e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Ed Tech Patent Update: The Innovator’s Agreement

    Carl Straumsheim has a good piece out on the Khan Academy patent Inside Higher Ed today. Much of it is a primer on the uses and limitations of defensive patents, but there is a piece on the specific nature of the patent pledge that Khan Academy has signed that I missed. The pledge, originally created by Twitter, is quite similar to my own proposal in a number of ways. It turns the decision-making regarding offensive use of the patent over to another party and, importantly, the agreement travels with the patent, even if it changes hands:

    The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.

    Shame on me for not doing my homework.

    The big difference between this pledge and the one I propose is that I am suggesting that the third party be a trust rather than the inventing engineer. This has several virtues. First, engineers die, and not all of them are going to be equally vigilant in protecting education. Can the engineer sell this right to somebody else? Can the right be inherited? If it isn’t inherited, is the patent then unencumbered? Giving the rights to a trust lays this concern to rest. It also creates a proactive deterrent because the trust could sue anybody that is asserting an ed tech patent.

    What I take from the details of Twitter’s pledge is that my proposal is probably legally viable. The original pledge just needs to be adapted to serve the specific needs of education.

  • Solving the Ed Tech Patent Problem

    You may have heard that Khan Academy has filed for several patents. Audrey Watters has written a really strong piece providing the details of the filings in the context of the history of ed tech patents and showing why some academics feel that the patent system clashes with the values upon which academia was built. In the process, she excavates some of my personal history in the Blackboard patent war. While I am sympathetic to arguments against ed tech or software patents on principle, my own personal reasons for getting involved with that fight were more utilitarian. I believed then, as I do now, that patents threaten to kill innovation in educational technology due to the specific characteristics of the market. The outcome of Blackboard v. Desire2Learn did not end that threat, although it did temporarily reduce it. The conversation being provoked by Khan Academy’s filings offers a new opportunity to come up with a more permanent solution. (more…)

  • What Blackboard’s New CEO Needs to Do Now (and how you can tell if he’s doing it)

    As Phil noted in his post, Blackboard has hired a new CEO, a guy by the name of Bill Ballhaus. We don’t know much about him yet, other than that he came from outside education. (That shouldn’t be considered a disqualifier, by the way. Instructure CEO Josh Coates also came from outside education, for example, and he has kept most of his customers very happy so far.) We’ll learn more about him over the next days, weeks, and months. In the meantime, it’s worth taking some time to consider the challenge he has in front of him.

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  • McGraw Hill’s New Personalized Learning Authoring Product

    In what has to be the softest launch ever, McGraw Hill has been quietly talking about their new personalized learning authoring system. If you ask them when it will be available to all customers, they will tell you “right now.” But since it doesn’t even have a name yet, I’m not sure how customers would ask for it. They occasionally refer to it as their “learning science platform,” but that’s not really its name.

    Here’s a dirty little secret: The “new” authoring platform is essentially a publishing front end for their SmartBooks platform. Not only is it interesting in and of itself; it also gives us some indication of one direction that the textbook publishing industry could go. (By the way, they don’t like to be called “textbook publishers” anymore. I guess the industry needs to come up with a new name for that too.)

    I was able to get a quick overview of the platform from McGraw Hill’s Chief Digital Officer Stephen Laster and SVP Zach Posner.

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  • Personalized Learning and the Teacher

    A few weeks ago, Jonathan Rees wrote a post calling out that, no matter what potential of so-called “personalized learning” for improving student outcomes, there is a potential—and a temptation—for it to be abused as a method of lowering (labor) costs in a way that also lowers educational quality and effectiveness. This is a serious and realistic concern, particularly as long as personalized learning is framed as a product rather than a set of teaching strategies.

    Phil and I have addressed this concern head-on in our latest piece on EdSurge. I suppose a battle over the meaning of the term was inevitable; why should this one be any different from all the others? There is an enormous disconnect between the way the term is used in product marketing and ed tech circles and the way it is actually applied in the real world in cases places it actually works. I have seen a number of cases in which personalized learning, as an educational strategy, produces good results for students. But every single one of those cases has had one or more good educators leading the charge, thinking hard about how to better serve the students. At its best, personalized learning is an effort to identify those classroom and institutional practices that are depersonalizing, and use technology as an aid to teaching strategies and support processes that can replace those practices with something more humane. Perhaps we should call it “undepersonalized learning.”

    As such, true personalized learning should be labor-friendly in important ways. It should put a premium on skilled educators and make a strong case for increased investment in professional development and teaching-friendly tenure and promotion practices. That doesn’t mean it will always be job-preserving. The focus should be on students and agnostic with respect to student/teacher ratios. It is possible to achieve a more humane and personal education at scale. Sometimes. With a lot of thought and iteration. But I have seen no evidence to suggest that personalized learning technologies improve outcomes significantly without good teachers at the helm, and plenty of evidence suggesting that they don’t.

  • Moodle Moves Give Hints of What a Post-Fork World Could Look Like

    Phil and I have written about the growing tension between the interests of Moodle HQ and a those of a couple of the bigger Moodle Partners, most notably Blackboard. There are a number of ways that this tension could be resolved, but one of the more dramatic possibilities would be a fork of Moodle. While we are not predicting it will happen, a couple of developments hit the wires last week that give us some idea of what the world might look like if there were a real and permanent split between the two groups.

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  • Is Open Education a Movement?

    Phil and I had a wonderful time co-keynoting the OpenEd 2015 conference. It was a hoot.

    Here is the spectacular graphic depiction of the keynote done by Tracy Kelly from BC Campus:

    And here is the post-keynote conversation that we had with the Virtually Connecting gang:

    There have also been some other interesting virtual conversations growing around the conference, first over Twitter and now in the blogosphere. Some of the ones worth reading that I have seen so far include those from Maha Bali, Clint Lalonde (parts one and two), Robert Farrow (who also captures some of the tweets), and Robin DeRosa.

    Phil and I approached our keynote as analysts because we figured that’s probably the main value that we have to offer. We wouldn’t presume to tell people what open education “should” be about, but given any particular “should,” we’re pretty good at thinking through how to achieve it. For my part of the talk I used the analogy of building the climate action movement because the open education community often speaks of itself in the language of a movement and because I happen to have some experience in that area. And if you read some of the posts I mentioned above, you will indeed see varying degrees of movement language.

    But there is an underlying question that really should be addressed explicitly: To what extent is it accurate or useful to think of open education as a movement?

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