e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Ed Tech

The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.

  • Web Analytics, Gaming Technology, and the LMOS

    A while back, a blog conversation between Mark Oehlert and Lee Kraus regarding how to knit together lots of embedded, widget/gadget like learning applications into a coherent picture of what and how learners are doing. To begin with, the idea they’re toying with is very similar to the LMOS but focused on a corporate market and workflow learning. What really got me thinking, though, was when they started talking about a dashboard somewhat like Google Analytics to track learner progress. (Those corporate folks sure do love their dashboards.) Something about this really clicked with me, but I couldn’t quite articulate how I would want to see this work in an academic environment.

    That is, until Raph Koster’s post put me onto VisitorVille–“Web Stats in Video Game Format!”

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  • Welcome to e-Literate 2.0

    At long last, I have managed to move my blog over to WordPress. Many thanks to Sarah Lewis at Blogging Expertise for helping me get my content out of ExpressionEngine, style the site the way I wanted, and make sure that old URLs didn’t break. She was able to head some problems off at the pass that probably would have taken somebody with less WordPress-specific experience days to figure out.

    There are a number of little issues I’m still working out (mostly small post formatting problems that I’m correcting by hand), but everything should work here. Please let me know if you spot any problems. All major URLs, including the RSS feed, should auto-forward, but just in case, you might want to update your RSS reader to the new feed URL, which is http://feeds.feedburner.com/mfeldstein/yyMY.

    In the meantime, I thought I would take the opportunity to point out a few features of the new blog that you might find useful:

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  • Oracle AEI at the Sakai Atlanta Conference

    Here, thanks to the magic of SlideShare, are the slides from one of the Academic Enterprise Initiative (AEI) presentations at the Atlanta conference:

    A few comments on the presentation are in order:

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  • Bodington at the Sakai Conference

    This is the first installment of my promised non-patent (and non-patented) coverage of the Sakai Atlanta conference. I’m going to start with Bodington, in part because I continue to be really impressed with these guys. In my opinion, they are doing some of the most interesting work in the LMS/VLE space today. They are also the furthest along of anyone in terms of realizing the kind of system design that my colleagues and I have been calling an LMOS.

    As you may know, Bodington is going to be using Sakai as the framework for the next generation of their platform. I wrote a few posts about Bodington a while back, shortly after the announcement. The conference gave me several opportunities to hear more from the Bod team about their thinking, their project, and their progress.

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  • Blackboard Patent Celebrity Death Match

    I note with satisfaction that Eben Moglen’s keynote speech [MP3] and debate with Matthew Small [MP3] have already been reported and commented on in a number of places. (See, for example, Seb’s analysis.) This pleases me for two reasons. First, it means we have developed a healthy community response mechanism to make sure we are all informed of future patent shenanigans. The second reason it pleases me is because, frankly, I’m sick of talking about nothing but the patent fight. The Sakai conference, for example, was excellent, and there were many good conversations that I’d much rather blog about (and will blog about in due course). That said, since I was actually in the room for both presentations, I feel obliged to give my own gloss on them.

    Moglen’s keynote was fascinating. The guy is clearly brilliant. While I didn’t agree with everything he had to say, I agreed with much of it and learned much from it. The talk is well worth listening to and well worth sharing with others. Alas, I cannot say that I feel the same way about the debate between Moglen and Small.

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  • Ex Parte and Inter Partes Patent Re-Examination

    As you know by now, the Blackboard patent has been challenged at the USPTO by separate requests filed by the SFLC and D2L respectively. SFLC filed what’s known as an ex parte request, while D2L filed what’s known as an inter partes request. I think it’s important for the community to become familiar with these two strategies because we’re likely to see them employed again in our future. Seb has some nice commentary up about the basics of the specific situation with the Blackboard patent. (Be sure to read the comments; there’s one by one of the leading researchers on patent re-examination.) What follows here is more of a high-level overview of the legal strategies in general.
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  • What the Sakai/Moodle/ATutor Re-Examination Request Really Means

    By now you’ve probably seen that the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed a request to re-examine Blackboard’s patent with the USPTO on behalf of Sakai, Moodle, and ATutor. You may have also seen that D2L has filed a different kind of re-examination request with the USPTO. (SFLC’s request is what’s known as ex parte, while D2L’s is inter partes.) I’ll have more to say about the legal maneuvers in tomorrow’s post. For now, I’d like to address a larger context.

    The Sakai/Moodle/ATutor request is generally being characterized as the “Open Source” response to Blackboard’s patent. This is unfortunate, as is the fact that SFLC is perceived to be leading the charge. Because to my mind, the most important message from this filing to Blackboard and the market has nothing to do with Open Source.

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