e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: edunomics

  • Jim Farmer on the Impact of the Patent Wars

    Seb Schmoller has posted an insightful, moving, and rather depressing reflection piece by Jim Farmer on the impact that the patent wars will have on education in general. Here’s a sample:

    Education patents and the new licensing environment may further commercialize teaching and learning. The Blackboard patent is not alone, but representative of many that have been issued – and many more that are pending – in the U.S. that could apply to any learning system. It is unlikely that all claims of all patents will be found invalid before someone wins an injunction or judgment, and cease and desist letters and license invoices follow. We should be prepared for a new environment of restrictions, licensing, and confrontation of our suppliers.

    Now any choice of software, any method of instruction, and any choice of content will have to be viewed from a new perspective of risk assessment. This moves the decision from teaching faculty to business officers and attorneys who are least prepared to judge the effect on education and research.

    Sad but true.

  • Why Desire2Learn CEO John Baker is Our Hero

    While most folks paying attention to the Blackboard patent scandal have sympathy for Desire2Learn, I’m not sure how many people realize just how altruistic the company is being by fighting the patent. From a purely financial perspective, it is clearly in D2L’s interest to settle and pay a royalty, even though doing so would harm the rest of the community. I’d like to lay out exactly why I think Desire2Learn is doing an enormous public service and what we can all do to help ensure that their good behavior pays off in the marketplace.

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  • An Example of How the Blackboard Patent Could Chill Innovation

    Blackboard’s General Counsel Matthew Small has said that their patent and lawsuit is “not about hindering innovation.” It’s important that we not allow this claim to go unchallenged. I’d like to start gathering concrete examples of initiatives that are beneficial to the educational community and could be directly harmed by Blackboard’s actions. I’ll start. The first example I can think of is the developing IMS Common Cartridge standard.

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  • The Economics of the LMOS

    Jim Farmer has posted a slide stack (in PDF format) on the economics of interoperability. There’s a lot of good general stuff here about service-oriented architecture (SOA) and interoperability issues from a business perspective, but 90%+ can also be read to apply directly to the LMOS concept.

    Here are some highlights:

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  • BRR Report Published

    I am pleased to announce that our report on BRR and LMSs for the Observatory on Borderless higher education has been published. Here’s the description:

    Apples to Apples: Guidelines for Comparative Evaluation of Proprietary and Open Educational Technology Systems
    Ken Udas and Michael Feldstein, SUNY Learning Network at the State University of New York, USA – May 2006

    Selecting a learning management technology has increasingly become a mission critical and strategic decision for higher education institutions. As technology supported and online learning has become more prevalent and learning management technologies more important institutional features, the selection environment has become increasingly complex. This paper presents a comparative model developed specifically for evaluating learning management software for adoption decisions in which open source software (OSS) and proprietary options are under consideration in higher education. It is intended to support senior academic administrators and policy makers who are responsible for or influence the software evaluation and selection process by proposing a methodology that accounts for organisational context and software system characteristics, while also providing the advantage of cross-organisational comparison.

    Unfortunately, it is only accessible via a paid subscription. However, they do offer a free trial that I assume would allow you access to this report plus other valuable resources published by the Observatory. (And if you do either get the free trial or subscribe, please do Ken and me a favor and let them know that it was our report that attracted your attention. Thanks.)

  • A Conversation About BRR and LMSs

    I’ve been meaning to write this up for a couple of weeks now. Ken Udas and I recently had a great conversation with folks from OpenBRR and Edutools/WCET about creating a community and framework to evaluate both Open Source and proprietary LMSs, drawing on the knowledge and resources of both OpenBRR and Edutools. In attendance were Tony Wasserman from Carnegie Mellon West, Murugan Pal of SpikeSource, Scott Leslie of BCcampus (and EdTechPost fame), Russell Poulin of WCET, and Bruce Landon of Douglass College (and LandOnline fame). What follows are some notes from the conversation.

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  • Who's Afraid of iTunes U?

    This is part 4 of a series of posts documenting a vist to Apple headquarters in February, 2005. For the full series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. and part 6.

    In my last post, I outlined Apple’s business model, particularly as it relates to the higher education market. You can’t really understand why they have launched iTunes U without first understanding how they do business. And from what I’ve been able to see so far, iTunes U is exactly the opposite of what some fear it to be.

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