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.

  • So You've Captured Baghdad. Now What?

    Somebody asked me what I thought the theme of this year’s EDUCAUSE turned out to be. My answer was “Blackboard.” I did not attend a single session in which somebody did not make a derisive comment or joke about it. In many cases, (including the Common Cartridge session and my own session on OpenBRR), it actually sidetracked the conversation for substantial periods of time. Meanwhile, there were several anti-Blackboard T-shirts making the rounds. (If anyone has any pictures of people wearing these T-shirts, please send them and I will post them.) As Al Essa notes, the EDUCAUSE board itself has apparently written a letter to Blackboard asking them to cease and desist. Blackboard’s town meeting (described in The Chronicle and in a participant’s notes [.DOC] posted by Stephen Downes), was very tough, with the audience applauding several times at negative comments and questions. And by all accounts, the CIO meeting was an unmitigated disaster. (I was not able to attend; if anyone has notes from the meeting, please {encode=”[email protected]” title=”email them to me”}.) Throughout all of this, Blackboard stuck to their message and showed little sign that they were willing to change course.

    They apparently assumed that we would greet them as liberators and didn’t bother to formulate an exit strategy.

  • Why Teachers' Unions Should Demand Support for the IMS Common Cartridge Standard

    I just got back from the EDUCAUSE conference and man, do I have a lot to write about. I’m going to start with the IMS’s announcement of the new Common Cartridge standard. Now, I know that technical standards aren’t always the stuff that gives you goosebumps. But if you are a teacher–particularly a unionized teacher–pay attention to this particular standard. This is a quality of workplace environment issue. (more…)

  • Oracle, Sakai, and the LMOS–Part 2

    A few posts back, I described Oracle and Unicon’s Academic Enterprise Initiative and how it fits well with the vision of the Learning Management Operating System (LMOS). I also noted that it adds the concept of a “student data hub” (sometimes also called an “education data hub” in the document). I’m going to explore that concept a little bit in this post.

    Now, within the edublogger community we tend to think in terms of small, independent pieces with data interoperability happening at the service layer (a la mashups). There are a number of reasons for this tendency, some of which are pragmatic, some philosophical, and some cultural. In contrast, Oracle being Oracle, they think a lot about enterprise applications and about data interoperability happening at the database layer. I don’t want to argue that one is better than the other. In fact, I believe that both are useful and may very well be necessary. But I do want to point out what Oracle’s angle on the subject adds to the world of possibilities within a learning environment. (more…)

  • More on Fairness

    Stephen Downes thinks I’m being too nice to Blackboard (which is the first time I’ve heard that particular criticism) by giving them too much credit for answering my questions during their webinar. He says it was all “just a needed warmup for court.”

    I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense.

    To begin with, I didn’t ask a single question about the legal validity of the patent. In fact, the questions I did ask would probably not be allowed in court, since they are immaterial to Blackboard’s claims and D2L’s counter-claims. Furthermore, even if they were material, why on earth would Blackboard telegraph its answers in advance to Desire2Learn? If Matt Small wanted a “warmup”, he’d do what every other lawyer in the world does. He’d bring in a team of his own people and run a moot court privately.

    I’ve been as hard on Blackboard as anyone. But I like to think that my criticisms are fair and supported by fact. It does none of us any good to demonize big corporations in general or even Blackboard in particular. If we want them to behave better, then we have to be prepared to work with them and recognize positive behavior–even when that behavior is motivated by self-interest. Matthew Small let me ask as many questions as I wanted in a very public forum, knowing that I would (and did) use his answers against him. He and the moderator could have cut me off at any time with ease, as anyone who has moderated a webinar knows. But they didn’t. I am confident that this was not any special concession to me, either; they were ready to take all comers and answer as many questions as were asked. Was this behavior self-serving on the part of Blackboard? Yes, in the sense that they know that stonewalling their critics surely won’t shut us up while communicating with us just might lead in a positive direction somehow. Honestly, I’d like to see more of that particular kind of self-serving behavior. Hence, I will continue to go out of my way to acknowledge it, praise it, and advertise it whenever I see it.

  • IMS Supports Digital Opportunity Investment Trust Legislation

    I am delighted to note that the IMS has endorsed the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust Act and urged its members to support it. As I described in a previous post, this legislation would create a trust that would generate a billion dollars annually–money that would be spent on the creation of non-proprietary digital educational content and digital educational technology. This is a game changer in every way. Kudos to IMS CEO Rob Abel and the IMS board for coming out strong for this very important legislation.

    Please do your part too and, if you are an American, write your Congressperson and Senators.

  • Oracle, Sakai, and the LMOS–Part 1

    It’s been a while since I’ve written a post about the notion of a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS). There’s some news out of the Sakai world that’s as good an excuse as any for doing returning to it.

    Apparently Oracle, with the help of Unicon, is going to do quite a bit of work on Sakai in the form of something they call their “Academic Enterprise Initiative” (AEI). According to Oracle’s white paper on the topic, the work includes (but is not limited to) the following elements:

    • Building batch and real-time integration between Sakai and Oracle’s student information system (SIS)
    • Creating flexible integration between Sakai and Oracle’s teaching-related products (most notably their portfolio and gradebook).
    • Making it possible to swap in Oracle collaboration applications (e.g., their discussion forum, calendar, chat, etc.) to replace the analogous Sakai tools
    • Presenting the whole thing through Oracle portal or any other JSR-168-compliant portal (like uPortal, for example)
    • Creating a student data hub that allows for disparate applications to share data while providing a single “source of truth” to avoid duplicate and conflicting content versions

    There’s a lot here to unpack. In this post I’m going to look at some of the specifics of what Oracle has in mind and why this advances the LMOS cause significantly–even for those institutions that will never use a single Oracle product. In a follow-up post, I’ll drill down into some of the specifics of Oracle’s approach and their implications for teaching and learning.

    (more…)

  • Once Again, IBM Sets a Good Example for Blackboard on Patents

    The New York Times has a piece out today on IBM’s latest responsibility in patenting initiative. It seems that Big Blue will advertise its pending patents. Some details:

    The policy, being announced today, includes standards like clearly identifying the corporate ownership of patents, to avoid filings that cloak authorship under the name of an individual or dummy company. It also asserts that so-called business methods alone – broad descriptions of ideas, without technical specifics – should not be patentable.

    No blind-siding competitors with surprise lawsuits from submarine patents? No trying to own broad ideas (like…oh, I don’t know…multi-role, multi-class educational groupware, for instance)? How refreshing!

    Note that IBM is taking this step despite the fact that it will cost the company:

    Patents typically take three or four years after filing to be approved by the patent office. Companies often try to keep patent applications private for as long as possible, to try to hide their technical intentions from rivals.

    “Competitors will know years ahead in some cases what fields we’re working on,” said John Kelly, senior vice president for technology and intellectual property at I.B.M. “We’ve decided we’ll take that risk and seek our competitive advantage elsewhere.”

    Nobody can claim that this is a throw-away for IBM–that it is donating patents that it has already written off as worthless. This policy goes for all their patent applications. Why are they doing this? Because they have come to believe the current environment of patent litigation damages innovation:

    “The larger picture here is that intellectual property is the crucial capital in a global knowledge economy,” said Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.’s chief executive. “If you need a dozen lawyers involved every time you want to do something, it’s going to be a huge barrier. We need to make sure that intellectual property is not used as a barrier to growth in the future.”

    That’s it in a nutshell. That’s the problem with the Blackboard patent. If you need a dozen lawyers involved every time you want to develop educational software, it’s going to be a huge barrier. IBM has it right.