Fortnightly Mailing

Blackboard's acquisition of ANGEL: thoughtful post by Hannah Whaley

Hannah Waley comments cogently on Blackboard's acquisition of ANGEL, from the perspectives of a Blackboard-using learning technologist in a Scottish university. Hannah concludes:

"Maybe they have learnt nothing at all from the WebCT merger, but I don’t believe that could be the case. However, learning is not enough alone, and they must act on what they have learnt. I hope they do, as it could benefit many institutions. I’m possibly too optimistic, but I feel that a focus on the negatives helps no-one. There will be opportunities to come from bbplusangel - perhaps people should focus on providing a strong community voice to guide them."

The rest of Hannah's newish blog is well worth a look.

Finding and treating lorry drivers with sleep apnoea - 13/5/2009 adjournment debate in Westminster

My 26 year-old nephew Toby was killed outside Liverpool in August 2006 by a truck driven by someone suffering from undiagnosed sleep apnoea who had fallen asleep at the wheel.  After last year's the inquest into Toby’s death, the coroner reported in August 2008 that the truck driver had visited his general practitioner during April 2006 complaining of tiredness. Blood and urine samples were taken to test for diabetes, and when the results were returned negative he was advised that he was most probably suffering from stress. Critically, sleep apnoea was not diagnosed.

Regular readers of Fortnightly Mailing will know that over the last 18 months, with the support of a wide range of people with medical, legal, and technical knowledge, in the UK and further afield, I and Toby's immediate family have been campaigning in a low key way for a coherent and evidence based framework that:

• makes clear the connection between obesity and obstructive sleep apnoea;
• indicates the likely prevalence of the condition among vocational drivers, given the prevalence of obesity among them;
• encourages general practitioners to identify and treat potential cases of sleep apnoea;
• requires vocational drivers or certainly the obese amongst them to be regularly screened for sleep apnoea, rather than only once they reach age 45.

Key players in such a framework will need to be the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the Health and Safety Executive. Both have been signally and depressingly reluctant to act, ignoring the Coroner's 2008 Rule 43 Report from Toby's inquest [137 kB PDF], and generally defending the status quo in a morale-sapping manner.

In the early hours of this morning my MP Meg Munn, Labour and Cooperative Party Member of Parliament for Sheffield Heeley, spoke lucidly in a 30 minute adjournment debate in the House of Commons, achieving a really clear synthesis of the issues, and gaining agreement that the relevant Minister (Jim Fitzpatrick) will now meet Meg Munn and others to consider them. The official transcript of Meg Munn's speech gives a clear insight into what the real work of backbench MPs can and should consist of.

More rationalisation amongst e-learning businesses - Blackboard buys ANGEL Learning

I was deciding not to write anything about Blackboard's announcement that it had acquired the Indiana-based VLE and ePortfolio company Angel Learning when Stephen Downes's RSS feed popped up, with his short post describing the acquisition as "Another stunner in the e-learning marketplace". I'm not so sure. Obviously, takeovers like this come out of the blue for us on the outside. But whether or not welcome, they are normal; and it looks like Blackboard is simply carrying on with its existing strategy of buying competitor companies (just as Saba and SumTotal  were doing 4 or 5 years ago in the in the corporate LMS market). Thus Blackboard's acquisition of ANGEL is in the same vein as its 2005 acquisition of WebCT, albeit on a smaller scale. At the same time the purchase looks like it gives  Blackboard reach into a sector of the US market (community colleges, smaller universities, and secondary schools) that is reported to have been tending to switch from WebCT to ANGEL, with one of ANGEL's current selling points being ease of switching [30 kB PDF]. Dave Nagel summarises some US reaction in Campus Technology.

Previous rationalisation-related posts:

• 12/12/2008 Pearson buys Fronter
• 18/5/2007 Does Pearson's purchase of eCollege give it the muscle to compete with Blackboard?

The Literacy Project

Via the indefatigable New Zealander Richard Elliott I found the Google hosted Literacy Project, "a resource for teachers, literacy organizations and anyone interested in reading and education, created in collaboration with LitCam, Google, and UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong Learning".  Is it any use? I'm not the best person to judge, but some aspects of the site, for example its Literacy Map, were superficial.  Try searching on Sheffield (where I live, and which I know well). What do you get? Sheffield University's Department of Education. Not Ufi; not Sheffield City Council; and not The Sheffield College, all of which are far more active on literacy issues than this university education department. If you've got views, post a comment below.

WolframAlpha: David Weinberger interviews Stephen Wolfram

Though I kept wanting him to challenge a bit more, here is an interesting, fairly searching and definitely thought-provoking 55 minute interview with Stephen Wolfram about WolframAlpha [MP3] by David Weinberger.

WolframAlpha is  described by Wolfram as a new "computational knowledge engine", and it is due to be launched by Wolfram's company during May.

I listened into a presentation about WolframAlpha on 14 April, and summarised this fairly enthusiastically here. Meanwhile, there is some sceptical commentary about WolframAlpha here on Slashdot.

Links for a talk

Below is an eclectic set of links that I included in, or drew material and ideas from, in talks at Learning Technologies 2009 in London in January, at a JISC RSC "e-Learning in HE: Strategy and Planning" event in Doncaster in March, and at the Cambridge Assessment Network in April.  At the bottom you will find a link to a (big) zip folder with the assets for the March version of the talk.

Hut-to-hut skiing in Jotunheimen

Looking West from top of Fortundalsbreen, 4 April 2009

This Easter I skied "hut-to-hut" in Norway from Lake Tyin via Tomashelleren and Lake Bygdin to Gjendesheim, followed by three days with a friend in and above the birch woods East of Gjendesheim (Finnbølesætra to Storholiseter to Skriurusten to Oskampen to Finnbølesætra). I then joined a group skiing from Sota Sæter to Fondsbu over the Fortundalsbreen and Smørstabbrean glaciers via Nørstedalsæter, Krossbu, and Skogaldalsbøen.  The weather ranged from still, clear and cold, with perfect snow to match, via downright hot, to too windy for safety, this last resulting in the welcome attention of the Red Cross. The pictures below will give you the flavour.

Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning - Technological Change "Thematic Paper"

The National Association for Adult and Continuing Education (NIACE) has published Simon Mauger's Technological Change Thematic Paper [50 pages, 1.4 MB PDF] from the National Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning (IFLL). I get quoted a bit in the document, which makes me feel well disposed towards it, and possibly clouds my judgement that though it is not saying anything earth-shatteringly original, the document does manage to capture in one place, and in language that policy-makers will relate to, the scale and nature of the changes taking place in the overall environment for learning.

Is it sufficient to entitle citizens to a 2 megabits per second Internet connection?

Donald Clark provides a scathing perspective on yesterday's "Digital Britain" summit. The FT's coverage of the event was more positive, and Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson's strong hints that the UK's interpretation of the Universal Service Obligation on telephone companies (to the extent that the USO relates to Internet access) will be changed from its current derisory 28.8 kbit/s to 2 megabits/s are not to be sniffed at, especially considering that in March 2006 Ofcom was arguing that "no significant changes are needed at this time" and in particular that "the benchmark minimum speed will remain at 28.8 kbit/s". A rapid implementation of a 2 mbit/s obligation would have big and beneficial effects on the parts of rural Britain where dial-up Internet access remains the only cost-effective option. But keep in mind that other developed countries are taking a much more ambitious approach. For example, earlier this month the Australian Government announced a $AU43 billion plan to provide 90% of households and business with affordable access to 100 mbit/s connections, with the remaining 10% having access to a 12 mbit/s connection.

Blackboard v. Desire2Learn 10 April round-up, with 18, 21, 24 April, and 7 May updates

[Updated 18, 21, 24 April 2009, and 7 May] - I suggest you read this in conjunction with the excellent 21 April piece from Michael Feldstein, and this piece by Jeff Bohrer.]

18/4/2009 update. Yesterday, the US Patent Office, which has been re-examining US Patent 6,988,138 since early last year in response to inter partes and ex parte applications from Desire2Learn and the Software Freedom Law Centre, issued a non-final  "Action Closing Prosecution" rejecting the whole of that patent.

Blackboard now has one month in which to respond, and assuming (which I don't) that any such representations have no effect on the results of the Patent Office's re-examination of the patent, it would then be open to Blackboard to appeal against the final results of the re-examination through the US courts. 

Will Blackboard be exercised by this development? I'm happy to stand corrected on issues that are not in my area of expertise, but my instinct tells me that Blackboard may not be too fussed about the non-final action by the US Patent Office. This is because the company's new US Patent 7,493,396 [PDF] (see relevant section of 10 April round-up below):

• incorporates Patent 6,988,138 in its entirety;
• includes in its "Other References" section a comprehensive list of most if not all of the "prior art" cited in Desire2Learn and the Software Freedom Law Centre's re-examination requests on 6,988,138, and by Desire2Learn in its appeal against Blackboard Inc.'s successful infringement case, and in Desire2Learn's original defence (even the Sheffield-based EU Framework 4 Renaissance Project, in which I and several readers of Fortnightly Mailing were involved in 1996ish, gets referenced).

Provided the US Patent Office got its teeth into the the listed prior art (which I'm told Blackboard would have been required to cite in its application) and came to a proper judgement that it did not affect the validity of the claims in the patent, then the new patent will be tougher to challenge than if the Patent Office has only considered the prior art superficially, if at all.