Fortnightly Mailing

Lucid summary of Blackboard's defence of its patent

Updated 31/5/2008

Writing in THE Journal, Dave Nagel provides a lucid summary of Blackboard's response to the US Patent Office's rejection of US Patent 6988138. For me the striking feature of Blackboard's response was its use of excerpts - including sections of witness testimony - from the recent patent infringement court case. Desire2Learn has 30 days to counter. From what I can make of it, the Software Freedom Law Centre, whose ex parte invalidity claim was merged with Desrie2Learn's inter partes claim, is precluded from involvement. 31/5/2008. Things are now moving quite fast in the dispute between Blackboard and Desire2Learn, with each company jockeying for position, in Blackboard's case from a position of apparent strength. Michael Feldstein has extensive coverage.

"Issues arising from the Blackboard Case". A one hour Educause web-seminar at 18.00 UK time on 29 May

Depending on your plans (if in the UK) for Thursday evening, this free Educause web seminar looks worth joining. Summary:

"The dispute between Blackboard and Desire2Learn over patenting course management software has highlighted a variety of questions about patents and patent enforcement in higher education. What role should patents play in academia’s highly collaborative, not-for-profit, revenue-strapped environment? As both producers and consumers of patented inventions, higher education has interests both diverse and deep. In this session, a respected patent litigator and leading CIO will explore key areas of patent law and discuss higher education's options and opportunities."

The seminar title gives you the impression that the event may focus overly on "Blackboard v. Desire2Learn", even if that is not the intention of the presenters. What I am hoping for is a strong focus on more general issues, such as:

• patents being secured and then commercially exploited "on the back of" either publicly funded work, or dispersed collaborative effort;
• the adverse impact of software patents on innovation, and the way they can strengthen monopoly;
• the range of policy stances that are open to individual organisations (universities and businesses).

If you cannot join the seminar you should be able to review the recording of the event subsequently.

Storm warning for cloud computing - good piece by Bill Thompson

The BBC's Bill Thompson is good at puncturing hype, usually in a measured, thorough and well written way. His Storm warning for cloud computing is no exception. Micro-abstract:

"Cloud computing brings with it storm warnings

The physical location of our online services still matter a great deal."

Sugar "reinvents how computers can be used for education"

Source: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/

There is something slightly perverse about the way that Sugar, the Open Source user interface and "cluster" of educational software developed for the OLPC laptop, has really only become visible to the outside world in the process of key people in OLPC parting company with the OLPC project itself.  The recently established SugarLabs wiki has a clear explanation of the rationale behind Sugar. Excerpt:

"Sugar reinvents how computers can be used for education. It promotes sharing and collaborative learning and gives children the opportunity to use their laptops on their own terms. Children — and their teachers — have the freedom to reshape, reinvent, and reapply their software, and content. Sugar is based on GNU/Linux, a free and open-source operating system."

"Sugar Labs" is a (soon to be established) non-profit foundation which "will serve as a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and software developers who want to extend the platform and create Sugar-compatible applications". Sugar Labs will also "focus on providing a software ecosystem that enhances learning on the XO laptop as well as other laptops distributed by other companies, such as the ASUS Eee PC". Full 15 May 2008 announcement.

Until April this year Walter Bender lead OLPC's software and content activities, and his thorough and inclusive weekly emailed reports kept people like me up to date with the development of the OLPC XO laptop. Walter is now in the process of forming Sugar Labs, with continuing funding from OLPC, and will be reporting weekly about Sugar: the simplest way to keep tabs on this is to subscribe to the Sugar Community Weekly News Digest.

XO-2: the next One Laptop Per Child laptop

Nicholas Negroponte describes the OLPX XO2. Source: Joanna Stern on http://blog.laptopmag.com/

Updated 27 May 2008

Useful coverage by Joanna Stern from a presentation given on 20 May 2008 by Nicholas Negroponte at MIT about the next version of OLPC, due for release in 2 years, with a brief video and several stills. (The video is actually a video of a still photograph, with Negroponte talking over it; and you can now access copies of the presentations in various formats, including Negroponte's, from the OLPC web site) Stern's report also states that a second "Give One Get One" programme for the current OLPC XO-1 will be launched later this year. (This piece by Steve Lohr in the 16/5/2008 New York Times provides commentary on the current collaboration between OLPC and Microsoft.)

Ivan Krstić's take on developments within OLPC

This 13 May 2008 long essay by Ivan Krstić  should be mandatory reading for people who care about OLPC. It is a reflection, bitter in places, by an ex-OLPC insider, on the massive changes in direction the OLPC project is now taking (with a re-orientation towards Windows), and on the roles of Open Source and proprietary software and the relationship between the two.  It ends:

"I’m trying to convince Walter [Bender] not to start a Sugar Foundation, but an Open Learning Foundation. For those who still care about learning ...... the charge should be to start that organization, since OLPC doesn’t want to be it. Having a company that is device-agnostic and focuses entirely on the learning ecosystem, from deployment to content to Sugar, is not only what I think is sorely needed to really take the one-to-one computer efforts to the next level, but also an approach that has a good chance of making the organization doing the work self-sustaining at some point."

"So here’s to open learning, to free software, to strength of personal conviction, and to having enough damn humility to remember that the goal is bringing learning to a billion children across the globe. The billion waiting for us to put our idiotic trifles aside, end our endless yapping, and get to it already."

The OU's Niall Sclater on Blackboard's "Next Generation" learning platform

Niall Sclater leads the Open University's VLE Programme.

I had not come across his interesting blog before, and it is now on my reading list.

Niall is responsible for the OU's widely reported and watched implementation of Moodle, for which reason his enthusiastic description of Blackboard's "Next Generation" learning platform - based on a presentation about the product given by Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen in Manchester on 13 May, rather than on direct experience of it - is worth reading, along with the comments that have been made on the post.

Blackboard v. Desire2Learn: The First Final Judgment

Long, fascinating (for me, anyway) post by Jim Farmer on Michael Feldstein's e-Literate, summarising the current state of "play" between Blackboard and Desire2Learn. You get the impression that several parties are on the hook in different ways. Desire2Learn, most obviously; a substantial number of Desire2Learn's clients in the US, who, to be free of risk will need to start using the revised (non infringing) version 8.3 of Desire2Learn's software, which may or may not be as functional as the (infringing) earlier version (this assumes that the revised version will not itself be judged to infringe); and Blackboard, which, without a settlement with Desire2Learn, will struggle to avoid being seen as the author of the misfortune of those Desire2Learn clients (and their students), as well as having used a software patent (viewed by many as dubious) to put the squeeze on its main non Open Source competitor.

JISC's £5m call: "Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design"

UK HE Institutions, and FE Institutions with more than 400 full time equivalents of higher education students, are eligible to apply for medium term funding for large-scale course redesign projects. Expect Carol Twigg's National Center for Academic Transformation to get a major boost in traffic, and for good reason. Excerpt:

"JISC invites proposals for projects to review course design and validation processes, and the ways these are supported and informed by technology, in order to transform learning opportunities to address an identified issue or challenge of strategic importance to the institution involved.

Funding of up to £400,000 per project is available with projects expected to last for just under four years. JISC has committed £5 million to this work and expects to funds up to 12 projects. Because of the need for institutions to identity issues or challenges relevant to their own context only one project per institution will be funded. Institutions are encouraged to ensure that the most appropriate bid from their institution is submitted.

JISC is holding a community briefing event where potential bidders will be given information about the background to the call, its objectives and the bidding process. Attendees will also have an opportunity to ask questions about the call. This meeting will take place on 21 May in Birmingham and registration will be open on Friday 2 May 2008.

The deadline for receipt of proposals is no later than 12.00 noon on Thursday 19 June 2008.  Projects should start in 1 September 2008."

Marc Andreessen's "If Microsoft goes fully hostile on Yahoo"

Long and interesting 28 April 2008 piece by Marc Andreessen (who founded Netscape, and is a successful serial entrepreneur in the US), analysing, with the help of expert analysis commissioned (?) by Marc from two corporate attorneys, about how a fully hostile takeover by Microsoft of Yahoo might play out.