elearning2.0

I thought I'd share these figures/drawings from the notorious patent, since they were such a pain to access and organise. You can read the Blackboard document at the US Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Full-Text Database, but it refers to 41 figures/drawings, and these are organised in a very awkward navigational format, viewable one at a time in a pane that requires a lot of scrolling (the uspto site says this is because some patents are 5000 pages long, and thus they cannot afford in general to allow omnibus downloads).

I wanted to read the patent, so I downloaded all these images, gave them meaningful names and rotated them as necessary so that I could make reference to them in a sensible way. That was such a pain that I thought I'd spare others the trouble, so I uploaded the images to flickr, gave those images complete titles based on the captions in the patent document, and placed them in order in a Flickr set: Figures from Blackboard's Patent (also available as a Flickr slideshow). If you want to have a local copy of all the figures (for printing etc), I also uploaded the figures as a zip full of TIFFs to my yahoo briefcase.

While I'm at it with links to resources... I've collected a good set of links in my del.icio.us tag 'blackboard', and will continue to add items I feel are particularly useful or important. Best viewed in our shiny new interactive tag-viewer: mmalloch/tagviewer?tag=blackboard.

By the way, I hope to post next week about these slick new tools we've been writing for interactive viewing of del.icio.us tags, clouds, items and related tags (and even for live-searching tagged sites!). Lots of goodness on the way and we'll release variants for Plone and plain html embeds under GPL as soon as the interfaces are complete.

And I also hope to post sometime soon with my own feelings about the Blackboard patent issue. For the moment, let me just say that having spent the summer of 1998 in Blackboard's DC offices (seconded there from the UK to do some IMS work on metadata), and having spent a lot of that time interacting with the architects of Blackboard's subsequent systems, I know that these guys did not 'invent' the VLE, and that they knew they weren't 'inventing' the VLE.

On the other hand, I've never understood why people are interested in these 'L' blinking 'E's in the first place. I prefer to call these things 'procurement-ware', since their sole use in the real world is to get bought by IT departments as evidence that they 'offer online learning'. I agree with those who've pointed out that outlawing the monolithic VLE really doesn't matter - it'd be wonderful if anybody peddling such monstrosities could be sued (and not just BB's competitors :o) ...I think a bit of student protest would be very welcome, against the injustice of this nuisance patent, but also against the injustice of cramming procurement-ware down students' eyeballs ... "No L Es" anyone?

Technorati Tags: blackboard, patents

Graham notes, in his blog, a point that came up while we were chatting on the phone this morning:

...there is a world of difference between someone sitting down to develop use cases when this is the thing they are doing i.e. installing, testing, using, a service or a piece of software as the task in itself - and using the services and applications as one small part of their everyday working life.

This is a surprisingly important point, and one which is surprisingly hard to get across. I hope we can illuminate the issue with further discussion - and some examples - over the next months.

I replied at length in his blog, and not being one to use prose once-only, I paste most of it below as well :o) ... see the extended text for this entry.

This is a much more important issue than it sounds, because by enabling casual, connected gestures of content-creation, systems like API-enabled weblogging and del.icio.us bookmarking let us share context to at least some extent. If it isn't *really* easy to post in the context of what I'm doing now - if I cannot make lots of tiny content-connecting/creating/categorising gestures without stopping what I'm doing - the good systems effects that we see in del.icio.us for instance will not emerge.

Scott Wilson has posted a damn fine summary of a damn fine PLE workshop:

I've had a pretty good two days at the PLE workshop. Some very interesting ideas from the participants - looking back I think we were extremely lucky to get such a varied, knowledgeable, and positively engaged group - and I actually managed to do a demo without getting a firewall/proxy/gateway/dns related problem.

No doubt there will be a much more detailed wrote-up at some point; for now I think I'll just note a few things I found interesting...

I enthusiastically endorse Scott's outline of the important issues and the emerging points of consensus. I had a wonderful (if exhausting) time at both days, and feel very positive about the emergence of a developer/practitioner community with some real vision and momentum. I've had to put nose to grindstone since the meeting, hammering out design and project work, and I won't have a chance to write extensively on the subject for a while. Let me just say what a pleasure it was to participate in such a focused and productive meeting with people as smart and long-sighted as Scott and Oleg.

I'll be participating in an meeting in Manchester hosted by CETIS on June 6th. This is a meeting of experts, the day before CETIS' public meeting on personal learning environments. We experts ( ahem :o) were asked to contribute very short position papers in advance of the meeting. I've pasted my position paper below (also available in a pdf version).

By the way, apologies for the scarcity of these posts.. I've been burning both ends of the midnight oil for a while now and just haven't had time to write...

Patterns in the clouds: Some thoughts on not being completely wrong about PLEs

To kick things off, let me admit that I have been completely wrong about some previous "xLx"s. When "virtual learning environments" and "learning objects" began to be spoken of in the 90's, I was one of the original dupes. Back then, I would tell anyone who would listen that these objects and environments, powered as they were by Standards™, were going to make cheap online learning possible, even ubiquitous. The web was great, and everyone saw its potential for learners, but creating good learning experiences online was hard and labour-intensive. To address that obstacle, software & standards architects had seen a way to augment the infrastructure.

Augmenting the infrastructure was what I assumed it was all about. When people spoke about 'learning environments', I took it as read that we were talking about smart middleware that added value to content and supported rich interactions across users and applications. It seemed obvious that by 'learning objects' people meant clever little programmatic objects that bundled content with code and knew how to hook up with each other in those smart environments. Begging, of course, the little question of engineering the actual software, but I assumed that (a) everyone knew about that little matter, and (b) the hard work would get done - what with big institutions on board, and big standards to help them work together for a common good.

I was completely wrong. That 90's jargon in effect meant something like... 'learning environment': institutional intranet, but with some 'spaces' named after a university's administrative concepts; 'learning object': a web page, but in a folder with the word "course" in its name. I'm not saying that nothing good has been accomplished by researchers, developers and practitioners of online learning - just that the hard infrastructure work implied by the 90's jargon got sidestepped in the rush to market.

Evocative notions like 'Personal Learning Environment' can mean radically different kinds of thing to people in different fields of work. So, nowadays, when I get excited about how some great common good can come from sharing out some tricky work, I assume that we'd better belabour the nature of that work before we get carried away with how good everything is going to be when we have the product. Work first, then hype.

So here I go, belabouring it. But first let me make it clear that I am very excited about the potential of "PLEs" in the sense of "leverage web2.0 for learners". In fact, I spend much of my working life organising and coding for experiments which try to deliver great features to real world users by combining, proxying and integrating the "small, loose" standards, simple services and social software entities of web2.0. (We here at KnowNet have built KNotes - a GPL'd collaborative weblogging system for Zope and Plone - which makes a very useful platform for such experimenting - pardon the plug :o) Some caveats, do's & don'ts follow:

Avoid reification by repetition

If we talk about "PLEs" for long enough, people will begin to assume they exist - and that there is a particular kind of artifact which "is a" PLE. This could encourage funders and vendors to concentrate on visible omnibus products - to the neglect of much needed work on other aspects of the services, systems, clients, interfaces, applications and best-practices which could comprise an environment worth describing as 'PL'.

The 'E' is out there

Many punters will mistakenly assume that the 'environment' will be metaphorically instantiated in some kind of desktop application program or web interface, but we all know better: a large part of the work required to make 'PL' happen will be in adding new services, service layers and bits of bridging code.

Practical experiments to reveal real-world use-cases

Our ignorance of pertinent use-cases is almost complete. The best way to shake out the issues and use-cases is to undertake some serious experimentation - try to use existing services and tools to accomplish small-scale aims with real users, and document the issues, patterns and gaps. Ideally, these experiments should have access to specialist development help, so that ad-hoc features and behaviours can be added or tweaked to meet the emerging cases.

I've done some experimenting with real users, and can attest that it is subtle and tricky in the extreme to mix and mash existing services and applications for ordinary groups of users. To my mind, small-scale collaborations among educators and developers, imaginatively pushing the limits of what can be done with existing equipment, are the most pressing immediate issue for all of us.

Creativity, connection and expression - not just consumption and aggregation

There is much work to be done to enable ordinary end-users to create their own content-in-context; to add connection and commentary to what they 'pull in'. The connectedness of content in web2.0 offers huge scope for exploring new ways for learners to create interesting structurings and representations of their own, but that will require determined experimentation, research and development

Respect the web2.0 way

In any work on PLEs, let's be very careful to learn from the simplicity, clarity, user-centricity, restraint and attention to detail that characterise web2.0. The good systems-effects only emerge when usage becomes rich and plentiful - and that depends on an ecology in which the individual parts are simple, focused and easy to get along with, and in which the interoperability architecture makes very lightweight demands on its citizens. Small pieces, loosely joined. Small APIs. Small steps. And remember to make it shiny :o)

Understand the gaps in web2.0 as it is

There are some wonderful applications, services and mash-ups out there, but existing services and applications are not quite enough to support the features we can envisage learners having access to in a PLE. Only by determined experimentation can we begin to characterise and address the gaps. (By the way, I have some hunches about where a few key gaps are to be found, but have had no chance to document them yet).

Concentrate on the parts web2.0 doesn't reach

My feeling is that we should concentrate our limited efforts on implementing functionalities and services which are not already available elsewhere ( or which practice has shown are unsuitable in the forms currently available).

Tools and platforms to experiment with

One crucial development task is to provide experimenters with platforms which can be flexibly and rapidly adapted to cases as they emerge. For instance, I am not sure that we need an omnibus desktop application in itself, but I am certain that we need to be able to rapidly experiment with desktop clients for new or adapted APIs/services (structured blogging and microformats through atom-publishing or weblogging API clients for instance, or structured-commentary on items read within an aggregator). Our own KNotes - which I mentioned above - is a useful platform for playing with the serverside of such experimental interactions.

Practice, practice, practice...

In case I did not emphasise my feelings about this enough above: web2.0 is a loose set of practices as much as it is a system... 1) Practical experiments are a key immediate task; (2) practice "in anger" with the web2.0 services and social software systems is to be heartily recommended to anyone who hasn't yet done so; (3) much of what will make the 'E' in PLE will be distillations and encodings of good practice, and much of our jobs will be to solicit, support, generalise and empower such practices.

The communication challenge

This stuff is subtle. What seems obvious to us is unknown to most policy-makers - indeed it's little-known or misunderstood by most professional ed-tech developers. In my experience, people do not "get" the new opportunities until they have made fairly serious use of some of them. Spreading the meme to funders and educators will require vivid demonstrators and small real-world success stories to exemplify the potential we see represented in those pretty omni-graffle clouds :O)

I'm involved as a consultant in a bid being developed for the ESRC/EPSRC Call for Research on Technology Enhanced Learning. The word-count restrictions on these proposals are quite severe, so my constribution to the text has been undergoing some pretty radical condensing (if only I'd had time to write half as much in the first place :o)

In order to save some words in the bid itself, I'm making this post in order to pull together some links I wanted to include with my text. These links should prove useful if you want to explore definitions of, and introductions to, web2.0, social bookmarking, and current ideas about Personal Learning Environments. Mostly, the links are to tags I have used in my own social-bookmarking:

• web2.0/intro (my del.icio.us bookmarking of introductory materials on web2.0 - currently 80 resources)
• web2.0/defining (my del.icio.us bookmarking of definitions of web2.0 - currently 14 resources)
• ossite.org/research/standards/library (tag clouds organised into 12 main topics, covering about 800 tags and 2000 resources related to web2.0 and learning technology)
• microformats (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about microformats - currently 20 resources)
• elearning/personalised (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personalised learning - currently 103 resources)
• PLE (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personal learning environments - currently 23 resources)
• webtech/MASHUP (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources illustrating "mash-ups" - currently 26 resources)
• connotea.org/tag/social-bookmarking(introductory materials about social bookmarking, also covering emergent systems effects in tagsonomies)
• REST : Representational State Transfer(wikipedia entry on the web architectural principle 'REST')

I've included - in the extended text for this entry - the text of my contribution to the bid (as of this morning - yet more shortening is threatened :o)

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)

...by the way, apologies for the long interval since my last post. This is partly down to me having a longer-than-usual post-Christmas bout of illness, and partly down to a mad coding frenzy through December which prevented me from finishing and posting a number of little articles I'd started.

A personal note for today's post. Something about the intense cold the other morning reminded me of early mornings watching for evictors at Newbury tree protest camps, and through that nostalgic haze it occured to me that it must be exactly ten years ago. Sure enough, today's Guardian includes a short reminiscence / celebration of the 10th anniversary (linking, I'm glad to see, to two current protests :o).

It does not seem like 10 years ago. My KnowNet colleague Al Harris and I, with many of our good mates from here in furry North Wales, spent some times at Newbury that winter. The North Wales climbing community was galvanised into active participation when some Sheffield climbers shamed the climbing world by turning tree-bailiff. The climbers proved a valuable press attraction and also showed that talent on the rocks can translate into amazing climbing feats in the trees. Among my bittersweet memories is a large ring of police giving a big round of applause to Dave Towse when he finally came down out of the distant, whiplashing top of a giant oak after foiling the best efforts of cherry-pickers and tree-bailiffs to shake or cut him down all day. Of course, there were some utter nutters about, but in general the experience gave me a new faith in young people. Just when my own middle age was starting to make anyone under 30 look selfish and unmotivated, I met some wonderful, aware, gifted, committed and imaginative young people - full of bravery, zeal and organisational nous, but without the dogmatic ideologism that blighted my own youthful activism. Here's to them.

Anyway, below are links to the Guardian article, and to some other resources:

The fierce battle against the Newbury bypass a decade ago changed the way campaigners fight for the environment, and altered forever the lives of many of those who took part. By Bibi van der Zee and John Vidal

The wikipedia articles on the A34 and on the A34 Newbury bypass include some (oddly worded) information and links about the protest. There is an extensive links-list on the Third Battle of Newbury in the press. That page also links to the chronology quoted below:

9 January


Third battle of Newbury starts. Attempts to start clearance work on the route of the Newbury bypass are foiled when hundreds of security guards and contractors are prevented from leaving their overnight base by protesters perched on two scaffold tripods. The location of the security base had been revealed to protesters by a 'mole' planted within the security firm. The tripod action appears on the news that day. It seems 15 people, with a five metre tripod of scaffolding poles had stopped the whole day's work.

Tuesday 17 November 1998 01:15 GMT


Bypass opens, with the movement of some traffic cones at Chieveley. There is no opening ceremony, "for fear of disruption by protesters".

The official opening ceremony is held in the afternoon at a secured Newbury Racecourse, and is led by Newbury MP, David Rendel, who cuts the ribbon. At the opening ceremony is also Undersheriff Nicholas Blandy. The racecourse was the site where the police and security convoys used to congregate before driving off in high speed to evict protesters.

I've been wanting to do this for a while now, but thanks the del.icio.us API and Steve's hard work there is now an accompanying elearning2.0 linklog.

I'm a pretty serious resource collector and tagger, especially in del.icio.us, with quite a few colleagues and clients following my linkstreams. We here at KnowNet are very serious about exploring new ways to integrate the web2.0-ish social software services with community portals and learning environments, and so we try to understand the potential by being active users of the services ourselves.

It has often occurred to me that I frequently see "blog entries" which are really bookmarks - in fact, because there is little work put into the tagging of these casual notings-of-other-content, they often have considerably less intellectual added-value than a well-tagged social bookmark. I can see why some bloggers are wont to "blog it on" by quickly quoting and linking - this passes on the hot links through chains of like-minded bloggers, allowing for some commentary along the way. And of course these posts are exposed to google indexing (whereas del.icio.us does not allow search engines to index its content), which makes life much easier for people looking for contexts in which people link to things. On the other hand, "blogging it on" does not naturally lend itself to the accumulation of categorically dense or rich resource bases - blog categories are like sections or departments, whereas del.icio.us tagging practices tend to throw a number of tags at each resource to reflect multiple uses and facets, and so del.icio.us tagging can lead to rich categorical schemas. For an example, see another view of my del.icio.us bookmarking - as a rich set of tag clouds - at the SIGOSSEE project Standards and Architectures Working Group resource base.

So we've added the linkroll as a blog-like view of the same resources that the SIGOSSEE resource base gives a library-like view of.

An extra benefit is that you can track more of my bookmarking by subscribing to the linklog's RSS 2 feed than by subscribing to my main del.icio.us feed. I often bookmark more than 20 items a day - sometimes a lot more than 20 items. del.icio.us feeds only deliver the latest 20 items, so unless you refresh often you'll miss some bookmarks when subscribing to del.icio.us feeds for busy bookmarkers. This is not a problem when subscribing to the full-content feed for the linklog; no matter how many items I bookmarked on a particular day, that day's digest is one entry in the linklog feed.

We'll make the linklog a feature of knotes, by the way, so that other users can make use of it - chron jobs / retrospective batch processing to pull del.icio.us bookmarks into daily digest blog entries using del.icio.us' API.

And we'll be trying to do the same for Connotea, citeulike, etc. Watch this space!

KnowNet leads a european project called SIGOSSEE - a mouthful I know but the acronym makes sense: Special Interest Group for Open Source Software for Education in Europe. One of the project's key activities is a set of working groups which will report on aspects of open source for education. I'm responsible for the working group on standards and architectures. In June I wrote a draft report, which is available on the SIGOSSEE site. Since then one of my jobs has been to furiously collect and catalog resources relevant to the issue, with the preparation of a final draft report in mind. Last week I built the tag cloud for that resource base into the WG's area of the SIGOSSEE site, and together with Al Harris wrote a presentation to introduce the resource base and outline the benefits of doing things like this in the 'content outside', web2.0 way. I blogged about it to the project news blog:

Al Harris is presenting a talk to the Conference on Open Source for Education in Europe, announcing the Standards and Architectures Working Group's resource base. This weblog post introduces the resource base, links to an online version of the presentation, and has a printable pdf version attached.

(By the way, the SIGOSSEE Project jointly organised that conference... see www.ossite.org for more info). My project news post just pointed to the resource base tag-cloud page and quoted its introductory paragraphs:

A large part of the work entailed by the Working Group's report is the comprehensive collection and categorising of web reseources related to standards, architectures and open-source in education. Mike has been seriously collecting, tagging and annotating resources for the WG since July, and we now have a very substantial and growing resource-base.

Most of the resource-base is back-ended by Mike Malloch's del.icio.us account, with others in Connotea. See Mike's main weblog, elearning2.0, for other materials and writings which explain why we are using external services to host the WG's resource-base, and about the theory and practice of architecting for education with open source and open standards. Please send me any links you think belong in the resource-base: if you are a del.icio.us user, add the tag for:Mike_Malloch- otherwise email mike AT theknownet DOT com. Because the resource-base is backended by well-known, open services, we can collaboratively build on it, and anyone is free to aggregate from it using del.icio.us and Connotea's rich and flexible APIs and RSS. You can also subscribe to my del.icio.us stream's RSS - all tags and queries are also avilable via RSS.

Below is a "tag cloud" showing the relevant categories in Mike's del.icio.us account. Click a tag to see the resources tagged with it along with a list of related tags.

Sadly I don't have the time to explain any of the groovy details or implications here. There are many benefits from accumulating resource collections using the lightweight public services, and soon I'll try to write about them here :o) In the meantime, the presentation is worth reading / viewing if you are interested in resources the web2.0 way.

A printable pdf version of the talk is available as an attachment to the SIGOSSEE post. Links: Stds Archs Talk Printable [ Download ] (stds_archs_talk_printable.pdf - 10.49 Mb ) Preview . An online version is available as a Flickr slideshow of the presentation.