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.

  • Bodington Review, Postscript

    Now that there are a number of LMOS/framework-like projects in active development (the Bodington Tetra/Sakai collaboration, Oracle’s AEI, LAMS’ service contract work and, of course, the venerable eFramework and all of its children), I thought it might be interesting to pause for a moment consider how what I’ve learned about Bodington reflects on the challenges of an LMOS-like approach. When we think of frameworks, conversations tend in the direction plugging in tools, as if everything else in the framework itself is fairly straightforward. But the Bodington/Sakai unification project shows that picture to be simplistic. Simply taking Bod’s tooks and plugging them into Sakai’s environment would basically remove everything Bodingtonish about Bodington. Permissions, page layout control (which is related to how tools present themselves in the environment), and UI metaphors all really matter.

    So how do we define the territory that needs to be considered in order to make a framework approach work? How do we figure out what’s important? I don’t know that I have answers to those questions, but I think the solution may well start with use cases. What we need is a library of relatively granular descriptions of what teachers and students do in Bodington (for example) so that we can think about the affordances required to support those activities. The use cases might eventually be built into a pattern language. This approach combined with a catalog of tools, tool capabilities, and tool interoperability contracts, would probably give us enough to have meaningful conversations about building common frameworks.

  • The EDUCAUSE Letter to Blackboard is Now Public

    Insider Higher Ed has let us know that the EDUCAUSE board has published its letter to Blackboard. This is such a remarkable (and courageous) letter that I feel compelled to reproduce it below in its entirety: (more…)

  • Bodington Review, Part II

    In my last post, I discussed Bodington’s unique access control system and how this affects teaching affordances. I started there deliberately and at the suggestion of my Bodington expert and guide, Oxford University’s Paul Trafford. Today, Stephen Downes comments sarcastically, “Yes, that’s what we all look for first when trying to decide whether an LMS is worth the effort.” And that’s exactly the point. Bodington’s most compelling strengths as a learning environment are precisely not what we tend to look at first when “trying to decide whether an LMS is worth the effort.” (Not that assessing whether Bodington was “worth the effort” was my goal in any case.) As we all know, seemingly subtle implementation details can have disproportionate impact on the quality of the learning environment. Permissions is one of those unfortunately obscure areas that LMS developers often get wrong and, as Paul had suggested would be the case, I immediately saw that Bod’s system opened up pedagogical possibilities that are not practical on other systems. For example, Bodington appears to support very sophisticated multi-role groupwork, including but not limited to simulations, that would be much harder to do in learning environments with less flexible permissions systems. Is this difference important enough to look at first? I guess that depends on what you are looking for.

    Be warned: I’m going to continue my review by looking at other aspects of Bodington that are also not the kinds of things people typically look at first when trying to decide “whether an LMS is worth the effort”. If what you’re looking for is a generic LMS review, then don’t bother reading further and consider starting at the Edutools page for it instead. (more…)

  • Bodington Review, Part I

    Here’s an interesting announcement out of the UK:

    The Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Hull, and the UHI Millennium Institute announce the formation of the Tetra Collaboration, the outcome of a series of meetings and a major summit held at the University of Oxford on the 25th-26th September 2006.

    The goal of the Tetra Collaboration is to coordinate activities across the member organisations so as to more efficiently develop and deploy open source enterprise applications of use to UK and European universities and colleges. By working together we can share common solutions to better serve the needs of students and academics, and each of the institutions named is committed to making tangible contributions into the collaboration.

    The Tetra Collaboration will work together on projects that address the needs of education, research, technical infrastructure, service oriented architectures (SOA), federated systems, and application frameworks.

    Tetra will demonstrate the potential of the JISC’s e-Framework, will be built on open standards and IMS specifications, and is committed to developing sustainable community source solutions for education.

    One of the first Tetra projects will be to continue the work of the Bodington (4) open source learning management system to produce Bodington – Next Generation or Bodington NG. This will combine elements of the Sakai open source framework with the pedagogically strong Bodington toolset. A major design goal of Bodington NG is to develop and implement an SOA enterprise e-framework.

    So the Tetra Collaboration will be working to develop a standards-based flexible framework, drawing on service-oriented architecture, that will enable federated virtual learning environments. And it will be using Sakai as one of its components. If you’re a regular reader of e-Literate, then you know that I couldn’t possibly resist finding out more about this effort. So, with the help and support of Oxford University’s Paul Trafford, I set out to learn a little bit more about Bodington. (more…)

  • Conversations with Desire2Learn and Blackboard

    While at EDUCAUSE, I had opportunities to sit down with both Blackboard’s General Counsel Matthew Small and the Desire2Learn executive team. In the spirit of diplomacy, everything in this post has been reviewed by both sides, and there are aspects of our conversations that will remain private.

    In my conversation with Matt Small, we spent a fair bit of time talking about the impacts of patent assertion on the educational technology ecosystem. I emphasized that, even if I thought that Blackboard’s patent were valid, I would still oppose their efforts because of the damage that an environment of patent litigation will have on innovation. I also let him know that I believe there are others in the community who feel the same way. (I don’t want to presume to speak for anyone but myself.) In turn, the position that he articulated to me was pretty consistent with his public statements.

    My conversations with the Desire2Learn team included CEO John Baker, COO Jeremy Auger, General Counsel Diane Lank, and Director of Marketing John Mcleod. The main message I took away from that conversation was pretty much the same one that they recently posted in their patent litigation blog, i.e., that they view themselves as fighting for the interests of the entire educational community, including universities, Open Source projects, and proprietary competitors.

    Thanks to both parties for making the time to speak with me.

  • Quick Blackboard Updates

    Between multiple family visits and a case of the flu that’s had my flat on my back the last couple of days, I’ve fallen even further behind on my backlog of posts than I was upon returning from EDUCAUSE. In the interest of catching up, this post will be short. First, several bloggers have already pointed out John Mayer’s interview with law professor Vince Chiapetta about the Blackboard patent. If you haven’t given it a listen yet, do yourself a favor and make the time. We now have a legal expert on record as validating much of what the community has been saying about the patent and contradicting Blackboard’s position on a number of key points.

    Also, Stephen Marshall has posted another summary of the Blackboard Town Hall meeting at EDUCAUSE. Here’s an excerpt:

    Question: (from me) Blackboard appears to be having things both ways by claiming that their patent is so narrow that it can’t be cast as a patent on e-learning systems while also stating that a very detailed analysis is needed to show the lack of prior art in ostensibly similar products like Lotus Notes and FirstClass. Can Blackboard appreciate that this places developers of new systems ina difficult position as they can’t afford to pay for an indepth legal investigation of their new idea, especially in the context of open source or higher education, in order to determine whether or not it is infringing? In particular this is an issue when external research funds are used as the risk of patent infringement is likely to dissuade funding bodies from supporting even initial explorations.

    Trust us – there’s no risk of enforcement against professors. Sadly this is an almost useless answer, there’s no guarantee that they won’t sue our employers, and there’s no guarantee that future management won’t change their mind, especially if a new open source product challenged Blackboards revenue.

    It was also very clear that Blackboard failed to appreciate the very real problem this patent poses for anyone engaged in e-learning systems research. Every granting agency is going to have to seriously consider the risk that funded projects will infringe the patent and be forced to pay royalties – something that is likely to see them pass on funding rather than take the risk.

    Matthew Small also delivered a damning indictment of software patents without realising it when he added that reviewing existing patents is a normal activity when creating software, that should be done as a matter of routine. This is clearly nonsensical for anything other than large software firms as the number of patents is vast and growing and as he himself noted, specialist and detailed analysis is needed to determine infringement. The idea that the creation of software should be a legally bounded and constrained activity is repugnant personally and its sad that increasingly lawyers seem to be controlling innovation in software rather than programmers.

    Yup.

  • Building Bridges To Nowhere

    Speaking of both standards compliance and Blackboard, IMS CEO Rob Abel has posted an interesting comment on the Wired Campus’ blurb regarding a Blackboard/SAP integration deal:

    It is important for the readers to understand that there are currently administrative system providers such as Oracle working within the nonprofit IMS Global Learning Consortium to create open standards for the type of integration mentioned between administrative (SAP) and course management (Blackboard) systems. SAP is not currently a member or participant in IMS and, as such, is not involved in this work. Buyers need to understand that proprietary integration schemes limit their choice and involve greater total cost of ownership. There has been quite a bit of “lip service” to standards and we are doing our best to change that. As such, IMS will be developing a certification and compliance program for the next generation of enterprise data exchange and I suggest that buyers look to the IMS web site (www.imsglobal.org) to see which vendors are participating members and which products are compliant.

    This is all of a piece with the Common Cartridge issue. If customers don’t demand standards compliance, then they will remain at the mercy of vendor lock-in. The last thing you want to hear is that you can’t change to a better LMS because the non-standard integration with your Student Information System (SIS) will break.

    Are these standards perfect solutions? Of course not. Standards specifications are rarely perfect and even more rarely perfect on the first try. For example, one LMS developer told me he had concerns that that the current Common Cartridge specification doesn’t give him very good tools for ensuring that his platform fully complies with it. So glitches will happen and the spec will need to be refined. But that won’t happen unless customers demand standards compliance first and then demand improvements to the standards as the needs are identified.

    Despite what some bloggers may tell you, there is plenty of evidence in this industry as well as others that customer demand can drive standards adoption. (SCORM is one good example off the top of my head.) So go ahead and be demanding. Tell the vendors that that you simply will not adopt a platform that locks you in by neglecting standards compliance.