Fortnightly Mailing

Open University "OpenLearn": MIT with pedagogy, or MIT without the completeness?

From the Hewlett Foundation's Open Educational Resources – Making High Quality Educational Content and Tools Freely Available on the Web

In March I reported on the Open University's announcement that it would be making some of its content "open", supported by a large grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In July I included a summary from a presentation I attended by Jason Cole and Martin Dougiamas about the OU's use of Moodle. Since then progress has been swift and impressive.

On 25/10/2006, the OU launched OpenLearn "free and open educational resources for learners and educators around the world". [Hewlett Foundation media release.] Yesterday I heard a presentation to the HEFCE "eLearning Partnership Board" (on which I represent ALT) by Professor David Vincent, who is the OU pro Vice Chanceller responsible for the initiative. 

EDUCAUSE on Blackboard: patenting a community creation is anathema to our culture

On 26/10/2006 EDUCAUSE (which has around 2000 mainly US institutions and 200 businesses in membership, and which plays a similar role in the US to ALT, UCISA, SCONUL, and parts of JISC and JANET rolled into one and grown in size) released the full text of an unprecedently no holds barred letter to Blackboard Inc. concerning the Blackboard patent, originally delivered to the company on 9/10/2006.

Two sections of the letter, which is worth reading in full (along with the wide range of feedback on it) in this article in Inside Higher Education, stand out:

"Our community has participated in the creation of course management systems. A claim that implies this community creation can be patented by one organization is anathama to our culture."

"We believe that Blackboard should disclaim the rights established under your recently-awarded patent, placing the patent in the public domain and withdrawing the claim of infringement against Desire2Learn. We believe this action would be in the best business interests of Blackboard and in the best interests of higher education. We do not make this request lightly or underestimate the courage it will take to implement. However, we believe it is the right action for your corporation and our community."

According to Inside Higher Education, Blackboard’s 26/10/2006 response was:

"Blackboard has been (and remains) a long time supporter of Educause and the important role it plays for the academic community, but we are disappointed that Educause, an industry organization, is taking public positions on its members' intellectual property and enforcement efforts. We are proud of our innovations and believe protecting Blackboard’s intellectual property is tantamount to the success of the company and the evolution of the industry at large."

Note. Other posts about the Blackboard patent:

• 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.

Paul Duguid and Nicholas Carr on the lack of quality in "peer production"

Serendipity is the gift of finding useful things unexpectedly by luck, and it is amazing how often you find important stuff by browsing as well as by searching. 

My route to Paul Duguid's October 2006 essay Limits of self-organisation: peer-production and the "laws of quality" was via Alfred Essa's The NOSE and Nicholas Carr's Rough Type, where there is a thorough and readable review of the essay.

Like a lot of others I was strongly influenced by Duguid and Seely Brown's 1999 book The Social Life of Information. Duguid's argument in the essay, which echoes Stephen Weber in The Success of Open Source is that there are particular conditions pertaining in Open Source software production, that "see to the quality", which do not necessarily exist in "open source knowledge generation".  (Weber's specific points are, roughly: that software has to work in a specific technical contex; that whether it works well, or whether a new version is an improvement on an earlier one, can be objectively judged; and that within Open Source software development there is usually a complex heirarchy of control. For more on this see this brief December 2005 review in (old style) Fortnightly Mailing and this extract from the book's final chapter, in which Weber lists the sorts of tasks for which he thinks an open source process is more likely to work effectively, and the circumstances in which those involved in an open source process are likely to be motivated to contribute.)

I hope that the abstract of Duguid's essay:

"People often implicitly ascribe the quality of peer–production projects such as Project Gutenberg or Wikipedia to what I call “laws” of quality. These are drawn from Open Source software development and it is not clear how applicable they are outside the realm of software. I look at examples from peer production projects to ask whether faith in these laws does not so much guarantee quality as hide the need for improvement."

and the conclusion to Carr's review:

"But one comes away from this excellent paper wondering whether, once these "other ways" of quality assurance are imposed on a process, it would still qualify as "peer production." As Duguid eloquently demonstrates, quality doesn't just happen; it's not an emergent phenomenon. It's imposed on a work by people who know what they're doing. Quality - true quality - may thus be incompatible with the democratic ideal that lies at the heart of what we call peer production."

encourage you to read both of them.

"Curriculum on Wheels" - the Bush family gets to grips with e-learning

The purple device this person is using is an Ignite!Learning "Curriculum on Wheels" or COW. The COW contains a stand-alone PC, preloaded with curriculum content, with an integrated data projector. Ignite!Learning is headed by Neil Bush, brother of George. A larger number of COWs - which cost ~$4000, and are said to cost a futher $1000/year to maintain [link dead, August 2012], have been bought for  Texas and other schools.

According to the 22 October 2006 Los Angeles Times:

"A company headed by President Bush's brother and partly owned by his parents is benefiting from Republican connections and federal dollars targeted for economically disadvantaged students under the No Child Left Behind Act."

Ignite!Learning has plans to expand outside the US. So watch out.

Links:

• Bush's family profits from 'No Child' act - Los Angeles Times, by Walter Roche, 22 October 2006;
• No Bush Left Behind - The President's brother Neil is making hay from school reform - Business Week, by Keith Epstein, 16 October 2006.

Bloggers' privacy expectations - a UK study

Karen Mccullagh, based at Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research at Manchester University, and sponsored by the ESRC and the Information Commissioner, is running this anonymous online survey about bloggers' attitudes towards privacy issues.

Oxford, Cambridge, Hull Universities, and the UHI Millenium Institute join forces on open source LMS development

From a media release issued on 12 October 2006:

"The Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Hull, and the UHI Millennium Institute  announce the formation of the Tetra Collaboration, the outcome of a series of meetings and a major summit held at the University of Oxford on the 25th-26th September 2006.

The goal of the Tetra Collaboration is to coordinate activities across the member organisations so as to more efficiently develop and deploy open source enterprise applications of use to UK and European universities and colleges."

A different angle on the term "managed learning environment" - building schools for the future.

Slightly sceptical article in the 7/10/2006 Economist about the current English "building schools for the future" programme which will see nearly every secondary school in England completely rebuilt or heavily modernised over the next 15 years. Many (most?) of the contracts will be won by private consortia who will get a return on the 50% of the capital costs they put up by charging for their services for the subsequent 25 years. The Economist picks up on the use of the term managed learning environment by the consortium that has just won the contract to rebuild Bristol's schools:

"The technology is to be provided by Northgate Information Solutions, which currently issues most of Britain's traffic-infringement notices. Its "managed learning environment" will integrate many different educational programs. It will also allow parents to see what children are doing (by tracking attendance, homework and canteen purchases), teachers to see what students are doing, and bureaucrats to see what teachers and students are doing (by recording the cost of staff phone calls and truancy, for example).

From the point of view of ICT provision, a key concern will be how much scope a school has to make changes to the set-up, once the school is built. The costs of making changes to out-sourced ICT systems are typically high: the supplier will tend simply to "want to get its rent"; and teachers and learners wanting to try out new things may find they get short shrift. And you could imagine, when a Local Authority is choosing between different bids, that the long term suitability of the ICT offering from a curriculum point of view might be both a harder thing to judge, and of a lower priority, than the design of the buildings.

JISC's new web site goes live

JISC's new web site is now live, complete with RSS feeds, much improved accessibility, faster page-loading, and what looks like an impressively well-designed search interface. Personally I'd prefer it if you could tell that a link is a link just by looking at it, and if the format of visited links changed after visiting. But these sorts of snags are easily fixed. [a] Much less satisfactory is the fact that at least some URLs from the old site do not translate to the equivalent page on the new site.

Revisions and additions: [a] 2006104.

Personalisation - just a slogan in search of a meaning

"Is there any way a teacher can personalise the learning experience for their charges, thereby transforming an ill-defined, throwaway political idea into action that would benefit children?"

asks Phil Beadle in this scathing Comment in today's Education Guardian. I've written previously and with scepticism about the rapidly spreading "personalisation virus", and I feel particularly critical of how the term is used so loosely in education, and especially in relation to ICT and e-learning. But that said, I think Beadle is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For example giving users (including learners) choice is at least sometimes a good thing, as is involving users in the design of services, both of which Beadle contests, with weary cynicism; and I found Charles Leadbeater's Demos pamphlet "Personalisation through participation" which Beadle slags off without even giving it an author or publisher, and without acknowledging that it was written about public services in general rather than education in particular, gave me plenty to think about during work I did in 2004 with Neil Smith and Nicky Ferguson for JISC, to the extent that we included a table of Leadbeater's as an appendix to our report. I can see why teachers view personalisation as "a duplicitous gimmick".  But the problem is not that offering choice and control  to learners is wrong per se, but that personalisation is being used as a gimmicky panacea, not backed up, in education, by evidence of benefit.

Notes

1. Thanks to Kevin Donovan, who wrote this Guest Contribution earlier this year, for telling me about the Guardian article.
2. With Neil Smith and NickyFerguson I recently finished a peice of follow-up work about personalisation for JISC , which I think will be available on the JISC web site later this year.
3. 10 October 2006. Charles Leadbetter has just published his new book We Think, which argues that the new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work (tell that to a Chinese shoemaker working 6 14 hour shifts per week) in a form which will allow comments to be made on it, for potential incorporation into the final product, which is due next year.

Moodle and other Open Source educational applications being bundled by Intel in India

Intel has started to sell, in India, its Integrated Solution Kit for Education (ISKE), so that PC manufacturers can supply PCs to educational users, pre-installed with a suite of Open Source applications suitable for education. For more details see:

• Intel's web site;
• Intel's technical brief [150 kB PDF];
• 4 September 2006 announcement in Indian Computer Reseller News.