Fortnightly Mailing

Blackboard patent. John Mayer interviews various lawyers with patent knowhow.

John Mayer, who is Executive Director of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, is building up a set of interviews with lawyers who know about patent law.

The first is with Professor Mary LaFrance who teaches patent law at the Boyd School of Law, part of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

The second, which is a long and intensly relevant to key issues in the Blackboard infringement case against Desire2Learn, is with Professor Vince Chiapetta who teaches at Willamette University College of Law.

This post was revised, and republished to include a link to Vince Chiapetta's interview on 16/10/2006.

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.

Bloggers' privacy expectations - a UK study

Karen Mccullagh, based at Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research at Manchester University, and sponsored by the ESRC and the Information Commissioner, is running this anonymous online survey about bloggers' attitudes towards privacy issues.

Oxford, Cambridge, Hull Universities, and the UHI Millenium Institute join forces on open source LMS development

From a media release issued on 12 October 2006:

"The Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Hull, and the UHI Millennium Institute  announce the formation of the Tetra Collaboration, the outcome of a series of meetings and a major summit held at the University of Oxford on the 25th-26th September 2006.

The goal of the Tetra Collaboration is to coordinate activities across the member organisations so as to more efficiently develop and deploy open source enterprise applications of use to UK and European universities and colleges."

Google For Educators. Destabilising or constructive? Or both?

"Today, teachers like you are using technology in innovative ways to help students build knowledge. You play a critical role in breaking down the barriers between people and information, and we support your efforts to empower your students. We're reaching out to you as a way to bolster that support and explore how we can work together."

Google is turning its attention to the use of its services by teachers, and has launched Google For Educators, a Google Teacher Newsletter (from which the above extract is taken, and to which several thousand people had signed up within hours of its launch), and a pilot Google Teacher Academy, through which a group of 50 (North California only) teachers can become "Google Certified". 

Google for Educators provides links to brief, somewhat school-focused, overviews of 12 Google products, which between them provide a pretty comprehensive (mainly) web based learning environment. (Google Earth and SketchUp require the download and installation of quite heavyweight applications.) Each product page calls for users to submit examples of successful "lessons" developed using the product in question, and in some cases the product page contains such examples, and other support resources.   Products to pay particular attention to include:

Privacy, trust, disclosure and the Internet

"In this paper we present results of a study which provides a detailed examination of the interaction between people's willingness to disclose personal information online and their privacy concerns and behaviours (and any moderating factors such as trust and perceived privacy)."

I'm trying to discover if there is anUnfortunately there is no audio or video file of the presentation that went with this paper [abstract only] by Carina Paine, Adam Joinson, Tom Buchanan and Ulf-Dietrich Reips, from which the above excerpt is taken. Meanwhile you can review the slides from the presentation [1.3 MB ppt]. But two full papers by Pain, Joinson, Buchanan and Reipson site cover the same broad ground:

• Privacy and self-disclosure online [272 kB PDF];
  Privacy and trust: the role of situational and dispositional variables in online disclosure [132 kB PDF].

Other related posts of potential interest:

• Why youth heart MySpace - identity production in a networked culture.
• When did you last see your data, and who do you trust to keep it safe?
• Anonymity online as the default.
• Are anti-plagiarism systems ethical?
• Privacy and self-disclosure on-line.

Let's face the music and learn. Podcasting for people with visual impairment. Guest Contribution by John Rudkin.

John Rudkin is eCommunity Manager for Blackpool Council.

In 2003, Blackpool Council embarked on an information and learning project partnering the local Society for the Blind, funded by the UK Adult Education Advisory body NIACE, and supported by Apple UK, the BBC and Ultralab. It was the start of a long and (for the community) fruitful relationship.

Everyone has heard of Podcasting over the last 12 months or so I'd guess? Everyone knows about streamed media and content sharing, but what we started predated Podcasting (so prevalent in its mention at the 2006 ALT conference), which was what we needed to ultimately make it tick.  Still, NIACE  saw the potential and supported this rather visionary project idea; Audio broadcasting to mp3 players.  During those early experiments we were inspired to look around at other mediums, and we hit on streaming, and a year later (when we found a funder in the Lancashire Digital Development Agency) blueIRIS was born. Launched on the 18th of October 2005, blueIRIS marked the start of a whole new chapter in the development of the Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre Society for the Blind and its Talking Services, and the beginning of a brand new approach to delivering information and learning content.

blueIRIS?

The link between health and wealth

This 3 page summary of Retirement, health and relationships in the older population in England: the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing 2004, edited by James Banks, Elizabeth Breeze, Carli Lessof and James Nazroo (eds.), published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in June 2006 is, overall, a model of clarity, as well being a stark reminder of the extent of health inequality. Here is an extract:

"Across the [English] population, there is a strong relationship between wealth levels and both mortality and morbidity. For example, people from the poorest 20 per cent of the wealth spectrum were much more likely to die between the first and second wave of the survey [the waves of the study were two years apart] than their richer counterparts. Unsurprisingly, the older people were more likely to die, but the differential pattern by wealth is consistent across all age  groups and strongest for the youngest. Of those aged 50–59 in the first interview 2.5 per cent of the poorest fifth had died, compared to only 0.2 per cent of the richest fifth. Of those aged 60–74, deaths accounted for 5.9 per cent of the poorest and 1.3 per cent of the richest."

Mozy remote back-up - seems to work well

I am currently trialing Mozy, a remote back-up service. Here is how it works.

You create an account and tell Mozy which directories you want to be backed up. Mozy runs in the background when your PC is online - it can cope with interruptions - and makes a, say, daily (you set the frequency) back-up of the files that have changed since the last back-up.

If you need to restore, you tell Mozy which back-up you want to restore, and it creates a remote copy of the directories you need to restore. You can then download these to wherever you want to put them.  For data-volumes up to 2GB the service is currently free; for more than this you have to pay a modest monthly fee.

Mozy has a well-implemented feel, and uses what to my semi-amateur eye look like solid and secure encryption, with the option to choose your own encryption key instead of the one provided by default. Technical support is by email, and, despite my use of the free service, was quick, clear, and efficient.

Have I given up making a weekly local back-up of my 6GB of data? Not yet. But for the first time I am tempted to rely on a third party solution. And for readers who do not make back-ups of any sort (own up, you know you are out there) Mozy must surely be much, much better than nothing.

Update - 14 October 2006. For a brief comparative review of different remote back-up services, dated 31 January 2006, but with over 250 comments on it, see http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/Openomy/.

Participation inequality: encouraging more users to contribute - article by Jakob Nielsen

"In most online systems, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don't participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background."

Although partly a plug for a forthcoming conference, this typically confident article by Jakob Nielsen provides a well-grounded overview of the problem of participation inequality on the web, and makes suggestions as to what can be done to reduce it.

Eduforge (part of the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment project) now has a team blog

Eduforge was founded in January 2004 as part of the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (NZOSVLE) project. (Now that really is an acronym to conjure with.)

"The NZOSVLE is a major collaborative education project funded by the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission (TEC). The project's goals are to adopt, adapt and develop open source e-learning infrastructure for its consortium members, composed of polytechnics and universities. The software developed will be made available on Eduforge under the General Public Licence (GPL) for members of the community and the greater public."

Richard Wyles mentioned that Eduforge is now publishing a team blog. While you are looking, you might want to take note of the Planet Eduforge Feed Aggregator, which pulls in the RSS feeds from a fairly restricted worldwide list of (English language) educational blogs, including this one, into one convenient place.