Flexknowlogy – Jared Stein

Desire2Learn announced on February 22nd that Blackboard has won its patent infringement lawsuit against them, stating, “the jury has handed down its verdict that the patent is valid and that Blackboard should be awarded damages of approximately $3 million.”

Blackboard filed the lawsuit on July 26, 2006 against competitor Desire2Learn based on intellectual property claims related to it’s Blackboard’s U.S. patent #6,988,138. Blackboard has argued that it had invested 100 million dollars in the development of the educational products protected under the patent. (NoEduPatents.com has made an explanation of Blackboard’s 44 patent claims.)

Backlash to the Blackboard patent by the open source and educational communities has been strong since news of the lawsuit first broke, and will likely continue through communities such as boycottblackboard.org. I personally did not expect Blackboard’s claims would be upheld when re-examined by the patent office, let alone that the lawsuit would be validated by the jury.

Because the patent claims are broad and impact so many common e-learning features, Blackboard’s legal victory is bound to be discouraging and troublesome to other commercial learning management system providers such as Angel Learning, eCollege, and Agilix. Blackboard has previously declared that it would not assert it’s U.S. patents against open source software development, e.g. Moodle and Sakai.

Does this apparent magnanimity bolster my favor for Blackboard? Certainly not; the position is superficial at best, and Blackboard knows it. Anyway, it’s beside the point: though I personally lean towards open source software for educational technology, I am a capitalist, and free market competition and consumer-driven innovation of services and products is important to me. Blackboard’s overblown patent claims are an affront to innovation and competition, taking advantage of systemic failures in U.S. Patent regulations.

And though some will dismiss this news based on the argument that even conceptually the LMS has inherent flaws (failure to keep up with current technologies, inauthentic, lack of learner ownership, creepy-tree-house, etc), I believe the LMS is still a valuable toolset for many. The LMS has has propelled e-learning into a new frontier by standardizing the basic communication and delivery features for an educational audience. The LMS’s ability to provide teachers an easy-to-use set of online educational tools in a one-stop-shopping experience is and will remain considerable for the next 5 years at least. (The unfortunate reality is that alternative networked education “systems” such as personal learning environments are still being thought out and developed–at the very least alternatives are probably not ready for widespread adoption and implementation by faculty members.)

Regardless of whether you’re pro-LMS or anti-LMS in general, I think the larger debate about software patents particularly when applied to education is an issue we in ed tech all have a stake in. At the ITC conference last week I picked up a witty t-shirt given to me by The rSmart Group that signifies the position of many:

Sources

• Desire2Learn’s Patent Lawsuit Blog
• Blackboard’s Patent Info Page
• Blackboard’s U.S. patent #6,988,138
• NoEduPatents’s Explanation of Blackboard’s 44 patent claims
• Groklaw: Reexamination of Blackboard Patent
• Wikipedia: Software Patent Debate
• BoycottBlackboard.org

Overview

There’s been a bit of buzz recently on more ed tech blogs than I think I can refer to about using blogs as a delivery host for opencourseware as PLE-inspired learning content. This branches off of that thought by demonstrating a very quick-and-dirty method of targetting chunks of content from various sources in order to remix a customized online “lesson”.

In short, this is a tutorial-in-lieu-of-a-lousy-conference-presentation for those who are unfamiliar with the tools or need orientation to an approach.

Preparation

You’ll need:

1. A Google account set up for Google Notebook and Google Docs & Spreadsheets
2. Mozilla Firefox Web browser with the Google Notebook add-on
3. A collection of topic-related Web pages or documents from which to remix
4. A basic outline of the lesson to be composed/remixed (pref. with objectives)

I expect that this process can also be done with Zoho using the Zoho Notebook Helper add-on for Firefox, however I’ve not worked through this process myself.

The importance of having the last element, an outline of the lesson, should not be underestimated. The hardest part of this task is staying focused and organized. I tend to take a kitchen-sink approach, throwing everything together and sorting it out later, but having a clear outline of what you want your lesson to include from the beginning sets up a checklist of sorts from which you can search and order information.

As for information sources themselves, there are an increasing number of Creative Commons-licensed or public domain materials available on the Web that can be remixed into an online lesson. Some of these are materials specifically authored for education (e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare, Open Yale Courses, UK Open University’s OpenLearn), others are collaboratively authored repositories (e.g. Wikipedia), and some are already in the publich domain (e.g. Project Gutenberg. Of course, copyrighted materials can be quoted and cited within reason, and Google Notebook helps you preserve source information for citations.

Quick Tutorial

Disclaimer: the sources and excerpts used in this example are merely for demonstration purposes and should not be reflective of a well-remixed or structurally complete lesson!

1. First, create a new Google Notebook for the lesson with title.
2. Using your lesson outline, seek out your information sources on the Web. Select a passage and right-click to activate the Firefox Google Notebook Add-on. Choose Note this (Google Notebook). This passage is now an excerpt copied into your Notebook. You’ll notice that the Google Notebook Add-on opens a preview window in the lower-right-hand corner of your screen. You can type your own commentary or notes here to include with the quoted passage.
3. Repeat this for all your information sources on the Web, selecting passages you wish to use as an excerpt in the lesson, right-clicking, and choosing Note this (Google Notebook).
4. Do the same for sources that you may wish to condense, rewrite, summarize, or paraphrase information from. You’ll be able to edit your Notebook in a minute. Because there’s so much information out there, it’s fine to collect more than you need. At the same time, using a lesson outline from the beginning will help you stay focused and not stray from your teaching objectives.
5. Don’t worry about noting sources out-of-order; Google Notebook will let you re-arrange your sources.
6. When you’ve completed your grab of sources, simply click Open Full Page from the Google Notebook add-on. This will open up your Google Notebook with all quotations. Each excerpts is preceded by the title of the Web page from which it came, and a hyperlink to the Web site for citation purposes.
7. You can type directly in the notebook to draft introductions, conclusions, additional information, or segways from one piece of information to another. Again, having a solid lesson outline here is very useful.
8. By mousing-over the left-side of source excerpts, you’ll find that you can left-click and drag excerpts above or below other excerpts or text sections that you’ve written. This makes it easy to rearrange the excerpts to match your lesson outline.
9. Once you’ve finished your rough edit of your lesson, you’ll need to send the saved Notebook to Google Docs for finish editing and publishing to your blog. Under Tools on the top-right, choose Export to Google Docs.
10. While Google Notebook is the best place to perform basic structural edits to your document because of the drag-n-drop feature, Google Docs have slightly more sophisticated formatting features to choose from for your finish edits. After you’ve completed editing and formatting your lesson in Google Docs, click the Publish tab to send this to your blog.
11. In the Publish tab you’ll need to click change your blog site settings and work through the few form fields to point to your own blog for publishing (e.g. blog hosting server, username, password, blog title). Click Test before finishing by clicking OK.
12. An alert will ask you to confirm publishing. Note that after you’ve published, you can in fact make edits to your Google Doc and republish to your blog, overwriting the original blog post using nearly the same process we just did.
13. After publishing, go to your blog and review your re-mixed lesson! Remember, you can edit your Google Doc and republish at any time, however if you want to add to your lesson starting from Google Notebook you are better off deleting the original blog post and Google Doc and re-exporting from step 9. Using the Firefox add in for this process preserves text, images, and hyperlinks from the source all the way to the published blog, however I’ve not had any luck preserving embedded video files.

OK, this creates an admittedly rough looking “lesson”, but it’s a fast method of remixing open content, especially if one has a good outline and is familiar with what’s available.

One idea that I haven’t played with is using Google Desktop with Notebook to grab pieces from files on my local computer. I’ve actually never used Desktop, but it’s been suggested that this would be possible.

This shirt is based on a workshop title suggestion Scott Leslie made (half?) jokingly over a Skype meeting.

I’m considering ordering up a batch of these from UberPrints.com for my crew at DE. PLE is People! That’s all you need to know.

Steve Hargadon posted up reflections on his Classroom 2.0 workshops, and the ideas he has generated are great for generating new ways of showing, sharing, learning, and doing at the 2008 Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange.

A couple of ideas for TTIX 2008 specificially:

In addition to the option of Twitter, why not a simple web-based chat room for back channeling? It’s old-fashioned now, but most setups require no user name, and rooms are easily created. Skype is cool too, however.

To that end, we’ll have a presenter-editable web page for each presentation which will host a shoutbox, presentation materials, link to video archive, link to relevant blogs, etc!

We are going to try starting TTIX with a 45-minute pre-conference session for everyone on Twitter and blogging. Just a means of getting people in and familiar with these two powerful social software tools. We’re going to ask for volunteers to each guest review 1 session during the day on our TTIX blog, and so we’ll divvy out users/passes at that time.

More ideas coming soon. Again, I can’t thank Steve enough for his work on Classroom 2.0–even though I haven’t attended this, his passion to making it a better workshop (or an “un-conference”) is inspiring and motivating.

One of the things I’m most proud of in my professional life is our annual Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange, which is now nearing it’s 4th year. While we’ve held it as a pretty traditional (small) ed tech conference during the first three years, John Krutsch and I began TTIX in 2004 with two key objectives:

1. TTIX will always be free – no registration fee (and therefore no conference tote bag, low-capacity usb drive, pen, keychain, etc.)
2. TTIX will emphasize 2-part sessions: part 1 is information, part 2 is hands-on application

We’ve added a few other facets, like
presenters are encouraged to make their materials available under a Creative Commons license, videos of presentations should be available for download after the event,
organized social events can help folks make professional connections
And, this year, conference proposals can be rated by the public almost immediately after submission. Admittedly the 5-star rating system is overly simplistic, but we see this as a great way to (1) advertise the possible sessions, (2) give prospective presenters some preliminary feedback, and (3) give the community a chance to make their interests heard to the proposal review committee. Ultimately we hope to go to a fully community-driven conference proposal review system.

Today I was lucky enough to stumble upon Alan Levine (aka CogDog)’s reflections on the EDUCAUSE ELI conference, “On Conferencing”. In this he examined the big questions I always ask myself when I go to conferences: Why do we go? and, Is it worth it? Mr. Levine lays out several complaints and ideas for conferences in general, and this inspired me to think about how we might push TTIX to the next level of meaningfulness and value for our participants. Let me highlight and springboard off of some of Mr Levine’s thoughts (and some of my own) here with respect to TTIX:

1. Online session evaluations. Addition: with immediate results viewable to everyone. With kiosks at the back of the room. Or with “clickers” (as much as I hate ‘em)
2. Learning Circle. Like Cracker Barrels at DT&L in Madison, Wisconsin. I like these a lot, actually, because you get to meet people and talk about related interests, and share experiences. The way I see this working best is someone deemed as expert moderates at small tables, others attend. On cue we all switch tables. I love Mr. Levine’s note that at ELI they used wikis and Google Docs for note-taking; TTIX will have to have this set up in advance for it to work.
3. Post session archives in 24 hours (a/v). We post video archives, but haven’t been able to do it in 24 hours. We probably could if we cut the quality. Addition: make presenter information uploadable during the conference, so presenters can upload their latest slides or materials. On the presentation video and materials download page make participant commentary open, a la a blog. This could be attached to or on the same page as the conference evals for each session! Ooh, but then we couldn’t use a presentation sharing service like Slideshare…
4. Twitter used throughout. ELI had a Twitter account just for the conference, which I definitely want to follow suit with, and many of its participants used Twitter voraciously–I know, I read ‘em! What if we started the first day of TTIX with a Twitter primer/workshop for participants? How to use Twitter, is it good for professional development, is it good for education? I mean, if participants are glued to their laptops for half the conference any way, can’t we encourage them to participate through their laptops? (What other sandboxes can we set up for them?)
5. Do something with the backchannel. No real new ideas here. Chris Lott has suggested “some lamps or orbs which change color and/or intensity according to the back-channel assessment”. Maybe blog up a “best IRC or Twitter quote” per session?
6. Conference blogging. It’s really nice when participants blog up the sessions or even just the conference in general. What if TTIX had it’s own blog that the TTIX committee updated during the conference, or a wiki that everyone could edit on the fly to summarize sessions with. Or, if we aim for something more reflective as Mr. Levine suggests, what if we set up a blog and invited participants to volunteer to author a reflective blog post on one session that they attend? We could have someone in charge of providing those volunteers with an author account on our TTIX blog, and then give them a reward if they post before the conference officially ends.
7. A conference with just keynotes. Last year we ran 4, even 5 sessiosn at a time. Bad move. The sessions were too poorly attended, and we knew some of the sessions were not cream of the crop in the first place. We took notice for 2008 and are trying to limit ourselves to just 3 at a time. But John attended one conference last year that was only keynotes. He loved it. I personally like the variety of being able to choose. But we need to emphasize differentness next year. We need to continue to pushe for, focus on, and applaud the second-day sessions, which is our twist of lime on ed tech conferences. What if we ask 2-day presenters to create an assignment day 1?
8. More hands-on. This is my own suggestion/complaint. Perhaps instead of a conference entirely of keynotes we composed a conference entirely of mini-workshops. That’s the idea behind the 2-part session, after all, but taken to the extreme. Or maybe the regular sessions are all workshops framed in by keynotes (2 per day)? Or a keynote and a learning circle/cracker barrel?
9. More Something Else. At DT&L and many other conferences you have the choice of going to an info session, a panel session, a poster session, etc–all of which are running at the same time. Now I cling to the idea of variety (I’m a session-jumper, remember?), but what if we did 3 sessions at a time, but had an info session hour, a panel session hour, a poster session hour, a workshop hour, etc to force the variety into the day?

These ideas have revved me up. I’m convinced we need to “stir up the stew” as Mr. Levine puts it. The next question is: If TTIX were to implement any 2 of these, which two would you find most valuable? Which would make the conference-going experience more important, more memorable, more applicable to your professional life when you return home?

I am a bit miserable about a series of questions that I whipped up for a survey device at the request of an instructor who teaches a Distance Education course.

Not only do I disagree with the instructor’s desired objectives in using this survey (she essentially hopes to prove that the reason students are failing her online course is because they are under-prepared or have wrong assumptions about online education–of course it couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the course has nearly no media-enhanced learning, no student-student contact, and very little student-instructor interaction), I disagree with the questions that I wrote.

Of course anyone who has written survey questions with a mind to gain accurate and insightful information on the participants knows what a challenge the task is from the get-go; I don’t kid myself that it’s no easy endeavor, but I also think there has to be a better way.

Among my primary objectives in writing the questions were the following ideas:

• Keep the survey short, so that students would actually do it.
• Have some redundancy to check for accuracy and inhibit prejudicial responses.
• Avoid asking questions that dare students to label themselves “dumb”.
• Avoid questions that tempted students into labeling themselves “smart”.

But the primary objective was essentially this: after reading a good number of “student readiness” surveys online I wanted to avoid asking questions that gauged a student’s willingness to partake in a lonesome independent study course. “Independent study” is not equivalent to modern “distance education” in the Stein dictionary (in fact, even “distance education” is not equivalent to “distance education” in the Stein dictionary, but that’s another story). And so though several of my questions are based on the questions asked in other “distance education” surveys, I purposefully steered away from presumptive questions like:

Feeling that I am part of a class is:
a. Not particularly necessary to me.
b. Somewhat important to me.
c. Very important to me.

As if being “part of a class” is somehow mutually exclusive from distance learning! And it’s not that I’m opposed to independent study types of courses; in fact, I myself greatly enjoy and grow in isolation, but I recognize that’s not necessarily the norm.

Then there are questions that perpetuate instructors’ presumptions that they can get back to distance students at their leisure:

My comfort level with waiting a few days to receive instructor feedback is..
Low   Moderate   High

While it may be an unfortunate reality in distance education programs that instructors do often delay responding to students (I recommend a 24 hour turn around at the latest), we certainly don’t want to encourage that behavior, nor do we want to discourage student expectations of their instructors.

Finally, I also have disagreements with the term “student readiness” in general, as that tends to automatically place the blame for student failure at the feet of the students. Jared Spool, a Web usability expert whom I greatly admired, once inspired me to make the following provocative paraphrase, There are no user errors, only
design errors. And while I recognize that this statement is not universally true, it does challenge the designer (in this case, the instructor or the instructor’s instructional designer) to reconsider blaming the user (aka student) for failing to complete the task.

My Questions

Even though I have a pretty good insight into what I think is wrong with so many “student readiness” surveys, I still had a hard time making my fundamentally different. But I’ll share them here anyway, with the hopes that some brainy folks can offer better suggestions to achieve the same general objective: determine if our students are adequately prepared–both mentally and technically–for an online course experience.

(Note: these questions are randomized in the final survey to mask redundancy.)

Options: Strongly Agree | Agree | Disagree | Strongly Disagree
1. I often get things done ahead of time.
2. I can work independently and meet deadlines without being reminded.
3. I learn best through live classroom discussions.
4. I am comfortable engaging in class discussions on the Web.
5. If given clear instructions, I am confident that I can complete the assignment independently.
6. I often need to have instructions for an assignment clarified or explained more than once.
7. As a reader, I sometimes need help to understand the text.
8. When I need help understanding the subject, I am comfortable e-mailing an instructor to ask for clarification.
9. When I don’t understand something I’ve read, I ask the instructor to explain it as soon as possible.
10. I am very competent using e-mail and Web sites.
11. I am a skilled writer.
12. I don’t always comprehend what I read.
13. I expect to spend less time on an Distance Education course than a regular on-campus course.
14. I often put things off until the last minute
15. I expect a Distance Education course to be easier than a regular on-campus course.

If you hate these questions, give me something better.

And if you like them, you can download them here (This survey is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.):

• DE Readiness Survey (survey).zip Blackboard Vista IMS Survey version
• DE Readiness Survey (quiz).zip Blackboard Vista IMS Quiz version (scored for a “perfect” student)
• DE Readiness Survey.txt Moodle GIFT format (scored for a “perfect” student)

(Originally posted on our Distance Ed unit’s IDS ‘blog.)

Today I met with the UVSC IP Office to go over our proposed process to allow for the open licensing of UVSC-owned, faculty authored materials. This is necessary because UVSC has ownership over most faculty-authored materials as provided in UVSC Policy 136: Intellectual Property.

So the process I proposed sets up an “open licensing request form” that a faculty or department submits to IP, IP passes to a review committee, and the review committee makes a recommendation to IP. Signatures happen, and the materials are released under a Creative Commons license.

The IP Office seemed very receptive and supportive of opencourseware, and we concurred that opencourseware is a suitable activity for a university. Now we just have to wait for legal counsel to weigh in, and we hope for a complete implementation by March 2008!