Fortnightly Mailing

Blackboard Inc. v iParadigms LLC settle their disagreement

Originally written 9 August 2007, amended 10 August 2007, and updated 23 August 2007

Update

On 23 August iParadigms LLC and Blackboard Inc. announced that the have settled their disagreement regarding iParadigms' plagiarism detection patent.  Under the settlement, iParadigms has reaffirmed its promise not to assert the patent against Blackboard or the use of Blackboard's SafeAssign anti-plagiarism application. If the settlement involved financial terms of any kind, these have, understandably, not been made public.

Original

For (e-learning) patent buffs, the 3/8/2007 8 page Complaint by Blackboard Inc. against iParadigms [300 kB PDF], owners of the TurnItIn system used by the UK's JISC Plagiarism Advisory Service, and helpfully placed on the Internet by im+m, is worth reading in full, if only for the insights it gives into "patent business practice" in the US. Here also for reference is iParadigms' US Patent 7,210,301.

iParadigms, the Claim asserts, has approached Blackboard telling it that Blackboard is infringing  patent 7,210,301. Blackboard's complaint seems to be a defensive response to this, and it uses the interesting line of argument in paragraphs 20 - 24 of the Complaint, that by previously joining the Blackboard Developer Network and signing up to its terms under some bespoke terms (which I've been given to understand included a specific promise not to sue Blackboard with any intellectual property related to the iParadigms TurnItIn product*), iParadigms has contractualised an entitlement for Blackboard to use Patent 7,210,301.

The "Prayer for Relief" on pages 9 and 10 of the Claim lists a number of apparently contradictory requests for declarations by the court - which you would imagine would be very time-consuming and costly for iParadigms to oppose, and, in the first case, risky for it if upheld, for example that:

• Patent 7,210,301 is invalid;
• Blackboard does not infringe any valid or enforceable claim of Patent 7,210,301;
• Blackboard has been expressly licences (sic) to practice Patent 7,210,301.

There will be (already is!) is other coverage of this issue on The Nose, and e-Literate, and elsewhere.

* Change made 10/8/2007

Hans Rosling, Itiel Dror, and David Cavallo will be keynote speakers at the 2008 ALT Conference: "Rethinking the Digital Divide"

I work part time for the Association for Learning Technology (ALT). ALT's 2008 conference will be in Leeds, between 9 and 11 September. The title of the conference will be "Rethinking the Digital Divide". We have just published preliminary details of the conference [0.8 MB PDF], and I am certain that plenty of readers of Fortnightly Mailing will be excited by the list of keynote speakers so far announced:

• David Cavallo, Chief Learning Architect for One Laptop per Child, and Head of the Future of Learning Research Group at MIT Media Lab;
• Itiel Dror, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Southampton;
• Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institute, Sweden, and Director of the Gapminder Foundation.

ALT hopes to  start taking bookings for the 2008 later this year. The best way to keep in touch with this is by joining the low volume email list from the ALT-C 2008 home page.

Meanwhile ALT has just issued a follow up call for expressions of interest in membership of the 2008 Programme Committee [smallish PDF] for which the closing date is 14/9/2007.

Finally, to keep in touch with the 2007 ALT conference, you may wish to subscribe temporarily to this RSS feed, which aggregates the feeds from a number of delegates who intend to update their own blogs whilst at the conference.

Previous relevant Fortnightly Mailing posts:

• Useful terse articles by Itiel Dror about the science of learning;
• The seemingly impossible is possible - TED and other talks by Hans Rosling.

3/8/2007 - Blackboard Inc. v Desire2Learn - court issues order construing claim terms

Michael Feldstein is quick to note Desire2Learn's 4/8/2007 announcement of the 3/8/2007 outcome of  the "Markman Hearing" in the Blackboard v. Desire2Learn patent infringement case. (The purpose of the Markman Hearing is for the trial judge to determine the meaning of the claims at issue, and to instruct the jury accordingly, with the judge's ruling subsequently open to being appealed by either party.)

According to Desire2Learn the effect of the judge's determination, if not successfully appealed, is to render invalid independent claim 1 and dependent claims 2 to 35 in Blackboard's Patent 6,988,138. (There is one  other independent claim in the patent - claim 36, upon which the remaining 9 claims 37 to 44 depend.)

For an overview of the process you may find it helpful to review pages 2 to 5 of the 23/8/2006 Notes of a teleconference between Blackboard Inc. and the Association for Learning Technology [135 kB PDF], in which I took part, from which I have excerpted two paragraphs in the continuation post below.

Smartphones "are the PCs of the developing world"

(Updated 7/82007)

Freely available 2 page report by Jessica Marshall in the 4/8/2007 New Scientist highlighting the utility of smartphones in the developing world. 2 excerpts:

"Smartphones may seem like a frivolous indulgence for rich westerners, but it turns out that their added features can be harnessed to help people in poorer countries do business, educate their children and even hold those in power to account."

"Farmers can also use photo and video-recording facilities on cellphones to share information about farming practices. In India, the non-profit organisation Almost All Questions Answered (aAqua) already operates a network where farmers can send questions to agricultural experts via text message or the internet, and check crop price information. But it is only accessible to those who can read, says Srinivasan Keshav of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. 'If you're educated, you can send text. If you're not, you need video or audio.'"

See also (via David Weinberger), this lucid 5/8/2007 article by Ethan Zuckerman in the Boston Globe "Building big: start small - a radical new way for poor countries to get the phones, power, and roads they need"about the take-off of mobile telephony in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and its economic impact.

Back-links:

• 28/7/2007 - Point-to-point wi-fi brings internet access to all;
• 27/1/2007 - Mobile phones in Africa;
• 14/12/2006 - Wireless Ghana;
• 17/10/2006 - What would you install on One Laptop Per Child;
• 22/9/2006 - 80% of the population is covered by a mobile network.

What's inside the One Laptop Per Child laptop?

Source: BBC, but go to the BBC article below if you want to click on the links!

The OLPC laptop is reportedly now in full production. Here is a short explanation by Chris Blizzard, OLPC chief software engineer, of key features of the laptop, with a particular focus on its power-saving design. You may also be interested in this BBC fact-file about the laptop, and (thanks to Dick Moore, who sent it as I was writing) this enthusiastic 27/7/2007 article from the Economist - with its sharp conclusion excerpted below the video. If you want to contribute to OLPC, you may also feel like volunteering (or contributing financially).

"Clearly, trying to produce such an extraordinary product as a laptop that is kid-proof and capable of working in jungles, deserts or the bush, miles from the nearest grid connection, and all for the cheapest possible price, has concentrated minds remarkably. The XO offers a lesson for laptop-makers everywhere. In fact, quite a few have gone from ridiculing the OLPC project to trying to emulate or join it. Most notable has been Intel. After first dismissing Mr Negroponte’s laptop as a toy, the chipmaking giant suddenly rushed out a spoiler design of its own for developing countries, fearing it was about to be left out of an emerging market. Called Classmate, Intel’s $225 laptop has failed to impress. Last week Intel admitted defeat tacitly by asking to join the OLPC association. The question now is when can the rest of us get laptops as cheap and clever as the OLPC’s radical design? Judging from the stir the XO has created, the answer is more likely to be months rather than years."

New from Futurelab: 1. Beyond the digital divide; 2. Learning with handheld technologies.

Futurelab is a UK-based and apparently well-resourced educational charity that develops "innovative resources and practices that support new approaches to learning for the 21st century". It spun out of the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts a year or two ago.

Two recent publications will be of interest to Fortnightly Mailing readers.

Beyond the digital divide, by Neil Selwyn (whose "Adults Learning @ Home" project I covered in May 2003) and Keri Facer, provides a timely and well referenced review of "why the digital divide remains a complex and entrenched social problem", and calls for "policy responses that go far beyond simply increasing levels of hardware provision and support". Within the report itself, or as a separate document [67 kB PDF], is "Beyond the digital divide, a charter for change", which proposes four entitlements for citizens, and six challenges about the digital divide "which should inform future discussions and action". You can get a flavour of the line taken in the report itself from this interview (?) with Selwyn and Facer from the 18/6/2007 eGovernment Monitor. You can order a free hard copy of the report, or download it as a PDF from the Futurelab web site.

Handhelds - learning with handheld technologies, by Fern Faux, Angela McFarlane, Nel Roche, and Keri Facer, results from school-based research by Bristol University. As well as a directory of nearly 40 handheld projects and resources, the report includes a page of coherent and practical summary recommendations, anddetailed "case reports" from four handheld learning projects:

• The Dudley Handhelds Initiative (~300 students using wifi- and network-connected Palm PDAs);
• Learning2Go Phase 2 - Wolverhampton Local Authority (1000+ students using wifi-connected Fujitsu Siemens Pocket PCs);
• Warren Comprehensive School, London (50+ students, using wifi-connected Dell Axims and Palm Tungsten Cs);
• Stiperstones School, Shropshire (~50 students using Dell Axims with no connectivity).

You can order a free hard copy of the report, or download it as a PDF from the Futurelab web site.

Reading the report I was struck by the fragmentation in the implementation of these kinds of projects: different technology platforms and different content partners; uneven funding; dependence on champions in a Local Authority of school; focus on individual schools rather than on doing things "on an industrial scale". Reports of this kind contain plenty of useful insights; but you cannot help thinking that the One Laptop Per Child project (with its emphasis on technology that has been designed for children, for mass-manufacture, and for genuine ubiquity) illustrates a more realistic and sustainable approach to putting ICT into the hands of children. To the extent that the price of OLPC will fall as the number of units made rises, why shouldn't the developed world throw its lot in with OLPC, if OLPC will let it? And, speculating wildly (naïvely?), if there remains a digital divide in the developed world, you could imagine that OLPC-like devices could play an important part in bridging that as well.

2008 ALT Conference - title announced, and call for Programme Committee members

ALT, for which I work part time, has announced the title Rethinking the digital divide for its 2008 conference, to be held in Leeds, between 8 and 10 September 2008, and issued a call for people to volunteer for membership of the conference programme committee. This is reproduced in full in the continuation post below.

John Denham announces new ministerial team at DIUS

4/7/2007 press release from the newly formed Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) showing which ministers are responsible for what in the new department. Meanwhile the DIUS web site is changing daily as the department gets underway.

Computers 'can raise attainment' - results published from Becta's ICT TestBed research

Source: ICT TestBed Final Report. URL below

According to this 24/6/2007 BBC report, issued before Becta has published the results, the final phase of Becta's 4 year £37m ICT Test Bed project (in which 23 primary schools, five secondaries, and three further education colleges have had substantial extra investment in ICT) shows that learning using ICT (in the ways provided by the schools and colleges) produces improvements in learner attainment. I'll reserve judgement on the report, which appeared today [790 kB PDF] on the TestBed project web site, and from which the chart above is taken, until I've read it. But my initial reactions were:

1. you'd expect improvement given the amount of additional funds the test-bed schools and colleges received - the key question is could the same amount, spent differently, have had a similar or greater effect?
2. how, in such a study, do you avoid a Hawthorne effect, in which the "shaping" of behaviour by the investigation process is partly responsible for at least some of the changes observed?

Becta press release.

Updated 8 July 2007 by the addition of a link to Becta press release, and the two concluding questions.

British Standards Institution seeks your views on e-learning standards

I have a small role in a contract that Schemeta has with the British Standards Institution to write a scoping study concerning the future development of e-learning standards. I know several readers have strong views about e-learning standards, their desirability, utility, and priorities for their focus. If you are interested in contributing your views to the study, please respond to this 20 minute web survey.

Disclosure statement