Fortnightly Mailing

3/8/2007 - Blackboard Inc. v Desire2Learn - court issues order construing claim terms

Michael Feldstein is quick to note Desire2Learn's 4/8/2007 announcement of the 3/8/2007 outcome of  the "Markman Hearing" in the Blackboard v. Desire2Learn patent infringement case. (The purpose of the Markman Hearing is for the trial judge to determine the meaning of the claims at issue, and to instruct the jury accordingly, with the judge's ruling subsequently open to being appealed by either party.)

According to Desire2Learn the effect of the judge's determination, if not successfully appealed, is to render invalid independent claim 1 and dependent claims 2 to 35 in Blackboard's Patent 6,988,138. (There is one  other independent claim in the patent - claim 36, upon which the remaining 9 claims 37 to 44 depend.)

For an overview of the process you may find it helpful to review pages 2 to 5 of the 23/8/2006 Notes of a teleconference between Blackboard Inc. and the Association for Learning Technology [135 kB PDF], in which I took part, from which I have excerpted two paragraphs in the continuation post below.

Key workers on the One Laptop Per Child project talk about the project

Here is 6-minute video from May 2007 featuring key people in the One Laptop Per Child project: Walter Bender, Mary Lou Jepson, Chris Blizzard, Owen Williams, Marcelo Tosatti, John Palmieri, and Eben Eliason.

Smartphones "are the PCs of the developing world"

(Updated 7/82007)

Freely available 2 page report by Jessica Marshall in the 4/8/2007 New Scientist highlighting the utility of smartphones in the developing world. 2 excerpts:

"Smartphones may seem like a frivolous indulgence for rich westerners, but it turns out that their added features can be harnessed to help people in poorer countries do business, educate their children and even hold those in power to account."

"Farmers can also use photo and video-recording facilities on cellphones to share information about farming practices. In India, the non-profit organisation Almost All Questions Answered (aAqua) already operates a network where farmers can send questions to agricultural experts via text message or the internet, and check crop price information. But it is only accessible to those who can read, says Srinivasan Keshav of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. 'If you're educated, you can send text. If you're not, you need video or audio.'"

See also (via David Weinberger), this lucid 5/8/2007 article by Ethan Zuckerman in the Boston Globe "Building big: start small - a radical new way for poor countries to get the phones, power, and roads they need"about the take-off of mobile telephony in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and its economic impact.

Back-links:

• 28/7/2007 - Point-to-point wi-fi brings internet access to all;
• 27/1/2007 - Mobile phones in Africa;
• 14/12/2006 - Wireless Ghana;
• 17/10/2006 - What would you install on One Laptop Per Child;
• 22/9/2006 - 80% of the population is covered by a mobile network.

The seemingly impossible is possible - data visualisation

Via the Open Rights Group mailing I came across this wonderful 18 minute talk by Hans Rosling, the Swedish co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation about the need for datasets to be made publicly available. Gapminder is "a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development". This is "done in collaboration with universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organisations". [Parts of the talk Rosling gave are similar to a much more effectively recorded, longer, and more wide-ranging talk - including..... sword-swallowing - at the March 2007 TED conference in Monterey, and this is the second video in the continuation post below. The first as an equally compelling talk given by Rosling in 2006.]  One of Gapminder's tools is Trendalyzer, which in March this year was acquired by Google, with Trendalyzer’s developers leaving Gapminder to join Google. I do not know how long you have been able to access a Google-hosted implementation of Trendalyzer, but if you've any interest in data visualisation tools, or in health, or in international development, spend some time examining it. If you get stuck, then the Gapminder World Tutorial, will help you get the hang of the tool. Rosling also has a web log.

What's inside the One Laptop Per Child laptop?

Source: BBC, but go to the BBC article below if you want to click on the links!

The OLPC laptop is reportedly now in full production. Here is a short explanation by Chris Blizzard, OLPC chief software engineer, of key features of the laptop, with a particular focus on its power-saving design. You may also be interested in this BBC fact-file about the laptop, and (thanks to Dick Moore, who sent it as I was writing) this enthusiastic 27/7/2007 article from the Economist - with its sharp conclusion excerpted below the video. If you want to contribute to OLPC, you may also feel like volunteering (or contributing financially).

"Clearly, trying to produce such an extraordinary product as a laptop that is kid-proof and capable of working in jungles, deserts or the bush, miles from the nearest grid connection, and all for the cheapest possible price, has concentrated minds remarkably. The XO offers a lesson for laptop-makers everywhere. In fact, quite a few have gone from ridiculing the OLPC project to trying to emulate or join it. Most notable has been Intel. After first dismissing Mr Negroponte’s laptop as a toy, the chipmaking giant suddenly rushed out a spoiler design of its own for developing countries, fearing it was about to be left out of an emerging market. Called Classmate, Intel’s $225 laptop has failed to impress. Last week Intel admitted defeat tacitly by asking to join the OLPC association. The question now is when can the rest of us get laptops as cheap and clever as the OLPC’s radical design? Judging from the stir the XO has created, the answer is more likely to be months rather than years."

Point-to-point Wi-Fi brings internet to all

 There's been plenty in the media about the beneficial impact of mobile phones on the developing world, and I've occasionally covered this in Fortnightly Mailing. (There is a list of back-links below.)

Paul Marks, in this "subscriber only" article in the New Scientist of 23/6/2007 (reproduced in full here) argues that unless, as in China, there is mandatory mobile coverage of sparsely populated poorer areas, or as in Bangladesh there is a dense population, mobile telephony is only economically viable for the service providers if there are on average enough users for each mobile antenna to justify its costs. Marks reports on an alternative technology called Wi-Fi over Long Distance Networks (WildNets) which can "beam the net to communities hundreds of kilometres away". Wildnets, coupled with the mesh technology being pioneered by One Laptop Per Child, and others, look like a potent way of getting connectivity into all corners of the globe.

For more on WildNets, the technology and approach for which has been developed by Eric Brewer (inventor of the pre-Google Inktomi search algorithm, and now back at the University of California), see this March 2007 article in Forbes, by Michael Zow.

Links:

• 28/7/2007 - Point-to-point wi-fi brings internet access to all;
• 27/1/2007 - Mobile phones in Africa;
• 14/12/2006 - Wireless Ghana;
• 17/10/2006 - What would you install on One Laptop Per Child;
• 22/9/2006 - 80% of the population is covered by a mobile network.

New from Futurelab: 1. Beyond the digital divide; 2. Learning with handheld technologies.

Futurelab is a UK-based and apparently well-resourced educational charity that develops "innovative resources and practices that support new approaches to learning for the 21st century". It spun out of the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts a year or two ago.

Two recent publications will be of interest to Fortnightly Mailing readers.

Beyond the digital divide, by Neil Selwyn (whose "Adults Learning @ Home" project I covered in May 2003) and Keri Facer, provides a timely and well referenced review of "why the digital divide remains a complex and entrenched social problem", and calls for "policy responses that go far beyond simply increasing levels of hardware provision and support". Within the report itself, or as a separate document [67 kB PDF], is "Beyond the digital divide, a charter for change", which proposes four entitlements for citizens, and six challenges about the digital divide "which should inform future discussions and action". You can get a flavour of the line taken in the report itself from this interview (?) with Selwyn and Facer from the 18/6/2007 eGovernment Monitor. You can order a free hard copy of the report, or download it as a PDF from the Futurelab web site.

Handhelds - learning with handheld technologies, by Fern Faux, Angela McFarlane, Nel Roche, and Keri Facer, results from school-based research by Bristol University. As well as a directory of nearly 40 handheld projects and resources, the report includes a page of coherent and practical summary recommendations, anddetailed "case reports" from four handheld learning projects:

• The Dudley Handhelds Initiative (~300 students using wifi- and network-connected Palm PDAs);
• Learning2Go Phase 2 - Wolverhampton Local Authority (1000+ students using wifi-connected Fujitsu Siemens Pocket PCs);
• Warren Comprehensive School, London (50+ students, using wifi-connected Dell Axims and Palm Tungsten Cs);
• Stiperstones School, Shropshire (~50 students using Dell Axims with no connectivity).

You can order a free hard copy of the report, or download it as a PDF from the Futurelab web site.

Reading the report I was struck by the fragmentation in the implementation of these kinds of projects: different technology platforms and different content partners; uneven funding; dependence on champions in a Local Authority of school; focus on individual schools rather than on doing things "on an industrial scale". Reports of this kind contain plenty of useful insights; but you cannot help thinking that the One Laptop Per Child project (with its emphasis on technology that has been designed for children, for mass-manufacture, and for genuine ubiquity) illustrates a more realistic and sustainable approach to putting ICT into the hands of children. To the extent that the price of OLPC will fall as the number of units made rises, why shouldn't the developed world throw its lot in with OLPC, if OLPC will let it? And, speculating wildly (naïvely?), if there remains a digital divide in the developed world, you could imagine that OLPC-like devices could play an important part in bridging that as well.

Top Ten Tools - spilling the beans to Jane Hart

Jane Hart has persuaded a lot of people who are active in e-learning - 45 at the last count - to tell her their top ten tools. Mine are shown here. The top 100 tools from all of us are listed here. Firefox, Skype, and a raft of Google services stand out, with Microsoft Office well-cited also. Oh that the same exercise had been conducted every couple of years....

Update - 2/8/2007. Jane has now published a different view of the aggregated data, in the form a personal tool-set and producer's tool-set.

Send large files without using e-mail

My heart sinks if someone sends me a large file by email. Especially if I am on-line with a slow mobile connection. YouSendIt is a free and functional service that enable you to upload a file up to 2 GB in size to a remote web site and to supply your recipient with a URL for the file.

2007 Oxford Internet Survey

Click on image to make it intelligible

Every two years the UK's Oxford Internet Institute does a large scale survey of internet usage in Britain. The full report, which is particularly easy to use on screen, is freely available as an ~80 page PDF [6.3 MB]. Alongside an executive summary and a description of the survey's methodology, the report is in two parts:

• Profiles of users and non-users of the Internet;
• Patterns of Internet use.

Two sections that caught my eye in the "patterns" section were "Creativity and production", and "Learning", and below I reproduce one chart from each section. The first  gives an indication that the overall proportion of users who are actively creating content for the Internet remains quite small and is not growing rapidly. The second highlights the extensive use being made of the Internet for learning, especially informal learning.

Click on image to make it intelligible

Click on image to make it intelligible

The report is most definitely useful, and should be required reading for people in policy and strategy roles. That said, I was left slightly dissatisfied by it. In particular it would have been interesting to know the extent to which users are using "flagship" services like Wikipedia. Secondly, some of the specific "facts" established by the survey did seem to lack basic credibility. For example, if ~90% of Internet users use email it does not feel "right" to me, given the proportion of spam originating outside Britain, that only just under 20% if Internet users have been "contacted by someone over the Internet from a foreign country"; or, given the proportion of spam that involves financial fraud, that under 20% have been "contacted by someone online asking you to provide bank details". If readers have views on this issue, please comment below.