Fortnightly Mailing

Did the US Department of Justice know about the January patent when in February it cleared Blackboard's acquisition of Web CT?

There is an interesting angle in a press release issued on 7/8/2006 by eCollege, a significant US competitor to Blackboard, and picking up on a point also made by John Mayer on 2/8/2006. (Mayer's legally-oriented blog has plenty else on it of interest.) Extract from the eCollege press release:

Thorne (Chairman and CEO of eCollege) concluded his comments by stating, "The fact that one company has been granted a patent for such a broad application and now is engaging in litigation with another eLearning provider is unfortunate for a market that traditionally has been fueled by innovation and choice.  It also is unfortunate that Blackboard chose not to issue a press release when the patent was awarded this past January, at a time when the Department of Justice was investigating the antitrust ramifications of Blackboard's merger with its competitor, WebCT."

Of course, not issuing a press release does not mean Blackboard failed to tell the DoJ of its patent: what it does mean is that Blackboard's competitors, who presumably had their eye off the patent ball* - as did the rest of the e-learning community - did not use the existence of the patent to oppose Blackboard's acquisition of WebCT. Which presumably they would have done.

Links

• Blackboard 6/2/2006 press release announcing that the DoJ had cleared the "merger".
• Interesting 8/8/2006 legally confident posting by John Ottaviani, a guest writer on the blog of Eric Goldman who teaches Law at Santa Clara University School of Law.
• Corrosive and witty 8/8/2006 view of Blackboard's "spin strategy" by Al Essa, whose other analysis is worth examining.

* in fact eCollege looks like its eye has been firmly on the patent ball: see this Open Letter to the Chairman and CEO of eCollege.

Updated with footnote, and further links, 9/8/2006. Attributed link to posting by John Ottaviani, rather than Eric Goldman, 12/8/2006.

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.

 

The "One Laptop Per Child" wiki, and an interesting March 2006 article from the FT

June 2006 demonstration of a working prototype of the OLPC laptop, with Red Hat engineer and Mozilla Corporation board member Christopher Blizzard

 

This 1/8/2006 report states that Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have all tendered commitments to purchase one million "100$ Linux Laptops" being developed under the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

The One Laptop Per Child Wiki is well worth browsing. Though currently the wiki seems rather stronger on technology than on curriculum and methods of use - "While ultimately, the work on curricula will be done by the ministries of education who buy this, there are several efforts underway to explore some of the education potential from this project" sounded ominously unrealistic - there are several interesting pages on the wiki about educational content ideas. The emphasis is on "not imitating mainstream ideas". Personally I'd have thought there would be at least some mileage in repurposing existing web and CD-based educational content - when and if it is any good - much of which has been produced in the developed world, with funding from the public purse. Also relevant is this longish piece by Ian Limbach in the 26/3/2006 Financial Times, about the place of ICT infrastructure in development, with a particular emphasis on Ethiopia's decision to flood the whole country with broadband connectivity.

Amended 7/8/2006 to substitute video of working demonstration for photo of mock-up. 

Blackboard's US Patent 6988138 seems to cover most of the "commodity" features of a learning environment

On 26 July, Blackboard Inc, which last year took over WebCT, and is the dominant vendor of course management systems, announced that it has been granted a US patent "for technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods", and that patents corresponding to the US patent "have been issued or are pending all over the world including in the European Union, China, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand India, Israel, Mexico, South Korea, Hong Kong and Brazil".

Here is an abstract of the patent itself, taken from the US Patent Office record for Patent 6988138.

A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are available to the students over a network such as the Internet. Various levels of functionality are provided through a three-tiered licensing program that suits the needs of the institution offering the program. In addition, an open platform system is provided such that anyone with access to the Internet can create, manage, and offer a course to anyone else with access to the Internet without the need for an affiliation with an institution, thus enabling the virtual classroom to extend worldwide.

Unsurprisingly, Blackboard is silent as to whether and if yes how and with (against?) whom it intends to make use of the patent; The day after its announcement, Blackboard filed a patent infringement claim against the Canadian company Desire2Learn [PDF file], hosted at this link by The Inquirer.  It will now be interesting to see how much "prior art" is claimed by others in the event that the patent is actually used in anger by Blackboard - the best place at the moment (2/8/2006) to put it and to find it especially the former looks to be this area of Wikipedia. From my own experience, thinking back to the early days of the Learning To Teach On-Line course in 1997 or 1998 (which I and several readers of Fortnightly Mailing had a hand in developing), I seem to recall:

• delivery over the Internet, with materials, tasks/assignments and discussion-board and chat system all accessible by browser;
• browser-based system for amending the materials;
• learners and tutors all over the world, with learners enroled to several of the institutions in the (then) South Yorkshire Further Education Consortium, and tutors employed by several different institutions.

We used the widely available ideas, knowhow, and Open Source and proprietary software that were available at the time, and nothing we did was particularly special. According to the US Patent Office web site, Blackboard's initial patent application was made in 1999.

More recent related Fortnightly Mailing posts include: 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.

Minor change made to the final paragraphs: 27/7/2006; bigger changes (indicated by used of strike-out font above: 1/8/2006; link to Wikipedia page added 2/8/2006; link to Desire2Learn court response to Blackboard's patent infringement claim, and to more recent Fortnightly Mailing posts, added 15/9/2006, and 29/10/2006, and 27/1/2007.

When did you last see your data, and who do you trust to keep it safe?

This 8/6/2006 article by SA Mathieson in the Technology Guardian struck a chord with me as I've always felt that if I wanted to trust my personal data (an ePortfolio, say....) to a third party, I'd prefer to let the Co-op Bank handle it, than an institution, or the Government. The article has the following introduction:

We trust banks far more than the government to protect our personal data, so plans to share files across departments should ring alarm bells.

You might think your personal data is safe, secured under computerised lock and key, and fenced by the Data Protection Act with its sanctions against release of private data. Especially, surely, that which the government holds.

The reality is that everything has its price. Last month, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the state-funded watchdog for personal data, published a report, What Price Privacy?. The title's question was answered with a price list of public-sector data: £17.50 for the address of someone who is on the electoral register but has opted out of the freely available edited version; £150 to £200 for a vehicle record held by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency; £500 for access to a criminal record. The private sector also leaks: £75 buys the address associated with a mobile phone number, and £750 will get the account details.

SA Mathieson's article in the Guardian.  Access page for the Information Commissioner's What Price Privacy? Report.

Palestine - surely it is Israel that must yield?

Amended on 13/5/2007; links updated 29/5/2011.

Between 11 and 14 June (and this is one reason why Fortnightly Mailing has had a hiatus) - just prior to the current crisis in Gaza - I was fortunate to go to East Jerusalem and Hebron, Ramallah, and Bethlehem in the West Bank.

The visit was my first to the Middle East. I went with John Cook, who is President of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), by which I am employed half-time. The visit was funded by the British Council and its focus was on how universities in the Palestinian Territories are using e-learning.

A short article will appear about the e-learning side of the visit in the ALT Newsletter. The continuation post is more of a personal reflection.

W3C Accessibility Guidelines - British Standards Institution response to consultation

The British Standards Institution (BSI) - the National Standards Body of the United Kingdom - has submitted 4 pages of solid comments in response to the World Wide Web Consortium's consultation on (the unsatisfactory!) version 2 of its Web Content Accessiblity Guidelines.  I have posted a copy of the response [23 kB PDF] on my web site, with BSI's permission.

Ray Ozzie will take over from Bill Gates in 2008

Concise piece from the 24/6/2006 Economist, set in the context of the threat posed to Microsoft by Google,  about Microsoft's plan for Ray Ozzie to take over from Bill Gates as "chief software architect" during 2008.  Ozzie, pictured, has had  long and illustrious career prior to joining Microsoft, in which he has concentrated on developing software to support collaboration and communication. Lotus Notes and Groove are two examples.

UKERNA SMS Survey - needs respondents

Thanks to Andy Black for pointing out that UKERNA is conducting an online survey about the provision and use of SMS, or text messaging, in UK education, the results of which will "help shape the requirement for a potential new SMS service for the (education) community". Complete the survey and you'll get a copy of the results.

E-learning trends - Kineo does some digging

Google Trends enable you to see how the frequency of common searches using particular terms changes over time.  I'd been meaning to use it to see if interest in e-learning (as measured by the number of web searches for the term)  may be on the wain. People at Kineo (a learning consultancy company in Brighton) got there first. The image above shows how the volume of searches with the term "podcasting" has varied over the last 2 years.   Thanks to Mark van Harmelen for spotting this.

The nature and value of formative assessment for learning

Link rot fixed using WebCite, with minor edits, 11/5/2011

This 2004 paper [72 kB PDF] by Paul Black and Christine Harrison, with the King’s College London Assessment for Learning Group, is in the same vein as Inside the Black Box - Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment [PDF]. The latter influenced me a lot, in particular when working with David Jennings  in 2003 on BS8426 - A code of practice for e-support in e-learning systems. (BS8426 is absurdly overpriced, but this 8 page CC overview covers quite a lot of it.)   Here is the abstract in full:

The this paper has two foci. The first is to present an account of how we developed formative assessment practices with a group of 36 teachers. This is then complemented by a reflection on the productive and positive experience of these teachers, in the light of learning principles, of changes in the roles of teachers and pupils in the task of learning, and of effects on the self-esteem and motivation of pupils. Attention then shifts to the second focus, which is on the ways in which these teachers struggled with the interface between formative assessment and summative testing. The conclusion is that the potential of enhanced classroom assessment to raise standards may never be fully realised unless the regimes of assessment for the purposes of accountability and certification of pupils are reformed.