Fortnightly Mailing

Help mySociety choose its next projects - call for proposals closes on 15 September 200

mySociety is running a public competition for ideas for mySociety's next services. Excerpt:

"We need your help to decide what mySociety builds next. Our previous calls for proposals have led to WhatDoTheyKnow.com, WriteToThem.com and Pledgebank.com. What big new services should we build? What features should we add to our existing sites? What bright ideas do you have to promote mySociety to the world?"

Here is the full Call For Proposals.In mySociety style, submitted ideas are immediately visible on the site.

Hal Abelson on Google's "App Inventor for Android"

14 July 2010 update - see also this post about the launch of App Inventor as a publicly available beta product.

Hal Varian is not the only academic (nor Hal...) seconded to Google. Hal Abelson is an eminent professor of computer science and engineering at MIT, and a very influential figure in the field. He was founding director of Creative Commons and of the Free Software Foundation. Over the last year he has been working on secondment to Google on a project about using the Android Open Source operating system as platform for learning computer science. He now reports on this in the Google Research Blog. This excerpt is about as succinct a summary as you will find of the "architectural shift" that is taking place:

"Mobile applications are triggering a fundamental shift in the way people experience computing and use mobile phones. Ten years ago, people "went to the computer" to perform tasks and access the Internet, and they used a cell phone only to make calls. Today, smartphones let us carry computing with us, have become central to servicing our communication and information needs, and have made the web part of all that we do. Ten years ago, people's use of computing was largely dissociated from real life. With the ubiquity of social networking, online and offline life are becoming fused."

Abelson goes on to announce App Inventor for Android, which "lets people assemble Android applications by arranging 'components' using a graphical drag-and-drop-interface", and which will be trialled with students in a group of around a dozen universities (all in the US bar the University of Queensland) in Autumn 2009. The rationale for the development of App Inventor for Android is that the architectural shift needs to be matched by a shift in the computer science curriculum "to make it more about people and their interactions with others and with the world around them", so that people "can engage the world of mobile services and applications as creators, not just consumers".

Abelson concludes:

"Through this work, we hope to do the following:

• make mobile application development accessible to anyone;
• enhance introductory learning experiences in computing through the vehicle of Android’s open platform;
• encourage a community of faculty and students to share material and ideas for teaching and exploring."

For me, this development raises several interesting issues:

1. Where are UK (on Indian, for that matter) Universities in developments of this kind? Are they not involved because there have been no opportunities, or because they've responded to calls and failed?

2. Openness (of approach, software etc) as a key vehicle to support innovation. It is hard to see an equivalent initiative being taken using the software components that the iPhone relies on.

3. Users as creators of applications. Note the broadening of emphasis from users as creators of content to users as creators of tools.

Hal Varian: Why that hoodie your son wears isn't trademarked

Lots of thought-provoking accessible articles from the New York Times by Hal Varion, who is on leave from the University of California, Berkeley, and serving as Google's Chief Economist. An example is Why That Hoodie Your Son Wears Isn’t Trademarked, from which this is an excerpt.

"According to Mr. Raustiala and Mr. Sprigman, the fashion industry can survive without intellectual property protection because of two interacting factors that they refer to as 'induced obsolescence' and 'anchoring'."

"The first factor means that clothes become unfashionable before they wear out, so trendy people have to keep buying new clothes every year. When you are wearing the same thing as your cool friends, that’s great. But when you start seeing that style on decidedly uncool people, it’s time for something new — which the fashion industry is happy to provide."

"But how do the fashionable decide what the next big thing is? Or perhaps more to the point: how does the fashion industry convey to their consumers what they should be wearing? How does the industry 'anchor' the consumers in this season's fashions? This is where copying comes in. If all the designers are showing baby doll dresses in the spring of 2006, then there’s a good chance that is what everybody will be wearing by the summer of 2006."

"Mr. Raustiala and Mr. Sprigman argue that the lack of intellectual property protection actually promotes the functioning of the industry. If the extension of copyright to fashion prevented clothes manufacturers from copying each other, the industry would be ceding a major role to the lawyers and become much less creative. We’d see the same thing year after year. "

ReViCa - a wiki-based web site about virtual campus initiatives worldwide

The ReViCa wiki has been "set up to provide an inventory and to show the results of a systematic review of Virtual Campus initiatives of the past decade within higher education throughout the world". According the the site more than 300 programmes are categorised by the "interesting or innovative eLearning approach they have taken".

Blackboard v Desire2Learn: lawyerly views on the Court of Appeal decision

Occasionally updated with links to comments from patent lawyers from 30 July onwards

"In summary, we affirm the district court’s decision that claims 1-35 are invalid as indefinite. Because we hold that under the proper construction of claim 36, claims 36-38 are anticipated as a matter of law, we reverse the district court’s failure to grant JMOL (Judgment as a Matter of Law) on that issue. We do not reach Desire2Learn’s assertion that claims 36-38 are obvious. We also do not address the parties’ contentions with respect to infringement of those claims. Based on our rulings in appeals No. 2008-1368 and 2008-1396, Blackboard’s appeal in No. 2008-1548, which pertains to the award of costs in the district court, is dismissed as moot. Each party shall bear its own costs for these appeals. AFFIRMED IN PART, REVERSED IN PART, and DISMISSED IN PART."

Desire2Learn reports on today's Court of Appeal decision, from which the above excerpt is the conclusion, arguing that the judgement represents an across-the-board ruling in favour of D2L. Though I do not doubt that the decision represents at least a bit of a setback for Blackboard, I have a "wait and see" feeling about what the full implications of the decision are; and it is patent lawyer commentary that I am now most interested in reading. [30/7/2009. Below are some links to such commentary.]

• 28/7/2009 - Bruce T Weider, of DowLohnes PLLC;
• 29/7/2009 - by Jim Singer, a partner in the Intellectual Property Practice Group of Pepper Hamilton LLP;
• 30/7/2009 - detailed explanation as to why the Court of Appeal found against Blackboard in "Patents and the Financial Services Industry", edited by Christopher Hilberg, Patent Attorney with Oppenheimer Wolff and Donnelly;
• 31/7/2009 - Michael C. Smith of Siebman, Reynolds, Burg, Phillips and Smith, LLP - a brief and intelligible summary.

Internet use by country - how it has changed since 2002

Source: New Scientist

Apart from the annoying use of zeros in numbers like 253,000,000, this graphic from the New Scientist (via Laura Czerniewicz) is an outstandingly good example of quantitative information visually displayed. You can explore some of the data with mouse-over and using the controls in the the Google Motion Chart below.

Après Wave, le déluge. Google Wave assessed in Dick Moore's new "Tools and Taxonomy".

Dick Moore (whom I know of old, through Ufi, and through ALT) has started Tools and Taxonomy. His first piece is an informative one about Google Wave which summarises why Google Wave is likely to be a "next big thing". Note also Dick's use of CommentPress, a "theme" for the  Wordpress blog software that allows for commenting on individual chunks of text. I've had my eye on CommentPress (which anticipates one of the features that Google Wave will support) for some time, and ALT has it in mind to use it when putting drafts of responses to public consultation out for comment by our members or the wider learning technology community. So it is interesting to see it in use in this way.

Like motorised centaurs: Czech police on Segways

Picture by taken by SB on 15 July 2009

The Prague police use a nice line in heavy-duty pannier-equipped Segways. Fast, manoeuvrable and imposing.

Afghanistan: Rory Stewart - The Irresistible Illusion

The Irresistible Illusion is a "must read" analysis of about UK and US involvement in Afghanistan by Rory Stewart, now Professor of Human Rights at Harvard, and who was an officer in the British Army, and who is hugely knowledgeable about Iraq and Afghanistan. [26/10/2009 - Stewart has just been selected to fight the safe Tory seat of Penrith and the Borders.]

Online education experiment in Alabama's schools helps raise attainment

Alabama Connecting Classrooms Educators and Students Statewide - ACCESS - is a large-scale (USD10m) online education experiment begun in 2005, and using Moodle, to overcome the relative scarcity of specialised teachers in Alabama's numerous small rural schools. The 18 July 2009 Economist reports on the success of ACCESS, which will now be extended to all of the state's schools. Excerpt:

"There were sceptics. The pilot programme cost $10m, not pocket change in a poor state. Teachers worried about how they would connect to their virtual students. But ACCESS quickly became a hit. In 2006 students took more than 4,000 courses at 24 schools. In 2008, with ACCESS now in more schools, the number exceeded 22,000. [...] Mark Dixon, the governor’s adviser for education, says that several years ago fewer than half of Alabama’s public high schools offered any college-level Advanced Placement (AP) courses. As of this summer, they all will; ACCESS is being extended to all the state’s schools. Joe Morton, the state superintendent of schools, points to the number of black students taking AP courses. In 2003, according to the College Board, just 4.5% of Alabama’s successful AP students (those who passed the subject exam) were black. In 2008 the number was up to 7.1%. There is still a staggering gap—almost a third of the state’s students are black—but the improvement in Alabama was the largest in the country over that period."