Fortnightly Mailing

Should organisations now put public knowledge and knowhow on Wikipedia instead of publishing it themselves? Views requested.

This 21/7/2006 article in the Times by Ben MacIntyre caught my eye whilst reading a free copy of the Times on a train. It shows the way that Wikipedia is becoming mainstream, and it gets to what for me is a "nub" issue: if I know and care about something, should I contribute to the relevant Wikipedia entry? 

Here is an extract:

The second point is that Wikipedia is here to stay, gradually improving, and growing more influential by the minute. If there is a subject that you know and care about, then it is becoming an intellectual duty to ensure that the entry on Wikipedia is as accurate as possible.

Many years ago, I wrote a book about a Victorian crook called Adam Worth, a subject so obscure that no one had ever written a book about him before, or since. When I found an entry for Worth on Wikipedia, I was at first astonished, then flattered to find the book cited in the references, and then slightly infuriated: whoever had written the entry had plainly read my book and summarised it, but added several small but irritating errors.

At first, I ignored the mistakes. This was only Wikipedia, after all. But the landscape of knowledge has changed since then, and I have joined the club. Wikipedia should always be taken with a pinch of salt. But the more we contribute and revise, the less salt we will need. We are all Wikipedists now.

For me the answer is "it depends how much I care", and as indicated previously, I've  found myself compelled to make several additions and a few changes to Wikipedia's History of VLEs, because I am so narked that Blackboard Inc. seems to have patented ideas and methods that I and loads of others helped in a small way to create, for the public good.

An interesting side effect has been the informal learning that I've done in the process - both about the history of VLEs, and about the way that Wikipedia works.

I'm now pretty well convinced that "the place to put stuff" that might be of value to others is on Wikipedia, rather than, say, on an organisation's web site. Here is an example:

Did the US Department of Justice know about the January patent when in February it cleared Blackboard's acquisition of Web CT?

There is an interesting angle in a press release issued on 7/8/2006 by eCollege, a significant US competitor to Blackboard, and picking up on a point also made by John Mayer on 2/8/2006. (Mayer's legally-oriented blog has plenty else on it of interest.) Extract from the eCollege press release:

Thorne (Chairman and CEO of eCollege) concluded his comments by stating, "The fact that one company has been granted a patent for such a broad application and now is engaging in litigation with another eLearning provider is unfortunate for a market that traditionally has been fueled by innovation and choice.  It also is unfortunate that Blackboard chose not to issue a press release when the patent was awarded this past January, at a time when the Department of Justice was investigating the antitrust ramifications of Blackboard's merger with its competitor, WebCT."

Of course, not issuing a press release does not mean Blackboard failed to tell the DoJ of its patent: what it does mean is that Blackboard's competitors, who presumably had their eye off the patent ball* - as did the rest of the e-learning community - did not use the existence of the patent to oppose Blackboard's acquisition of WebCT. Which presumably they would have done.

Links

• Blackboard 6/2/2006 press release announcing that the DoJ had cleared the "merger".
• Interesting 8/8/2006 legally confident posting by John Ottaviani, a guest writer on the blog of Eric Goldman who teaches Law at Santa Clara University School of Law.
• Corrosive and witty 8/8/2006 view of Blackboard's "spin strategy" by Al Essa, whose other analysis is worth examining.

* in fact eCollege looks like its eye has been firmly on the patent ball: see this Open Letter to the Chairman and CEO of eCollege.

Updated with footnote, and further links, 9/8/2006. Attributed link to posting by John Ottaviani, rather than Eric Goldman, 12/8/2006.

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.

 

Mobile Learning - from Leonard Low of Canberra Institute of Technology

Leonard Low has a well organised and well written blog about mobile learning. From which I learnt that 30 million mobile phone users in Japan have mobile phones that can read QR codes, which are the equivalent of bar-codes but designed so that a mobile phone with a camera can capture the data from them.

Leonard points to this piece by Ewan McIntosh describing QR codes in use in Japan in an educational context.

Social computing - a guide (the Blackboard "prior art" wikipedia page is a practical example)

The claimed benefits, especially for wikis, are that collaborative projects are accelerated, emails are hugely reduced, innovation happens through serendipitous connections, unnecessary barriers are broken down and the risks posed by leaving staff are reduced because their contributions remain.

This level-headed analysis from the 21/7/2006 Register in David Tebbut's IT manager's guide to social computing summarises the business uses of "social computing", and is the kind of thing to  show people who are turned off by terms like "Web 2.0".  It has an interesting set of links at the bottom of the second page.

Here is a practical - indeed stunning - example of how a wiki can aid knowledge management and creation - admittedly in circumstances in which a large number of people are exercised, and want to "do something":

E-learning for public library staff. Guest Contribution by Howard Hills.

E-skillsUk has just completed a major new report evaluating an e-learning programme rolled out to public library staff in the UK. The report is on on the E-skillsUK web site.  The report contains much of interest, including the major changes the library service is going through to move from a process organisation (ordering, giving out, taking in and maintaining book stock) to a pro-active service organisation (encouraging more participation in reading, supporting readers in a number of different ways).

As someone who knew little about libraries I was surprised both at the extent of the changes and the direction. Libraries are set to become learning centres: this will take time, and will depend on the creation of partnerships, but that is the trend; so what better place than to try out a new approach to e-learning? And I have "seen it all" (in the Royal Navy, Ministry of Defence, LloydsTSB, and PricewaterhouseCoopers) so that is perhaps a surprising comment.

The method of learning reminds me of the paper organisers new staff in Lloyds Bank were issued with that planned out there first week at work, who to talk to, which learning modules to study, which work based assignments to complete, which books to read; then write it up and review the learning with a supervisor. The Frontline programme uses the same approach electronically using coaches and assessors who are themselves completers of the course. The result is very low tech, and very successful. The same approach could be implemented easily by many employers.

Lessons learnt, include that:

• the supervisor/coach role using a recent completer of the course works well;
• the majority of learners considered themselves reasonable confident with IT;
• all found access to IT easy (perhaps not surprisingly with the widespread public access to IT available in libraries);
• managers felt the implementation was very straightforward and painless for them.

If you want to know more - read the report, or email Howard Hills - howard [AT] howardhills.net. www.howardhills.net

Perceptive review of Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail" by David Jennings

David Jennings has posted a long and typically perceptive review of  Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail". It starts:

It's a measure of a term achieving zeitgeist status when people apply it liberally, even in circumstances where it doesn't really fit — as with the managers who sought to label their initiatives as Total Quality Management or Business Process Re-engineering in the nineties, even if they only half-grasped the original intention behind these terms. In the 21 months since Chris Anderson published his article on the Long Tail in Wired, this new term has come close to achieving similar status.

Link to the full review.

The "One Laptop Per Child" wiki, and an interesting March 2006 article from the FT

June 2006 demonstration of a working prototype of the OLPC laptop, with Red Hat engineer and Mozilla Corporation board member Christopher Blizzard

 

This 1/8/2006 report states that Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have all tendered commitments to purchase one million "100$ Linux Laptops" being developed under the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

The One Laptop Per Child Wiki is well worth browsing. Though currently the wiki seems rather stronger on technology than on curriculum and methods of use - "While ultimately, the work on curricula will be done by the ministries of education who buy this, there are several efforts underway to explore some of the education potential from this project" sounded ominously unrealistic - there are several interesting pages on the wiki about educational content ideas. The emphasis is on "not imitating mainstream ideas". Personally I'd have thought there would be at least some mileage in repurposing existing web and CD-based educational content - when and if it is any good - much of which has been produced in the developed world, with funding from the public purse. Also relevant is this longish piece by Ian Limbach in the 26/3/2006 Financial Times, about the place of ICT infrastructure in development, with a particular emphasis on Ethiopia's decision to flood the whole country with broadband connectivity.

Amended 7/8/2006 to substitute video of working demonstration for photo of mock-up. 

Report from Sheffield "Spotlight on Moodle" event with Martin Dougiamas (Moodle Lead Developer) and Jason Cole (Product Development Manager at the Open University)

Martin Dougiamas and Jason Cole (who is responsible for the OU's Moodle implementation) spoke in Sheffield on 27/7/2006.

The event was organised by South Yorkshire's e-Learning and Open Source Special Interest Groups, and sponsored by:

• Ufi/learndirect;
• the South Yorkshire branch of the British Computer Society (BCS);
• the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), South Yorkshire Branch;
• Tribal Technology.

The continuation post contains an unpolished precis of Martin's and Jason's talks, and a very brief summary of responses to 2 of the questions that were raised subsequently.  Slides for Martin and Jason's presentations will be available soon are available as a 4MB ZIP file, and I will link to them from this post. Responsibility for the whole of this piece rests with me, and I will gladly correct any errors that are pointed out to me.

Blackboard's US Patent 6988138 seems to cover most of the "commodity" features of a learning environment

On 26 July, Blackboard Inc, which last year took over WebCT, and is the dominant vendor of course management systems, announced that it has been granted a US patent "for technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods", and that patents corresponding to the US patent "have been issued or are pending all over the world including in the European Union, China, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand India, Israel, Mexico, South Korea, Hong Kong and Brazil".

Here is an abstract of the patent itself, taken from the US Patent Office record for Patent 6988138.

A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are available to the students over a network such as the Internet. Various levels of functionality are provided through a three-tiered licensing program that suits the needs of the institution offering the program. In addition, an open platform system is provided such that anyone with access to the Internet can create, manage, and offer a course to anyone else with access to the Internet without the need for an affiliation with an institution, thus enabling the virtual classroom to extend worldwide.

Unsurprisingly, Blackboard is silent as to whether and if yes how and with (against?) whom it intends to make use of the patent; The day after its announcement, Blackboard filed a patent infringement claim against the Canadian company Desire2Learn [PDF file], hosted at this link by The Inquirer.  It will now be interesting to see how much "prior art" is claimed by others in the event that the patent is actually used in anger by Blackboard - the best place at the moment (2/8/2006) to put it and to find it especially the former looks to be this area of Wikipedia. From my own experience, thinking back to the early days of the Learning To Teach On-Line course in 1997 or 1998 (which I and several readers of Fortnightly Mailing had a hand in developing), I seem to recall:

• delivery over the Internet, with materials, tasks/assignments and discussion-board and chat system all accessible by browser;
• browser-based system for amending the materials;
• learners and tutors all over the world, with learners enroled to several of the institutions in the (then) South Yorkshire Further Education Consortium, and tutors employed by several different institutions.

We used the widely available ideas, knowhow, and Open Source and proprietary software that were available at the time, and nothing we did was particularly special. According to the US Patent Office web site, Blackboard's initial patent application was made in 1999.

More recent related Fortnightly Mailing posts include: 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.

Minor change made to the final paragraphs: 27/7/2006; bigger changes (indicated by used of strike-out font above: 1/8/2006; link to Wikipedia page added 2/8/2006; link to Desire2Learn court response to Blackboard's patent infringement claim, and to more recent Fortnightly Mailing posts, added 15/9/2006, and 29/10/2006, and 27/1/2007.

If ever you need a new disclaimer

Thanks to Sarah Blandy for this terrific disclaimer, from the Peak District Weather web site.

This information is provided to the best of our knowledge. We have collected and collated it in good faith but we are not responsible for its accuracy and anyone intending to make use of this information is advised to check it out.

Well that's the legal stuff sorted.

Should you decline to comply with this warning, a leather winged demon of the night will soar from the deep malevolent caverns of the white peak into the shadowy moonlit sky and, with a thirst for blood on its salivating fangs, search the very threads of time for the throbbing of your heartbeat. Just thought you'd want to know that.