Fortnightly Mailing

Lucid summary of Blackboard's defence of its patent

Updated 31/5/2008

Writing in THE Journal, Dave Nagel provides a lucid summary of Blackboard's response to the US Patent Office's rejection of US Patent 6988138. For me the striking feature of Blackboard's response was its use of excerpts - including sections of witness testimony - from the recent patent infringement court case. Desire2Learn has 30 days to counter. From what I can make of it, the Software Freedom Law Centre, whose ex parte invalidity claim was merged with Desrie2Learn's inter partes claim, is precluded from involvement. 31/5/2008. Things are now moving quite fast in the dispute between Blackboard and Desire2Learn, with each company jockeying for position, in Blackboard's case from a position of apparent strength. Michael Feldstein has extensive coverage.

"Issues arising from the Blackboard Case". A one hour Educause web-seminar at 18.00 UK time on 29 May

Depending on your plans (if in the UK) for Thursday evening, this free Educause web seminar looks worth joining. Summary:

"The dispute between Blackboard and Desire2Learn over patenting course management software has highlighted a variety of questions about patents and patent enforcement in higher education. What role should patents play in academia’s highly collaborative, not-for-profit, revenue-strapped environment? As both producers and consumers of patented inventions, higher education has interests both diverse and deep. In this session, a respected patent litigator and leading CIO will explore key areas of patent law and discuss higher education's options and opportunities."

The seminar title gives you the impression that the event may focus overly on "Blackboard v. Desire2Learn", even if that is not the intention of the presenters. What I am hoping for is a strong focus on more general issues, such as:

• patents being secured and then commercially exploited "on the back of" either publicly funded work, or dispersed collaborative effort;
• the adverse impact of software patents on innovation, and the way they can strengthen monopoly;
• the range of policy stances that are open to individual organisations (universities and businesses).

If you cannot join the seminar you should be able to review the recording of the event subsequently.

Storm warning for cloud computing - good piece by Bill Thompson

The BBC's Bill Thompson is good at puncturing hype, usually in a measured, thorough and well written way. His Storm warning for cloud computing is no exception. Micro-abstract:

"Cloud computing brings with it storm warnings

The physical location of our online services still matter a great deal."

Sugar "reinvents how computers can be used for education"

Source: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/

There is something slightly perverse about the way that Sugar, the Open Source user interface and "cluster" of educational software developed for the OLPC laptop, has really only become visible to the outside world in the process of key people in OLPC parting company with the OLPC project itself.  The recently established SugarLabs wiki has a clear explanation of the rationale behind Sugar. Excerpt:

"Sugar reinvents how computers can be used for education. It promotes sharing and collaborative learning and gives children the opportunity to use their laptops on their own terms. Children — and their teachers — have the freedom to reshape, reinvent, and reapply their software, and content. Sugar is based on GNU/Linux, a free and open-source operating system."

"Sugar Labs" is a (soon to be established) non-profit foundation which "will serve as a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and software developers who want to extend the platform and create Sugar-compatible applications". Sugar Labs will also "focus on providing a software ecosystem that enhances learning on the XO laptop as well as other laptops distributed by other companies, such as the ASUS Eee PC". Full 15 May 2008 announcement.

Until April this year Walter Bender lead OLPC's software and content activities, and his thorough and inclusive weekly emailed reports kept people like me up to date with the development of the OLPC XO laptop. Walter is now in the process of forming Sugar Labs, with continuing funding from OLPC, and will be reporting weekly about Sugar: the simplest way to keep tabs on this is to subscribe to the Sugar Community Weekly News Digest.

XO-2: the next One Laptop Per Child laptop

Nicholas Negroponte describes the OLPX XO2. Source: Joanna Stern on http://blog.laptopmag.com/

Updated 27 May 2008

Useful coverage by Joanna Stern from a presentation given on 20 May 2008 by Nicholas Negroponte at MIT about the next version of OLPC, due for release in 2 years, with a brief video and several stills. (The video is actually a video of a still photograph, with Negroponte talking over it; and you can now access copies of the presentations in various formats, including Negroponte's, from the OLPC web site) Stern's report also states that a second "Give One Get One" programme for the current OLPC XO-1 will be launched later this year. (This piece by Steve Lohr in the 16/5/2008 New York Times provides commentary on the current collaboration between OLPC and Microsoft.)

OECD Broadband Portal - the UK has more than 25 broadband connections per 100 inhabitants

Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Finland, Korea and Sweden each have more than 30 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, according to new data, via David Weinberger, on the OECD Broadband Portal.

"The OECD broadband portal provides access to a range of broadband-related statistics gathered by the OECD. Policy makers must examine a range of indicators which reflect the status of individual broadband markets in the OECD. The OECD has identified five main categories which are important for assessing broadband markets."

This ranking table is taken from one of the many Excel worksheets available from the site:

                                                                                                                                                                       

Rank		DSL	Cable	LAN	Other	Total
1	Denmark	20.9	9.9	3.3	0.8	35.1
2	Netherlands	20.7	13.4	0.4	0.2	34.8
3	Iceland	31.1	0.0	0.4	0.7	32.2
4	Norway	23.3	5.5	2.0	0.4	31.2
5	Switzerland	21.2	9.4	0.1	0.3	31.0
6	Finland	25.6	4.0	0.0	1.1	30.7
7	Korea	9.5	10.5	10.4	0.0	30.5
8	Sweden	18.9	5.9	5.5	0.1	30.3
9	Luxembourg	24.1	2.4	0.1	0.1	26.7
10	Canada	12.4	13.8	0.0	0.4	26.6
11	United Kingdom	20.1	5.6	0.0	0.1	25.8

The OECD has also published a new report, Broadband Growth and Policies in OECD Countries, which is available as a 14 page summary [150 kB PDF], or as a 151 page full report [2MB PDF], and which contains a number of recommendations for government intervention to ensure that citizens can get online, irrespective of geography or class.

 

Ivan Krstić's take on developments within OLPC

This 13 May 2008 long essay by Ivan Krstić  should be mandatory reading for people who care about OLPC. It is a reflection, bitter in places, by an ex-OLPC insider, on the massive changes in direction the OLPC project is now taking (with a re-orientation towards Windows), and on the roles of Open Source and proprietary software and the relationship between the two.  It ends:

"I’m trying to convince Walter [Bender] not to start a Sugar Foundation, but an Open Learning Foundation. For those who still care about learning ...... the charge should be to start that organization, since OLPC doesn’t want to be it. Having a company that is device-agnostic and focuses entirely on the learning ecosystem, from deployment to content to Sugar, is not only what I think is sorely needed to really take the one-to-one computer efforts to the next level, but also an approach that has a good chance of making the organization doing the work self-sustaining at some point."

"So here’s to open learning, to free software, to strength of personal conviction, and to having enough damn humility to remember that the goal is bringing learning to a billion children across the globe. The billion waiting for us to put our idiotic trifles aside, end our endless yapping, and get to it already."

The OU's Niall Sclater on Blackboard's "Next Generation" learning platform

Niall Sclater leads the Open University's VLE Programme.

I had not come across his interesting blog before, and it is now on my reading list.

Niall is responsible for the OU's widely reported and watched implementation of Moodle, for which reason his enthusiastic description of Blackboard's "Next Generation" learning platform - based on a presentation about the product given by Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen in Manchester on 13 May, rather than on direct experience of it - is worth reading, along with the comments that have been made on the post.

Using a mobile phone for disease diagnosis

The 17 May Economist has  a piece about how simple accessories can turn mobile phones into useful medical devices. The prompt for the article is work led by Dan Fletcher at the University of California. Here is an extract from the Telemicroscopy for Disease Diagnosis web site, with a picture of the prototype mobile phone microscope and an image of a blood sample taken with the device. (Seeing these pictures led me successfully to use some small binoculars as a telephoto lens for the camera on a phone.)

"The goal of this project is to bring modern diagnostic testing to remote regions cheaply and efficiently with telemicroscopy. The ability to capture images of, for example, malarial blood samples, infected skin, or ulcerous lesions, and then to send those images for remote diagnosis could drastically reduce both the cost and time of performing critical disease diagnosis – as well as provide early warning of outbreaks – in poverty stricken regions of the globe. In many developing countries with the greatest health needs, the infrastructure for cellular phones is expanding rapidly, opening the door for greater use of cell-phone-based healthcare devices. The project is actively developing a second-generation device for field testing in 2008."

 

Blackboard v. Desire2Learn: The First Final Judgment

Long, fascinating (for me, anyway) post by Jim Farmer on Michael Feldstein's e-Literate, summarising the current state of "play" between Blackboard and Desire2Learn. You get the impression that several parties are on the hook in different ways. Desire2Learn, most obviously; a substantial number of Desire2Learn's clients in the US, who, to be free of risk will need to start using the revised (non infringing) version 8.3 of Desire2Learn's software, which may or may not be as functional as the (infringing) earlier version (this assumes that the revised version will not itself be judged to infringe); and Blackboard, which, without a settlement with Desire2Learn, will struggle to avoid being seen as the author of the misfortune of those Desire2Learn clients (and their students), as well as having used a software patent (viewed by many as dubious) to put the squeeze on its main non Open Source competitor.