboard buys ANGEL Learning

I was deciding not to write anything about Blackboard's announcement that it had acquired the Indiana-based VLE and ePortfolio company Angel Learning when Stephen Downes's RSS feed popped up, with his short post describing the acquisition as "Another stunner in the e-learning marketplace". I'm not so sure. Obviously, takeovers like this come out of the blue for us on the outside. But whether or not welcome, they are normal; and it looks like Blackboard is simply carrying on with its existing strategy of buying competitor companies (just as Saba and SumTotal  were doing 4 or 5 years ago in the in the corporate LMS market). Thus Blackboard's acquisition of ANGEL is in the same vein as its 2005 acquisition of WebCT, albeit on a smaller scale. At the same time the purchase looks like it gives  Blackboard reach into a sector of the US market (community colleges, smaller universities, and secondary schools) that is reported to have been tending to switch from WebCT to ANGEL, with one of ANGEL's current selling points being ease of switching [30 kB PDF]. Dave Nagel summarises some US reaction in Campus Technology.

Previous rationalisation-related posts:

• 12/12/2008 Pearson buys Fronter
• 18/5/2007 Does Pearson's purchase of eCollege give it the muscle to compete with Blackboard?

Is it sufficient to entitle citizens to a 2 megabits per second Internet connection?

Donald Clark provides a scathing perspective on yesterday's "Digital Britain" summit. The FT's coverage of the event was more positive, and Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson's strong hints that the UK's interpretation of the Universal Service Obligation on telephone companies (to the extent that the USO relates to Internet access) will be changed from its current derisory 28.8 kbit/s to 2 megabits/s are not to be sniffed at, especially considering that in March 2006 Ofcom was arguing that "no significant changes are needed at this time" and in particular that "the benchmark minimum speed will remain at 28.8 kbit/s". A rapid implementation of a 2 mbit/s obligation would have big and beneficial effects on the parts of rural Britain where dial-up Internet access remains the only cost-effective option. But keep in mind that other developed countries are taking a much more ambitious approach. For example, earlier this month the Australian Government announced a $AU43 billion plan to provide 90% of households and business with affordable access to 100 mbit/s connections, with the remaining 10% having access to a 12 mbit/s connection.

Blackboard v. Desire2Learn 10 April round-up, with 18, 21, 24 April, and 7 May updates

[Updated 18, 21, 24 April 2009, and 7 May] - I suggest you read this in conjunction with the excellent 21 April piece from Michael Feldstein, and this piece by Jeff Bohrer.]

18/4/2009 update. Yesterday, the US Patent Office, which has been re-examining US Patent 6,988,138 since early last year in response to inter partes and ex parte applications from Desire2Learn and the Software Freedom Law Centre, issued a non-final  "Action Closing Prosecution" rejecting the whole of that patent.

Blackboard now has one month in which to respond, and assuming (which I don't) that any such representations have no effect on the results of the Patent Office's re-examination of the patent, it would then be open to Blackboard to appeal against the final results of the re-examination through the US courts. 

Will Blackboard be exercised by this development? I'm happy to stand corrected on issues that are not in my area of expertise, but my instinct tells me that Blackboard may not be too fussed about the non-final action by the US Patent Office. This is because the company's new US Patent 7,493,396 [PDF] (see relevant section of 10 April round-up below):

• incorporates Patent 6,988,138 in its entirety;
• includes in its "Other References" section a comprehensive list of most if not all of the "prior art" cited in Desire2Learn and the Software Freedom Law Centre's re-examination requests on 6,988,138, and by Desire2Learn in its appeal against Blackboard Inc.'s successful infringement case, and in Desire2Learn's original defence (even the Sheffield-based EU Framework 4 Renaissance Project, in which I and several readers of Fortnightly Mailing were involved in 1996ish, gets referenced).

Provided the US Patent Office got its teeth into the the listed prior art (which I'm told Blackboard would have been required to cite in its application) and came to a proper judgement that it did not affect the validity of the claims in the patent, then the new patent will be tougher to challenge than if the Patent Office has only considered the prior art superficially, if at all.

Are there too many UK communities and professional bodies supporting workplace e-learning?

Prompted by a piece by Donald Clark which touches (I think rightly) on the problem of "too many membership organisations in the e-learning space", Clive Shepherd lists some of the reasons why rationalisation might be hard, without dissing the idea, and pulls together a useful two page list of the organisations concerned [60 kB PDF]. Clive invites comments on the list, and I am assuming it will evolve a bit, so its URL might alter. In the continuation post below I've included the comment I wrote (from the point of view of my employer the Association for Learning Technology) in response to Donald.

WolframAlpha: changing the face of information retrieval? Report from webinar with Stephen Wolfram

Updates

5/5/2009. Perceptive reflection by David Weinberger on the importance (or lack of it) of WolframAlpha.

28/4/2009. Here is some informative and sceptical discussion about WolframAlpha on Slashdot.

29/4/2009. NB. On Tuesday 28 April, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will hosted a face-to-face and remotely accessible preview of the WolframAlpha system. Participants included WolframAlpha founder Stephen Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law. Here is David Weinberger's contemporaneous report from the session, and here is a link to a 55 minute interview by Weinberger with Wolfram.

16/4/2009 - "Making 'expert level' knowledge accessible to everyone" - Stephen Wolfram

I signed up for a preview of WolframAlpha, and today I took part in a webinar presented by Stephen Wolfram, in which he put the very impressive WolframAlpha through its paces by feeding its search field with a wide range of brief (English) queries e.g. "next solar eclipse in Chicago" - including from participants - generating, quickly, elegantly presented well-structured answer-screens, with facts, data, graphs, time-lines, and links to sources of data (but not images). Think of it as a "CIA world fact book" that can generate its fact-sheets flexibly and on the fly, about a huge

Top 5 internet priorities for any next Government

Via Owen Bader, Tom Steinberg from the excellent organisation - see * below - mySociety (link to 50 minute video, and to interesting Gordon Brown phone call on the bus story)  provides a list of the top 5 major things any government of any developed nation should be doing in relation to the Internet, as Tom sees it at the start of 2009.  Three in particular caught my eye:

"2. Free your data, especially maps and other geographic information, plus the non-personal data that drives the police, health and social services, for starters. Introduce a ‘presumption of innovation’ – if someone has asked for something costly to free up, give them what they want: it’s probably a sign that they understand the value of your data when you don’t.

3. Give external parties the right to interface electronically with any government or mainly public system unless it can be shown to create substantial, irrevocable harm. Champion the right fiercely and punish unjustified refusals with fines. Your starting list of projects should include patient-owned health records, council fault reporting services and train ticket sales databases. All are currently unacceptably closed to innovation from the outside, and obscurity allows dubious practices of all kinds to thrive.

5. When people use your electronic systems to do anything, renew a fishing license, register a pregnancy, apply for planning permission, given them the option to collaborate with other people going through or affected by the same process. They will feel less alone, and will help your services to reform from the bottom up."

* mySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to use the internet most efficiently to improve lives. Examples of mySociety systems include FixMyStreet and TheyWorkForYou. See also this link to the work of software developer Chris Lightfoot, who died two years ago, and who contributed to many of mySociety's projects.

Blurring the lines between net-books and e-book readers

The main brain behind the wonderful screen on the OLPC laptop was Mary Lou Jepsen. The screen had a low power consumption, high screen resolution, and worked well in direct sunlight. Jepsen's start-up company Pixel Qi is tackling the design and production (by manufacturers not by Pixel Qi) of cheap, but above all, highly functional screens. Here Jepsen provides a brief update:

"We are making screens that are more readable than regular laptop screens, and our studies show they are as comfortable to read as electrophoretics in existing ebook readers. But these screens also update quickly, show video, are sunlight readable and (with the backlight on) show full color. In addition, our display screens integrate with touchscreens of many different varieties (an analyst I know is aware of over 200 different efforts by various companies in new and improved touchscreens)."

10/1/2008 - The 75$ laptop.

Giving a boost to Carol Twigg's work on how to ensure technology interventions are (cost) effective

Donald Clark has been reading and summarising - to good effect -  Carol Twigg's work for the National Centre for Academic Transformation. (See Favourite e-learning research; Carol Twigg's research on cost-effectiveness; Effective learning through e-learning; reducing drop-out rates.)

On 7/9/2005 Carol did a keynote at the 2005 ALT Conference in Manchester. At the last minute, Carol was unable to attend the conference in person, so she delivered the speech remotely. A technical issue between the US and the UK prevented her from using the microphone in the studio she was in, so she did the whole keynote with a mobile phone. Despite this she held the attention of 500 people for an hour. Stunning. Carol's slides from her presentation, and my summary of Carol's answers to questions after her keynote are here on the ALT web site.

As an aside, I think that there is more than a streak of "not invented here" in relation to UK attitudes to Carol's work; ALT^* and others have been regularly referencing  the work in responses to policy consultations; but the underlying "points of fact" that the National Centre for Academic Transformation has established have tended either to be ignored, or marginalised with explanations as to why "it ain't like that in the UK".

^*Disclosure. I work part time for ALT.