elearning2.0

As noted in the past week by Graham Attwell and others, Riina Vuorikari of Flosse Posse has organised a petition against software patents:

I am deeply concerned by the current European Commission plans on industrial property. The development of the Community Patent and European Patent Litigation Agreement, in combination with the London protocol, could lead to the EU-wide introduction of software patents. I believe that this could jeopardise developments in the field of technology enhanced learning by inhibiting innovation among European e-learning developers and practitioners.

Here are two examples of pending European Patent Office patents on e-Learning solutions that would clearly impact on current and future e-learning development:

Testing learned material in schools

Use a computer for testing pupils. The main claim covers the basic procedure, the others just specify useful things to be done. The “technical contributions” consists in the teaching that a computer can be used to do these things more efficiently. There are ongoing activities in schools and universities all around Europe that potentially could violate such patent and may have to be cancelled. As an example most open source LMS have this kind of functionality.

Language learning by comparing one’s pronunciation to that of a teacher

This covers all digital language learning systems that allow a user to compare his pronunciation of a selected piece of text to the right pronunciation. This patent is a good example of how concepts that is considered “common knowledge” suddenly becomes patented and restricted for use in the digital world. As a byproduct, the claim also seems to include the learning function of voice recognition systems like ViaVoice.

I wish I had time to do more than say "right on!". It's too easy to assume that someone else will stop the lunacy of software patents, but the fact that the EU is considering them so seriously is alarming evidence that they could become a major obstacle to the improvement of educational technology. Please go to Flosse Possee and sign the petition

Apologies for not having posted for a long time here. We've been totally nose-to-grindstone in software development work on knotes, the weblogging and discussion product for Plone which we've been working on since late 2004. And at last the hard work has paid off --- knotes is available in version 0.8 BETA now, and it seems to be popular with end-users; it is certainly much improved in usability. It is very feature-rich, and supports a number of key web2.0-ish standards. It is the weblogging system under the hood of this blog, for instance.

We've completed pushing recent improvements into knotes on sourceforge. To indicate that we feel the product is almost at the "it just works" stage, we've incremented it's version number to 0.8 BETA. Please feel free to try installing knotes in your own Zope/Plone set-up. We still have documentation and end-user help to write, and still need to provide an issue-tracking system

I don't have time to go into the merits of knotes here and now, but readers of this blog might like to check it out as a possible platform upon which to base experimental work in edu-blogging, learning activities, goal- and resource-centred discussion, "portfolios" and "personal learning environments". We'll be exploring a number of such experimental variations on the them of blogging ourselves, and will be concentrating next-generation knotes work on web2.0 integration - microformats, social bookmarking integration, "glu" like personal dashboards, etc etc...

I'm now hoping to get the time to get started on a few of the articles I've been itching to write about architectural, ed-tech and ed-tech-politics issues. Mind you, we do have a lot of project-management work to finish in the next 30 days, and we are also planning to have a first pass at extending knotes for personal-devekopment-profiling by mid-April, and there are still glitches to fix and documentation to write, so please excuse me if there's another extended silence here :o)