e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Overview of Oracle's Participation in Open Source

    I just discovered this summary of a speech about Oracle’s participation in open source (and open standards) given by Omar Tazi. Apparently, Tazi is Oracle’s Chief Open Source Evangelist. (Who knew?) Tazi himself affirms that the summary is reasonably accurate in his comment on it. (It doesn’t look like he’s aware of our work with Sakai, though.) At any rate, if you’re interested in learning more about what Oracle is doing in the realm of open source, you might want to read Omar Tazi’s blog.

  • Four Ideas for the Future of Sakai

    One of the emerging themes from the Sakai Amsterdam conference was a strong desire in the community to develop a coherent vision for Sakai’s developing educational value proposition. Now, because of Sakai’s heritage as a project grown out of an alliance of strong, independent institutions rather than led by a single, charismatic leader (like a Martin Dougiamas or a Linus Torvalds), the process of fostering such a shared vision is a bit complicated. The most likely scenario is that capabilities first developed to meet local concerns of one or more of the members gets recognized by the community at large as addressing a common and reasonably deep need; it could then get picked up as part of Sakai’s identity.

    I’d like to suggest four capabilities existing in at least prototypical form within Sakai today that could lead us to a vision for Sakai as providing unique and valuable benefits to the teachers and students that use it. That word “unique” is important. While it is always tempting for the Sakai community to try to emulate the admirable success of the Moodle community, the fact is that Sakai is not now and never will be Moodle, just as it is not now and never will be Blackboard. The educational potential for Sakai has to come from its own DNA as a technology platform and, even more importantly, as a community. With that in mind, the four ideas I am suggesting today are all about taking advantage of the…um…Sakai-ness of Sakai.

    (more…)

  • Blackboard and D2L Markman Filings Are Up

    Thanks to Seb for the reference.

    D2L has posted the latest filings from both sides, detailing their competing interpretations of Blackboard’s patent. (Before you can decide if somebody has infringed on a patent, you first have to decide what that patent means.) The judge will evaluate these competing claims in what’s known as a Markman hearing.

    I haven’t read the documents, but according to Seb, D2L’s filing references the Wikipedia page on the History of Virtual Learning Environments that the ed tech community collectively created in response to the Blackboard patent. If you contributed to that page (and hundreds of people did), then give yourself a pat on the back. You played a small role in the legal history of our profession.

  • Sakai Amsterdam 2007: The State of the Union

    I have decided to hold off posting about individual presentations at the Sakai Amsterdam conference until the podcasts of those presentations are available. In the meantime, I thought it might be helpful to provide my general impressions of the state of the Sakai community. It’s always difficult to get a sense of the likely evolution of an open source project. Historic performance is not necessarily predictive of future performance. So what I’m going to talk about here is not so much Sakai the software as Sakai the community. How is it evolving? How is that evolution likely to impact the software in the future?

    After spending a rather full week of long days talking to many community members, I can honestly say that I have never been more hopeful about the future of Sakai than I am today.

    (more…)

  • Tim Lee and EduPatents

    Correction: Thanks to Seb Schmoller for pointing out that the op ed piece is not, in fact, by Tim Berners Lee but by Timothy B. Lee. Very different guy. Nevertheless, the points made by…um…the other Tim Lee are no less valid than they would have been coming from The Man Himself.

    There’s a great op ed piece in the New York Times by Tim Berners Lee Timothy B. Lee on the impact of software patents, drawing on a 1991 quote from Bill Gates:

    Microsoft sang a very different tune in 1991. In a memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” Mr. Gates worried that “some large company will patent some obvious thing” and use the patent to “take as much of our profits as they want.”

    He goes on to use the Verizon suit against Vonage as an example of why he believes Gates was right then and is wrong now:

    The Gates memo predicted that a large company would “patent some obvious thing,” and that’s exactly what Verizon has done. Two of its patents cover the concept of translating phone numbers into Internet addresses. It is virtually impossible to create a consumer-friendly Internet telephone product without doing that. So if Verizon prevails on appeal, it will probably be able to drive Vonage out of business. Consumers will suffer from fewer choices and higher prices, and future competitors will be reluctant to enter markets dominated by patents.

    There’s no mention of the education market in his editorial, but the inference is not a hard one to make regarding the dangers to our industry. This is a great piece to share with anyone in education who has questions about why people worry about edupatents.

  • Sakai Resources Tool Meeting

    I arrived in Amsterdam before the main conference started and had the pleasure of sitting in on a bit of the Resources tool working group. (I didn’t last too long, having flown in that morning on the redeye from Philadelphia.) At any rate, there were a couple of pieces of good discussion that managed to penetrate the haze of sleep deprivation and jet lag.

    First, the group is interested in making it possible to organize the primary navigation within a course from being organized around tools (i.e., in a Blackboard-ish way) to being organized around curricular goals and content (i.e., in a Moodle-ish or Boddington-ish way). To me, this difference tells me more about an LMS and its design philosophy than probably any other single feature. It is the design philosophy litmus test for distinguishing between a developer-centric and a truly teacher-centric vision of an online class. (Like many, I’m not entirely confident that it gets us to a student-centric vision of an online class, but PLEs are another conversation entirely.) The Resources Tool group is not the only Sakai group working on this; I believe that Melete wants to be able to provide the same functionality. I don’t know enough about the different options to have an opinion about the best way to reach this goal; I’m just glad that people are working on it.

    The second bit is confirmation that Sakai is moving in the direction of adopting JSR-170, the Java standard for content repositories. One of the incentives for this move is apparently system performance, but I’m more excited about it because it gives us an opportunity to get student and teacher content out of course instance silos and into a persistent, easily accessible place where people can continue to make use of that content through a variety of enabling tools. I note with pleasure that Moodle also has plans to support a content repositories through JSR-170, including a PHP/Java bridge. So very soon, the two most influential open source LMSs will both connect to content repositories that sit directly under the course tools and support the same technical standards.

  • Going to the Sakai Amsterdam Conference

    I’ll be in Amsterdam next week for the Sakai conference. I’m not generally very good at the live blogging thing, since I like to focus on listening rather than writing. (I’m not a very good note taker for the same reason.) But I will make an effort to live-blog where I can and do after-the-fact posts where I can’t on stuff that may be of general interest.

    Stay tuned.