e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Blackboard v Desire2Learn Trial Is Coming Up

    From D2L’s patent blog:

    Since our last posting, we received word that the judge has decided not to rule on any summary judgment motions – he’s letting all issues go to trial. As a result, Desire2Learn’s legal folks – inside and outside counsel – have been working overtime preparing for trial.

    We’re going to trial on February 11, in Lufkin, Texas. We anticipate that the trial will last approximately two weeks – both sides have been restricted to 18 hours each to present their cases. We continue to be grateful for the support of others in the industry. Most of the issues will be tried before a jury; inequitable conduct is tried before the judge. At this point, we’re (obviously) careful about divulging our trial strategy – we’re sorry we can’t share more.

    As much as ever, we’re confident of our defenses, including the defense of the patent’s invalidity and inequitable conduct, and the fact that we do not infringe.

    Looking for a warm place to spend a couple of weeks in February? Consider an early-spring trip to Lufkin!

    If anybody is planning to go to the trial, please let me know.

  • The Perils of Prediction

    As we watch the spectacle of the jackasses in the mainstream media blithely continue to pretend to know what they’re talking about after being repeatedly and stunning wrong in the predictions of the U.S. Presidential primary, it’s worthwhile to look in the mirror. Stephen Downes has a good report card up for those of us who had the audacity to make predictions in last year’s eLearn Magazine‘s annual crystal ball reading. After giving each of us (including himself) a grade, he muses:

    So that’s it. What did I learn from all this?

    First, that there are two major types of predictions: one, which identifies a current trend, and says it will continue; and the other, that identifies something novel or unexpected. It seems clear that the former predictions are easy and safe and not especially useful. The latter, while not as safe, were much more useful to people.

    There are also different types of predictions. Some predictions speak to attitudes. Others speak to trends (including a subset of these that suggest a trend will go mainstream). And still, others speak of technological or system-wide advances. And finally, the most useful predictions identify side-effects – the result of some unexpected event and development. For example: predicting people will want video is one thing, predicting that it will become popular is another, predicting that Flash video will help video become accessible is another, but predicting YouTube is most useful of all.

    And third, scale is a tricky issue. There were many predictions that will probably come true – some day. But they did not come true in 2007. We want to reward such predictions, because we feel they are accurate, but unless it happens, it’s just another false prediction. Another trend was a slew (the perpetrators won’t be named) who correctly predicted last year’s event or trend.

    Good points all. I try make predictions about areas where I have some personal knowledge of events that maybe not everybody has and to be as aggressive in my predictions as I feel that I realistically can, but I do tend to err on the side of caution.  Sadly, I don’t think I’m nearly smart enough to predict something like YouTube so I generally don’t try to shoot the moon, so to speak. I think it’s good to know one’s own limitations.

  • Gadgets Instead of Portlets?

    Via CMSWatch, an interesting facet of the Apache Shindig proposal has surfaced. Shindig is Apache’s server-side container for OpenSocial and OpenSocial, in turn, is (among other things) based on Google Gadgets.

    Here’s the interesting bit:

    A social application, in this context, is an application run by a third party provider and embedded in a web page, or web application, which consumes services provided by the container and by the application host. This is very similar to Portal/Portlet technology, but is based on client-side compositing, rather than server.

    I was aware, of course, that you can put a Google gadget on a web page, but I hadn’t thought about it explicitly in terms of a portlet alternative before now.

    I’m curious to hear from more technically savvy readers–especially those associated with LMS development: Have you thought about building a gadget server into your LMS? What are the pros and cons? How does this option compare to other display “standards”? How hard is it to make gadgets accessible? And could this work as, say, part of the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability standard?

  • Is Obama's Victory Partially Driven by Facebook?

    Here’s an interesting tidbit from BlueMassGroup:

    David reported about a year ago, and again in February, that Obama’s FaceBook organizing efforts dwarfed those of his competitors. I think we can all agree that most FaceBook users are under 44. By May, the largest Obama group on Facebook had 323,899 members, compared with 2,089 for the largest Clinton group (and 58,982 for the largest anti-Clinton group). The Obama group has now grown to 411,631 members. Indeed, the Obama campaign even has its own application on FaceBook that keeps supporters constantly updated with news and events related to the candidate. Several thousand people have installed it in their accounts.

    Is this the first Facebook election (just as, perhaps, 2004 was the first MeetUp election — that functionality now subsumed into most campaign websites)? Perhaps Saturday’s Facebook/ABC News debate will tell us more.

    I don’t want to take anything away from Obama, but given the unprecedented turnout of young voters–turnout that U.S. Democrats have tried to achieve election after election with significantly less success–it’s worth looking around to see what factors in addition to the candidate himself might be driving the change. I’d be really interested to hear first-hand accounts by young Iowa caucus-goers about what role Facebook and similar social networking sites may have played in helping them to become more politically invested.

  • Patrick Masson in Campus Technology

    My buddy Patrick Masson, fellow escapee from the SUNY Learning Network and current CIO of SUNY Delhi, has a great interview in Campus Technology about his first year as a CIO in a small, relatively rural college. As usual, Pat is breathtakingly honest. He’s a model leader. When I was congratulating him on the publication, I noted that it wasn’t exactly the usual puff piece that you tend to see about campus administrators. His reply was, “Well, I’m not exactly a puffy guy.”

    So true.

  • My Personal Feed

    Despite my apparent reputation for being Mr. Hip-to-the-Scene Blogger Dude, I’m not exactly livin’ la Web 2.0 vida loca. I almost never blog about personal details of my life. I have a Facebook account, but I don’t do much with it. I killed my MySpace account after getting creeped out by “friend” invitations from 13-year-old girls, phone sex operators, phone sex operators pretending to be 13-year-old girls, 13-year-old girls pretending to be phone sex operators, and other combinations thereof. My Second Life name, Xeno Balderdash, pretty much sums up my my experiences to-date with SL. (I haven’t even bothered to install the client on my current computer.) I have never tried the World of Warcraft. The whole notion of Twitter frankly horrifies me. I sign up for lots of accounts for all sorts of social software sites when they first come out but pretty much abandon them all until I suddenly am reminded that I have an account with them as other people try to “friend” me. (The latest is Spock. I am suddenly getting a slew of messages from people who want to join my “trust network.” Folks, I’ll click the button to do the thing, but chances are good that I’m going to learn a lot more about Spock by watching you than you are by watching me. But hey, live long and prosper.)

    Still, I have learned over time that I should be patient and not make snap judgments because I am often the last person to figure out the value of a new social tool. Heck, I thought blogging was a narcissistic waste of time when I first heard about it. So I try to watch other, smarter people and learn from them. As such, I have been lucky to have a few friends (both the Facebook kind and the real kind) who do the whole Web 2.0 “living out loud” thing very gracefully, where I actually feel enriched by the personal aspects of their lives that they make public. There’s an art to it, and I am beginning to think that art is worth learning.

    So today I am making a baby step in that direction by making available my personal RSS feed.  This is the very lightly filtered sum total of all the items in my RSS reader (which happens to be Google Reader). It is not filtered for e-learning and related topics; it’s whatever happens to be in reader and catching my personal attention from day to day. (At the moment, it’s a lot of wonky articles about United States politics and economics.) I basically apply the following criteria:

    • It has to appear in my feed reader.
    • I have to read the item (and if it’s only a sentence or two, I have to have clicked through to the web page).
    • I have to not feel that reading it was a total waste of my time.

    That’s it. I don’t have to agree with the article, or think it’s a great article or have it be about a particular topic. It’s everything in my reader that I read without regretting. Thanks to the magic of Google Reader and AJAX, it takes so little effort for me to share an item I read in my feeder that it’s worth my time to do it. And because I’m a freak for analysis, I’m running the feed through Feedburner to see (a) if anybody actually cares what I’m reading and (b) what the trends are in terms of overlap of interest, if any. And if you do find this valuable, please let me know why you find it valuable. I really do want to know.
    Enjoy, I guess.

  • Congrats to the Edublog Award Winners

    I’m remiss in not getting this out earlier. Delightfully, I’m completely unfamiliar with most of the award winners. I haven’t had time yet to check out all of these new finds, so if anybody discovers a particularly exciting blog among this group, please let me know.