Fortnightly Mailing

Blackboard v Desire2Learn - claim construction briefs filed

Image from D2L Claim Construction Response Brief

On 29 May Blackboard filed its Opening Claim Construction Brief [1MB PDF] with the Texas Court that is handling Blackboard's patent infringement claim against Desire2Learn. On 15 June Desire2Learn filed its Claim Construction Response Brief [200 kB PDF].

Both briefs link to a number of supporting appendices with back-up evidence, which include things like dictionary definitions of key terms, emails, and, in D2L's case, the Wikipedia History of Virtual Learning Environments [400 kB PDF] page originally created by Michael Feldstein, and to which several readers of Fortnightly Mailing contributed content during late summer 2006. As an aside, page 4 of the D2L brief has a nicely illustrated explanation of role-based access control.

I'm no lawyer, but as I understand it the purpose of the Briefs is to enable the court to rule on disputed meanings for key phrases in the patent (Blackboard and D2L are already agreed upon the meanings of other key phrases). So this is not about judging the claim, but about creating the framework within which the claim will subsequently be judged. So dry, wordy, and from the point of view of the protagonists, important stuff.

All the documents are currently available from the patent information area of the Desire2Learn web site.

Note. Other posts about the Blackboard patent:

• 26 February 2007 - US Patent and Trademark Office orders inter partes re-examination of Blackboard Inc.'s Patent Number 6988138;
• 1 February 2007 - Blackboard issues "Patent Pledge";
• 25 January 2007 - United States Patent & Trademark Office orders re-examination of Blackboard Patent;
• 9 December 2006 - Two contrasting views about software patents. A debate between Eben Moglen and Blackboard's Matt Small;
• 2 December 2006 - Blackboard: two separate re-examination
  requests to the US Patent and Trade Mark Office; and an application to the Court from Desire2Learn for a stay in proceedings;
• 27 October 2006 - EDUCAUSE on Blackboard: "patenting a community creation is anathema to our culture";
• 16 October 2006 -  John Mayer interviews various lawyers with patent knowhow;
• 10 September 2006 - The new "post-patent" environment for e-learning: a perspective. Guest contribution by Jim Farmer;
• 9 September 2006 - Blackboard's work for IMS;
• 8 August 2006 - Did the US Department of Justice know about the patent when it cleared Blackboard's acquisition of Web CT?;
• 26 July 2006 - Blackboard's US Patent 6988138.

 

Wireless power limit raised to bridge digital divide

According to the excellent e-commerce and IT law newsletter OUT-LAW.COM, from law firm Pinsent Masons, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries Ofcom has allowed fixed broadband internet providers to double the power of their signals, with a view to helping bridge the digital divide.

"The new rules apply to the 5.8GHz frequency, which is used by fixed WiMax radio technology for wireless internet connections. The frequency is subject to light regulation from Ofcom which allows the registration of terminals at its website."

According to Ofcom's announcement [33kB PDF]:

"Concern has been raised that a so-called digital divide exists in the availability of services, particularly broadband, in rural and urban areas in the UK. Ofcom's Communications Market Report: Nations and Regions showed that the gap is closing and 41% of adults in rural areas have broadband internet at home compared to 45% of adults in urban areas. Changing regulation in this band, enabling greater geographical coverage, could help to increase access to wireless broadband in rural areas."

According to OUT-LAW.COM:

"Ofcom has also said that it will soon change its regulations so that users of equipment that communicates via ultra wide band (UWB) technology will no longer need licences. The very short range systems are commonly used for video wireless or camera wireless systems. The rule change will bring the UK into line with an EU Directive which demands that regulations be changed by 21st August."

A Race to the Bottom - Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies

Report prepared by the London-based Privacy International following a six-month investigation into the privacy practices of key Internet based companies.

"The ranking lists the best and the worst performers both in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 across the full spectrum of search, email, e-commerce and social networking sites."

Google is singled out for particularly trenchant criticism, and is put in the  "Comprehensive consumer surveillance & entrenched hostility to privacy" category. As you would expect, Google contests this assessment, and here is a piece by Matt Cutts (a Google staffer) countering the Privacy International claims. Meanwhile, Privacy International accuses Google of smear tactics against it. Services covered in the report include:

• Amazon
• AOL
• Apple
• BBC
• Bebo
• eBay
• Facebook
• Friendster
• Google
• Hi5
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• LiveJournal
• Microsoft
• Myspace
• Orkut
• Reunion.com
• Skype
• Wikipedia
• Windows Live Space
• Xanga
• Yahoo!
• YouTube

An interim report is available in PDF format [60 kB PDF], with a fuller report due in Autumn 2007.

Closure of BBC Jam - usage and other data - results of Freedom of Information Act enquiry

Jam, the BBC's £150m on-line learning service was scrapped earlier this year. Having written a piece asserting that usage data was needed to judge the extent to which use of the service was taking off, I requested usage and other data from the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act.  In the continuation post below I include the BBC's introduction to its response of 24/4/2007, followed by  the main questions put (in bold), together with the full responses (in italics). Any annotations by me are underlined.

For me, the "killer fact" that the data reveals is the low average weekly use made of the service per registered user, summarised in the chart below, which I made from the data provided by the BBC. (It is so low that I only half trust my calculations, and am waiting for someone to show me the "killer error".)

Jim Farmer on "Making college textbooks more affordable"

First of a series of Guest Posts by Jim Farmer in Michael Feldstein's e-Literate. This one picks up on the recently published US Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance report “Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable” and examines the way in which (US) HE students use the on-line materials to which they get time-limited access from a text-book publisher through their ownership of the text-book. One sentence jumped out at me:

"In a 1999 presentation to the National Council of Higher Education Programs, an Open University official confirmed the estimated cost for the development of Open University’s media-rich, fully tested, baccalaureate program was US$1 billion."

and my instinct is that some extra zeros may have slipped into the presentation referred to by Jim, unless what is being referred to is the whole or a really substantial proportion of the Open University's entire provision.

Are US teachers being left behind?

Participants at Blackboard's "Educational Leadership Forum"

On 16/5/2007 Blackboard Inc. hosted an "Educational Leadership Forum" at the National Press Club in Washington DC. Blackboard's Peter Segall introduced a panel of 4 US experts in technology enabled learning, which was moderated by Adam Newman of Eduventures, in front of a small invited audience. Like Desire2Learn at its Personalisation and innovation in education "round table" at the UK Education Show on 22/3/2007, there was no "sell" of any kind. Panel members were:

• Susan Patrick (who has been Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education);
• Ken Kay (President, Partnership for 21st Century Education);
• Don Knezek (CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education);
• Debra Sprague (Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Education, George Mason University).

The panel's focus was on how America's school, college, and university students are faring in today's global economy.

I found it helpful to listen (rather than watch) the whole 90 minute panel discussion - below as a Google video - partly because it shows how much overlap there is between US and UK policy concerns, and how insularly we examine these. (You'd put money on none of the panel members having read the UK 2020 Gilbert Review - [216 kB PDF].) Take particular note of Sprague and Knezek's comments (about 33 minutes into the video below) on the impending teacher crisis, and on the importance of close integration between schools and universities on teacher training; and on the discussion between Kay and Sprague (about 47 minutes in) about the (ill?)preparedness of long serving staff in university teacher training departments to prepare trainee teachers to use technology in pedagogically effective ways.  The discussion of the globalisation of teaching (about 52 minutes in), and about the failure of schools to build on the digital skills that learners have (about 100 minutes in) are also interesting.

With thanks to Jim Farmer who was at the session, for telling me about it.

Learning Technologist of the Year Award - open to individuals and teams

ALT, for which I work part time, has launched the inaugural Learning Technologist of the Year Award. The Award is open to individual members of ALT and to individuals and teams based in ALT member organisations worldwide.

The Award's overall purpose is to celebrate and reward excellent practice and outstanding achievement in the learning technology field.

The award will be judged by a panel chaired by Gilly Salmon, Professor of E-learning & Learning Technologies at the University of Leicester, and presented in Nottingham at the ALT conference on 5 September 2007, by Dr Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google.

Prizes will be as follows: 1st prize £1000; 2nd prize £600; 3rd prize £300.

The closing date for applications is 20 June 2007. Short-listed applicants will be interviewed (in person, by phone, or using web-conferencing) on 19 or 20 July 2007, and will be informed of this, if required for interview, by email on 29 June 2007.

Full details of the award are in the Rubric [15 kB PDF] and the Application Form [35 kB DOC]. Closing date 17.00 UK time on 20/6/2007.

Workshop on 29 August about Open Source software in libraries

Last year I did some work in a commission from JISC as part of a team that included Eric Lease Morgan, Head of Digital Access and Information Architecture at Notre Dame University in the US.  Eric will be running a 90 minute workshop about Open Source software in libraries as part of Digital Libraries à la Carte 2007, a modular 5 day course that "prepares librarians for the future" at Tilburg University in the Netherlands during the last week of August 2007.  According to Eric,

"Workshops in the course are designed for any type of person who works in a library. They will help you learn about the current and immediate future of computing in libraries. The workshop have something to offer everybody. They are not strictly designed for computer types. The only prerequisites are an open mind and the desire to learn."

 

Lorcan Dempsey on Google's "Universal Search"

You may have noticed that Google's search results have looked different from earlier this month, especially if you are searching in English, using google.com, with results returned across its major services from a single search.

Here, for example is the result for searching on mount everest, with links to web, maps (useless actually!), and images, all from the one search result.

Lorcan Dempsey, who used to work for JISC and is now Chief Strategist for OCLC (a giant worldwide library cooperative), has written a thoughtful piece about Universal Search, which is what the new development is being called, albeit not by Google. (Take particular note of some of the experimental features that can now be reviewed in Google Labs.)

One angle on these changes concerns user training. Conventional wisdom has it (had it?) that users need training on new software. An alternative approach - as in this case - which avoid the hassle of having to maintain help files or other documentation, is to change what is already superficially very intuitive software gently and incrementally, and assume that users will find out how to use the new features more-or-less of their own accord, helping each other out if they get stuck.  Of course that option was not really open when software was distributed and installed locally by the user. Once software is hosted "up in the sky somewhere" then it is: and my guess is that most readers will not have even noticed what is, behind the scenes, a very big change to how Google works. If they've not noticed, they definitely did not need any training.

Does Pearson's purchase of eCollege give it the muscle to compete with Blackboard?

Long article by Scott Jaschik from the 15/5/2007 issue of Inside Higher Education about Pearson's purchase of eCollege - a US supplier of VLE services to (mainly US distance) education providers. Pearson, best known in the UK for its ownership of the Financial Times and Penguins, has a huge text-book business, and its purchase of eCollege (alongside its even bigger acquisition from Reed Elsevier of some of the publishing and assessment parts of Harcourt) brings its recent spending in this area to around $1.5 billion. The article hints at further rationalisation and consolidation between educational technology and educational content businesses, and sees eCollege, backed by Pearson as much more serious competition for Blackboard, though Blackboard's share price, today 50% higher than 3 months ago, continues to rise; and there are also interesting insights in some of the comments on Jaschik's article. For example Jim Farmer, who wrote a guest contribution in Fortnightly Mailing last year about the "post patent" environment for e-learning, highlights the extensive use made by students in the US of text-book publishers' supplementary on-line content and formative tests (to which they get time-limited access when they purchase a text-book), and the possibly greater utility of such content and tests than that provided through institutional VLEs. Chair of Becta Andrew Pinder's October 2006 call for education to "organise industrially" for it properly to exploit ICT seems to be being heeded........