Mike Malloch's SuprGlu : recent blogging, bookmarking and images / policy/

I thought I'd share these figures/drawings from the notorious patent, since they were such a pain to access and organise. You can read the Blackboard document at the US Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Full-Text Database, but it refers to 41 figures/drawings, and these are organised in a very awkward navigational format, viewable one at a time in a pane that requires a lot of scrolling (the uspto site says this is because some patents are 5000 pages long, and thus they cannot afford in general to allow omnibus downloads).

I wanted to read the patent, so I downloaded all these images, gave them meaningful names and rotated them as necessary so that I could make reference to them in a sensible way. That was such a pain that I thought I'd spare others the trouble, so I uploaded the images to flickr, gave those images complete titles based on the captions in the patent document, and placed them in order in a Flickr set: Figures from Blackboard's Patent (also available as a Flickr slideshow). If you want to have a local copy of all the figures (for printing etc), I also uploaded the figures as a zip full of TIFFs to my yahoo briefcase.

While I'm at it with links to resources... I've collected a good set of links in my del.icio.us tag 'blackboard', and will continue to add items I feel are particularly useful or important. Best viewed in our shiny new interactive tag-viewer: mmalloch/tagviewer?tag=blackboard.

By the way, I hope to post next week about these slick new tools we've been writing for interactive viewing of del.icio.us tags, clouds, items and related tags (and even for live-searching tagged sites!). Lots of goodness on the way and we'll release variants for Plone and plain html embeds under GPL as soon as the interfaces are complete.

And I also hope to post sometime soon with my own feelings about the Blackboard patent issue. For the moment, let me just say that having spent the summer of 1998 in Blackboard's DC offices (seconded there from the UK to do some IMS work on metadata), and having spent a lot of that time interacting with the architects of Blackboard's subsequent systems, I know that these guys did not 'invent' the VLE, and that they knew they weren't 'inventing' the VLE.

On the other hand, I've never understood why people are interested in these 'L' blinking 'E's in the first place. I prefer to call these things 'procurement-ware', since their sole use in the real world is to get bought by IT departments as evidence that they 'offer online learning'. I agree with those who've pointed out that outlawing the monolithic VLE really doesn't matter - it'd be wonderful if anybody peddling such monstrosities could be sued (and not just BB's competitors :o) ...I think a bit of student protest would be very welcome, against the injustice of this nuisance patent, but also against the injustice of cramming procurement-ware down students' eyeballs ... "No L Es" anyone?

Technorati Tags: blackboard, patents

I'll be participating in an meeting in Manchester hosted by CETIS on June 6th. This is a meeting of experts, the day before CETIS' public meeting on personal learning environments. We experts ( ahem :o) were asked to contribute very short position papers in advance of the meeting. I've pasted my position paper below (also available in a pdf version).

By the way, apologies for the scarcity of these posts.. I've been burning both ends of the midnight oil for a while now and just haven't had time to write...

Patterns in the clouds: Some thoughts on not being completely wrong about PLEs

To kick things off, let me admit that I have been completely wrong about some previous "xLx"s. When "virtual learning environments" and "learning objects" began to be spoken of in the 90's, I was one of the original dupes. Back then, I would tell anyone who would listen that these objects and environments, powered as they were by Standards™, were going to make cheap online learning possible, even ubiquitous. The web was great, and everyone saw its potential for learners, but creating good learning experiences online was hard and labour-intensive. To address that obstacle, software & standards architects had seen a way to augment the infrastructure.

Augmenting the infrastructure was what I assumed it was all about. When people spoke about 'learning environments', I took it as read that we were talking about smart middleware that added value to content and supported rich interactions across users and applications. It seemed obvious that by 'learning objects' people meant clever little programmatic objects that bundled content with code and knew how to hook up with each other in those smart environments. Begging, of course, the little question of engineering the actual software, but I assumed that (a) everyone knew about that little matter, and (b) the hard work would get done - what with big institutions on board, and big standards to help them work together for a common good.

I was completely wrong. That 90's jargon in effect meant something like... 'learning environment': institutional intranet, but with some 'spaces' named after a university's administrative concepts; 'learning object': a web page, but in a folder with the word "course" in its name. I'm not saying that nothing good has been accomplished by researchers, developers and practitioners of online learning - just that the hard infrastructure work implied by the 90's jargon got sidestepped in the rush to market.

Evocative notions like 'Personal Learning Environment' can mean radically different kinds of thing to people in different fields of work. So, nowadays, when I get excited about how some great common good can come from sharing out some tricky work, I assume that we'd better belabour the nature of that work before we get carried away with how good everything is going to be when we have the product. Work first, then hype.

So here I go, belabouring it. But first let me make it clear that I am very excited about the potential of "PLEs" in the sense of "leverage web2.0 for learners". In fact, I spend much of my working life organising and coding for experiments which try to deliver great features to real world users by combining, proxying and integrating the "small, loose" standards, simple services and social software entities of web2.0. (We here at KnowNet have built KNotes - a GPL'd collaborative weblogging system for Zope and Plone - which makes a very useful platform for such experimenting - pardon the plug :o) Some caveats, do's & don'ts follow:

Avoid reification by repetition

If we talk about "PLEs" for long enough, people will begin to assume they exist - and that there is a particular kind of artifact which "is a" PLE. This could encourage funders and vendors to concentrate on visible omnibus products - to the neglect of much needed work on other aspects of the services, systems, clients, interfaces, applications and best-practices which could comprise an environment worth describing as 'PL'.

The 'E' is out there

Many punters will mistakenly assume that the 'environment' will be metaphorically instantiated in some kind of desktop application program or web interface, but we all know better: a large part of the work required to make 'PL' happen will be in adding new services, service layers and bits of bridging code.

Practical experiments to reveal real-world use-cases

Our ignorance of pertinent use-cases is almost complete. The best way to shake out the issues and use-cases is to undertake some serious experimentation - try to use existing services and tools to accomplish small-scale aims with real users, and document the issues, patterns and gaps. Ideally, these experiments should have access to specialist development help, so that ad-hoc features and behaviours can be added or tweaked to meet the emerging cases.

I've done some experimenting with real users, and can attest that it is subtle and tricky in the extreme to mix and mash existing services and applications for ordinary groups of users. To my mind, small-scale collaborations among educators and developers, imaginatively pushing the limits of what can be done with existing equipment, are the most pressing immediate issue for all of us.

Creativity, connection and expression - not just consumption and aggregation

There is much work to be done to enable ordinary end-users to create their own content-in-context; to add connection and commentary to what they 'pull in'. The connectedness of content in web2.0 offers huge scope for exploring new ways for learners to create interesting structurings and representations of their own, but that will require determined experimentation, research and development

Respect the web2.0 way

In any work on PLEs, let's be very careful to learn from the simplicity, clarity, user-centricity, restraint and attention to detail that characterise web2.0. The good systems-effects only emerge when usage becomes rich and plentiful - and that depends on an ecology in which the individual parts are simple, focused and easy to get along with, and in which the interoperability architecture makes very lightweight demands on its citizens. Small pieces, loosely joined. Small APIs. Small steps. And remember to make it shiny :o)

Understand the gaps in web2.0 as it is

There are some wonderful applications, services and mash-ups out there, but existing services and applications are not quite enough to support the features we can envisage learners having access to in a PLE. Only by determined experimentation can we begin to characterise and address the gaps. (By the way, I have some hunches about where a few key gaps are to be found, but have had no chance to document them yet).

Concentrate on the parts web2.0 doesn't reach

My feeling is that we should concentrate our limited efforts on implementing functionalities and services which are not already available elsewhere ( or which practice has shown are unsuitable in the forms currently available).

Tools and platforms to experiment with

One crucial development task is to provide experimenters with platforms which can be flexibly and rapidly adapted to cases as they emerge. For instance, I am not sure that we need an omnibus desktop application in itself, but I am certain that we need to be able to rapidly experiment with desktop clients for new or adapted APIs/services (structured blogging and microformats through atom-publishing or weblogging API clients for instance, or structured-commentary on items read within an aggregator). Our own KNotes - which I mentioned above - is a useful platform for playing with the serverside of such experimental interactions.

Practice, practice, practice...

In case I did not emphasise my feelings about this enough above: web2.0 is a loose set of practices as much as it is a system... 1) Practical experiments are a key immediate task; (2) practice "in anger" with the web2.0 services and social software systems is to be heartily recommended to anyone who hasn't yet done so; (3) much of what will make the 'E' in PLE will be distillations and encodings of good practice, and much of our jobs will be to solicit, support, generalise and empower such practices.

The communication challenge

This stuff is subtle. What seems obvious to us is unknown to most policy-makers - indeed it's little-known or misunderstood by most professional ed-tech developers. In my experience, people do not "get" the new opportunities until they have made fairly serious use of some of them. Spreading the meme to funders and educators will require vivid demonstrators and small real-world success stories to exemplify the potential we see represented in those pretty omni-graffle clouds :O)

As noted in the past week by Graham Attwell and others, Riina Vuorikari of Flosse Posse has organised a petition against software patents:

I am deeply concerned by the current European Commission plans on industrial property. The development of the Community Patent and European Patent Litigation Agreement, in combination with the London protocol, could lead to the EU-wide introduction of software patents. I believe that this could jeopardise developments in the field of technology enhanced learning by inhibiting innovation among European e-learning developers and practitioners.

Here are two examples of pending European Patent Office patents on e-Learning solutions that would clearly impact on current and future e-learning development:

Testing learned material in schools

Use a computer for testing pupils. The main claim covers the basic procedure, the others just specify useful things to be done. The “technical contributions” consists in the teaching that a computer can be used to do these things more efficiently. There are ongoing activities in schools and universities all around Europe that potentially could violate such patent and may have to be cancelled. As an example most open source LMS have this kind of functionality.

Language learning by comparing one’s pronunciation to that of a teacher

This covers all digital language learning systems that allow a user to compare his pronunciation of a selected piece of text to the right pronunciation. This patent is a good example of how concepts that is considered “common knowledge” suddenly becomes patented and restricted for use in the digital world. As a byproduct, the claim also seems to include the learning function of voice recognition systems like ViaVoice.

I wish I had time to do more than say "right on!". It's too easy to assume that someone else will stop the lunacy of software patents, but the fact that the EU is considering them so seriously is alarming evidence that they could become a major obstacle to the improvement of educational technology. Please go to Flosse Possee and sign the petition