Fortnightly Mailing

Two contrasting views about software patents. A debate between Eben Moglen and Blackboard's Matt Small

"a very effective trial lawyer summing up his case before a jury, and a corporate attorney reaching for a compromise"

Updated 15/12/2006, and a broken link fixed 14/10/2013

A couple of years ago, in Fortnightly Mailing Number 44, I mentioned Eben Moglen's work for the Free Software Foundation:

"Not many academic lawyers start off as programmer/analysts with IBM, and then switch to law. Eben Moglen is now Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia Law School, and acts pro bono for the Free Software Foundation.  For interesting samples of Moglen's views, see The dotCommunist Manifesto and Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture."

Moglen has come to the fore as the lawyer behind the Free Software Foundation's ex parte application for a re-examination by the US Patent Office of the Blackboard Patent.

On 6/12/2006 Moglen gave the keynote at the Sakai Conference in Atlanta, and later on in the day he and Matt Small, Blackboard Inc.'s General Counsel, took part in a debate about the Blackboard Patent. Jim Farmer [20 kB PDF], who wrote The new "post-patent" environment for e-learning: a perspective as a Fortnightly Mailing Guest Contribution in September of this year, has done a brilliant job of summarising the debate between Moglen and Small [190 kB PDF]. (Notes from Moglen's keynote will be available in due course, and I will post a link to them from this piece.) The debate, which is relevant to the situation in Europe rather than just the US, provides plenty of insights into "the software patents question". Sakai has done us a service by organising it; and Blackboard a service by taking part in it (whatever you think about the logic or justification for the Blackboard patent, you have to admire Small for going into the lion's den and patiently holding his and Blackboard's ground, albeit with a much more reasonable tone than is used by the lawyers that Blackboard instructs [63 kB PDF]): and it emphasises that the dispute, in which Moglen is vigorously confident of long term victory, is really between two world views, rather than between organisations, or about a particular piece of software.

Jim's write-up should be taken alongside the podcasts of Eben Moglen's keynote [78 minutes, 37 MB MP3 - gripping, forceful, wide-ranging, devoid of the slightest shred of self-doubt, not to mention entertaining] and the debate between Moglen and Matt Small [69 minutes, 32 MB MP3].  10/12/2006.  And you might also want to take account of Michael Feldstein's carefully thought out and heartfelt "from ringside" views about the debate, which [15/12/2006], over the last few days has accrued some exceptionally interesting comments, including a long explanation by Eben Moglen about his strategy, and his scathing views about Desire2Learn's. They shed a lot of light on the final part of this comment from Jim's introduction to the transcript:

"Typically I try to summarize the key points from a presentation in notes like these. However, the important points are all subtle points of interpretation. I suggest you listen first to the audio recording of Moglen’s keynote for context and then the entire audio recording several times in conjunction with these notes to make your own interpretation. I have transcribed, with errors anyone unfamiliar with transcription and with only primitive software installed would make, the parts that I believe should be carefully reviewed. The further the presentation moved from Joseph Hardin’s introductory questions to confrontation, the more I thought you would find the points less obvious and the transcription useful."

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.

Computers in schools are like zebra mussels - the social life of technology

Picture source: Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources

The Times Educational Supplement's coverage of a recent talk by Professor Yong Zhao, Director of the Centre for Teaching and Technology and US-China Centre for Research on Educational Excellence at Michigan State University, to the UK's Specialist Schools and Academies Trust Conference, had the strap line: "Technology is triggering teachers' survival instincts, warn US academics". The TES reports that Zhao's talk was received in frosty silence and with much shaking of heads. According to the TES, Zhao:

"believes that computers are like an invading species in schools. Survival of the fittest will dictate whether they are ousted, establish an uncomfortably equilibrium with the existing species (teachers, apparently) or replace them. "

I was not at the talk, but my guess is that this 1 hour video [100 MB MP4] of a wide-ranging, perceptive, and internationally well-informed talk by Yong Zhao given earlier in the year covers the same ground, as does this 2003 PDF of a paper by Yong Zhao and Kenneth Frank. What I found striking about the talk is the way Zhao pulls in data about educational use of ICT from across the world, and draws out similarities in the (failed) approaches of different OECD countries (including the large amount of funding poured wastefully into ICT spending in schools) over the last 10 years.  Zhao's comments on the difficulties of innovation, and the "normal fact" that  technology-as-innovation (new unreliable complicated system) fails, whilst technology-as-appliance (e.g. iPOD) are also interesting. His subsequent analysis, in which he views technology innovation and its spread and embedding from an ecological perspective, though much more contentious, provides plenty of "aha!" insights.  Watching this will be an hour well-spent.

Educational change and ICT - a new report from Becta says "concentrate on people not technology"

An outline of the eSIR research methodology

Last year Becta commissioned the Open University's Peter Twining, Roger Broadie, Deidre Cook, Karen Ford, David Morris, Alison Twiner, and Jean Underwood, to lead a review of Priorities 2 and 3 of the DfES e-Strategy, as they relate to schools and colleges. (3/12/2006 - not all the authors are OU employees. See Peter Twining's comment below for clarification.) These Priorities are (or rather were, at the time the report was commissioned; the six in the 2005 e-Strategy having since been boiled down to four): Priority 2. Integrated online personal support for children and learners, and  Priority 3. A collaborative approach to personalised learning activities.

The resulting "e-Strategy Implementation Review" (eSIR), which should be said with a northern accent to get the acronym's weak quip, has just been published as a 106 page, 2 MB PDF.

A short post like this cannot properly cover the content of the report, so all I am attempting here is to convey its breadth and depth.

In 19 different languages - eLearningPapers - first issue of a new European digital publication

eLearning Papers, is an ambitious new EU-funded digital publication "providing articles, interviews and good practices related to e-learning", all of which appear to be available in 19 different languages, which is a major plus. Articles in the first edition are as follows.

by Kussai Shahin, Cristina Cogoi, Daniele Sangiorgi

mGBL - mobile Game-Based Learning: perspectives and usage in learning and career guidance topics

by Sharon  Monti Bonafede, Felix San Vicente, Vanio Preti

Characteristics and Capacity of e-learning platforms for learning languages (Summer 2006)

by Ian Roffe

E-learning Development and Exchange: practical lessons from developing e-language tools for support in lesser-used European languages

by Tapio Varis

eLearning and higher education

by Jean Johnson, Jonny Dyer

User-defined content in a constructivist learning environment

Development of measures of online privacy concern and protection for use on the Internet

Pre-print of an interesting study by Tom Buchanan, Carina Paine, and Adam Joinson [100 kB PDF] to appear as an article in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. The aim of the study described is to develop a robust, reliable measure of privacy concerns and behavior suitable for administration as a short questionnaire via the Internet. Abstract:

"As the Internet grows in importance, concerns about online privacy have arisen. We describe the development and validation of three short Internet-administered scales measuring privacy related attitudes (‘Privacy Concern’) and behaviors (‘General Caution ’and ‘Technical Protection’). In Study 1, 515 people completed an 82-item questionnaire from which the three scales were derived. In Study 2, scale validity was examined by comparing scores of individuals drawn from groups considered likely to differ in privacyprotective behaviors. In Study 3, correlations between the scores on the current scales and two established measures of privacy concern were examined. We conclude that these scales are reliable and valid instruments suitable for administration via the Internet, and present them for use in online privacy research."

The items and instructions to participants for the Internet administered questionnaires are included as Tables 1 and 2 at the end of the article. There are  6 questions each for General Caution and for Technical Protection "privacy behaviours", and 16 questions for Privacy Concern, i.e. "privacy attitude".

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, trust, disclosure and the Internet.

Evaluation of Open Source repository systems

Here is a well-structured and clear 41 page technical evaluation [250 kB PDF] of 3 major Open Source open access repository systems (DSpace, ePrints, and Fedora), written by Max Maxwell, Jun Yamog, and Richard Wyles. The evaluation was funded by the Tertiary Education Commission of New Zealand. It was published in September 2006, and, in the case of ePrints, covers version 2, rather than the presently available version 3, which has superior work-flow capabilities.

TRACE Project web site. A meaty resource about dealing with restructuring.

For the last two years I've had a paid involvement in a big multi-partner European trade union project called TRACE - Trade Unions Anticipating Change in Europe.  Under the auspices of the European Trade Union Confederation, TRACE brought together trade union organisations from across Europe, across a wide range of economic sectors, both public and private. TRACE finishes at the end of November 2006. One of the main outputs from TRACE is its web site, and which has recently been filled with a wide range of materials from the project, relating to restructuring, including:

• learning materials;
• workshop reports;
• handbooks;
• presentations;
• analysis tools;
• online courses;
• "topic sheets";
• web links.

LEX: new reports from the UK into the learner experience of e-learning

Image from LEX Report

Much of the discourse about e-learning is between people with ideas about how to organise and deliver it. The JISC-funded LEX project gets beyond this because its focus is on how learners experience e-learning. LEX is also interesting because it is the joint work of an unusual combination of organisations: Glasgow Caledonian University, and the London-based Open Learning Partnership (a small educational charity dedicated to opening up learning opportunities for all), whose collaboration started in the course of an earlier JISC part-funded project that I managed called Union Education Online. The main authors of the LEX study are Linda Creanor and Kathryn Trinder from Glasgow Caledonian University, and Doug Gowan and 
Carol Howells from the Open Learning Partnership, with Terry Mayes having had what looks to have been a decisive influence over the study's research methodology.

A key purpose of the LEX study was to:

"create materials and resources that by reflecting learner voices would be of real assistance to course designers, tutors and support staff making use of ICT"

The two main outputs from LEX are now freely available. They are:

1. The LEX Report [800 kB PDF], a coherently structured, comprehensive 45 page report on the LEX findings, which concentrated on the following research questions:

• What might characterise effective learners in an e-learning context? (e.g. IT skills, confidence, technology-rich background)
• What beliefs and intentions do effective learners display? (e.g. understanding of the teaching and learning process and their role within that, personal motivation, emotional aspects of technology use)
• What strategies do effective learners display? (e.g. managing their learning, fitting life around learning, coping with problems, willingness to engage in e-learning)

2. The LEX Guides [450 kB PDF], a clearly written set of short guides for the different main actors in e-learning -  Learner, Author and designer, Support staff, Manager, Tutor - which, refreshingly, are richly illustrated with quotes from the learners who took part in the study.

It is the way that learners are given a voice by this work that is most important: both documents deserve to be widely read and used; and this work shows clearly the value that can flow from of cross-sectoral collaboration in e-learning R&D, collaboration that is, sadly, much reduced within JISC-funded projects as a result of  the Learning and Skills Council's recent decision to cease to contribute to this aspect of JISC's work.

Manchester - free afternoon workshops on technology, media, communities and learning

Previous Guest Contributor Mark van Harmelen is the person behind a series of 10 afternoon workshops on Technology, Media, Communities and Learning run by the Manchester University School of Computer Science, between now and mid March 2007. If I lived in Manchester I'd try to get to some of them.

ALT's 2006 Conference: MP3s of keynote speeches and theme leader summings up

Reasonable quality audio files, alongside copies of all but Stephen Heppell's presentation,  are now available on the Association for Learning Technology web site (I work for ALT half-time), or below, and they represent a mix of sometimes quite provocative material. Stephen Heppell, in particular, has a good dry sense of humour, and strongly questions whether conventional institutionally based education has much of a future. (And most of the time you find yourself wanting to believe him even if at the back of your mind you guess that the evidence may be a bit thin.) Tim O'Shea asserts the long term strength of big research universities. Diana Oblinger comments on how today's learners are different, and draws on EDUCAUSE's excellent work on building design.  The end of conference summings up by the theme leaders, who are drawn from a wide range of roles, provide a good insight into what makes the ALT conference worth attending.

• Stephen Heppell's 7/9/2006 keynote: 19 MB, 65 minute MP3;
• Diana Oblinger's 5/9/2006 keynote: 1.5 MB PDF 25 MB, 88 minute MP3;
• Tim O'Shea's keynote 6/9/2006: 5.5 MB PPT 16 MB, 56 minute MP3;
• Terry Anderson's summing up from "next generation technology" theme: 3.6 MB PPT 21 MB, 73 minute MP3;
• Phil Candy's summing up from "next generation learners" theme: 0.3 MB PPT 13 MB, 44 minute MP3;
• Gilly Salmon's summing up from "next generation learning" theme: 0.8 MB PPT 9 MB, 33 minute MP3;
• Chris Yapp's summing up from "next generation providers" theme: 3.7 MB PPT 19 MB, 68 minute MP3.