Colleges need towns

by

The New York Times reports [why do they require a login?] that towns around colleges are just as important as the colleges themselves in attracting faculty and students:

Colleges have traditionally tempted top students with ivy-covered campuses, towering Gothic buildings and up-to-date student centers. But nowadays, there is a sense that a beautiful campus is not enough. An alluring college town is seen as necessary as well.

Our small town has a university but the town itself has had some difficulties over the past few years, with business and store closures. This past weekend, a 150 year-old building, on the main downtown corner, burnt and was completely destroyed. No one was injured.
sackville fire.jpg

[Note: Project Rebuild is focused on helping out those who were left homeless by the fire.]

Perhaps this is also an opportunity for us to rethink the important connection between the university, the town and what attracts and retains people. What could be built on this key intersection that would enhance a sense of community? Should it be retail; residential; a town square?

Via Christian Long, at Think: Lab

An historical explanation of Blackboard’s Legal Suit

by

There is much discussion about Blackboard’s recent suit against Desire2Learn for allegedly infringing on learning management system patents, such as Stephen Downes’ aggregated links and Dave Cormier’s commentary.

This post from Oligopoly Watch, not related to Blackboard, explains the nature of the beast and shows once again that corporatism is the enemy of a free and open society:

Reback recalls the time when Sun Microsystems was still small and IBM still utterly dominant in the computer business. IBM sued Sun for patent infringement, and Sun’s legal staff called for a meeting to iron things out. As Reback puts it, “Fourteen IBM lawyers and their assistants, all clad in the requisite dark blue suits, crowded into the largest conference room Sun had.” After hearing details of the alleged violations, outmanned, but of tech-savvy Sun lawyers, demolished the arguments of the IBM lawyers one by one.

At first, the IBM lawyers were silent. Then, recounts Reback, “the chief suit responded. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘maybe you don’t infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?'”

This kind of historical precendence shows that the patent system and corporations are the real problem, not any specific company. Given the chance, most corporations would act in the same way; on the advice of their lawyers of course.

An Introduction to the Commons

by

I’m working on an introductory piece (about 2 printed pages) for people who know nothing about the Commons. My aim is to explain enough so that people are interested and will ask more questions. Feedback is always appreciated.

Our Commons

For a long period of time, human economic development was tied to the land. The elites owned the land, and various types of workers, from serfs to sharecroppers, produced crops for the landowners. During the Agrarian Age, land was the most valuable commodity.

Even though large engines and other physical capital had been around in the 18th century, it was not until the early 20th century that a large number of workers were able to leave the farm. The automobile and highways made it possible for many people to commute to factories to work as employees. With the arrival of the tractor, one person was able to farm much more land than was previously possible with a team of horses. Larger farms were now viable and farm workers were lured to higher paying factory jobs. During the Industrial Age, physical capital, such as a factory, was the most valuable commodity.

factory.jpg
Today, less than 2% of Canadians work on farms, yet we can all eat. At the same time, the industrial sector is shrinking, but there is no shortage of manufactured goods. The only sector that is growing is the knowledge sector. At some time in the near future, knowledge work will outnumber manufacturing jobs. I say knowledge work, not jobs, because much of this work is not as salaried employees.

Knowledge work is not information work. It is work that creates something new, such as a story, a design, or a service. Some knowledge workers can create new services, such as a digital photo sharing service. This is the case of Vancouver-based Flickr, whose husband and wife founders sold their service to Yahoo for $30 million. In the Internet Age, the most valuable commodity is human creativity.

team_sketch_erich_schube_02.jpg

If a community is to thrive in the Internet Age, it must be attractive to knowledge workers. These workers need to be connected to other knowledge workers so that they can stay creative. They need to have constant access to fresh ideas. One way to attract knowledge workers is to offer the right physical space and connections. Because many knowledge workers are not employees, they don’t need conventional office space. Many are starting to create their own alternative spaces in cities such as London, Toronto, Vancouver and even Charlottetown. Take a look in any city and you will see people working with wireless enabled computers in what has become the default third-space – the coffee shop.

coffeeshop1.JPG

Now, a new third-space, the work commons, is being created where workers pay a monthly membership to have access to shared work areas and business services. No one owns an office, because no one needs a full-time space. It would be a waste. The idea behind the Tantramar Commons is to provide the physical space in Sackville for a work commons. The model for the work commons has been established and is successful, covering its costs, nurturing innovation between sectors and growing entrepreneurs; all at a minimal capital cost.

The presence of a work commons will encourage communication between entrepreneurs, who need additional space, and will be a focal point to attract knowledge workers from outside the area. Other commons are currently looking at creating a worldwide network to share ideas and services.

In addition to a work commons, the Tantramar Commons will offer space to non-profit organisations in the environmental and cultural sectors. These sectors are important to ensure our sustainabilty as a community. Sackville has a certain critical mass of organisations in these two sectors already, but we need to sustain it. There are many potential benefits of local entrepreneurs working in the same space as environmentalists and artists. The cross-pollination between sectors that don’t usually intermix will be fertile ground for innovation.

Much as the town square was the common space for community development in early America, so will the interconnected, but locally grounded, Tantramar Commons be our space for problem-solving, celebration, consolation, and knowledge creation.

Elgg Reviewed by R/WW

by

elgg.gif

Read/Write Web has a good overview of Elgg Learning landscape and an interview with Dave and Ben, the co-founders. [I had mentioned that I believe that Elgg is one of the few online learning systems that is not affected by the current Blackboard LMS patent suit, though there are other Blackboard patents that may be a cause for concern].

The overview is a brief look at what Elgg currently offers and what is coming soon, including Elgg Spaces. This article is excellent for anyone unfamilar with Elgg, as Read/Write Web is not about educational technology, so they don’t assume that the reader knows everything about the field.

The Commons – creating social space

by

In speaking with Robert Paterson about the many commons blossoming across the country, I was reminded about this statement made by John McKnight, in Community and its Counterfeits in 1994.

McKnight was referring to de Tocqueville’s famous book, Democracy in America, recounting his travels across the new country in 1831-32 (as cited in Ideas: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds (2005) Goose Lane Pub., p. 116). My emphasis added.

The book, Democracy in America, is, I think, the most useful book I know to help understand who we are. And he says, if I can summarize him in a rather gross form, that he came here and he found a society whose definitions and solutions were not created by nobility, by professionals, by experts or managers, but by what he identified as little groups of people, self-appointed, common men and women who came together and took three powers: the power to decide there was a problem, the power to decide how to solve the problem – that is, the expert’s power – and then the power to solve the problem. These little groups of people weren’t elected and they weren’t appointed and they were everyplace, and they were, he said, the heart of the new society – they were the American community as distinct from the European community. And he named these little groups “associations”. Association is the collective for citizens, an association of citizens. And so we think of our community as being the social space in which citizens in association do the work of problem-solving, celebration, consolation, and creation – that community, that space, in contrast to the space of the system with the box at the top and lots of little boxes at the bottom. And I think it is still the case that the hope for our time is in those associations.

I cannot think of a better description of what our Commons could be.

Writely for proposal development

by

We’ve just finished an intense collaborative effort to get a proposal shipped for today. Our main collaborative tool was Writely, a free online word processor/wiki combination.

I’ve been using Writely (now owned by Google) for collaborative document development for about a year. Writely lets you upload or create a document online with most of the features that you would find in any word processor. It also lets you invite other people to collaborate at the same time. If two people make simultaneous changes to the same text, then Writely wiill tell you about the conflict. You can look at everyone’s changes, make comments, add content and view all versions of your document.

I think that Writely is the perfect tool for a distributed team that is writing a proposal. It’s even better with a team in different time zones so that one person can work while others are sleeping.

Here are some suggestions on using Writely, while it’s still fresh in my mind:

  • Start your document online with Writely – don’t upload an existing document. This will reduce extra HTML code and weird formatting, especially from uploaded MS Word documents.
  • Use the online version to develop the main text of the document and don’t worry about making it look pretty.
  • Avoid tables in the document, but if you need them, create them in Writely.
  • Use Writely to get consensus on the words and the flow of the proposal.
  • Once you have agreement on the content, save the document as an RTF, Word or OpenOffice document. I find that OpenOffice produces the cleanest document.
  • On your desktop application, start adding graphics, headers & footers, headings & titles, etc.
  • If you are using OfficeOffice, you can finish by clicking on “Export as PDF” and your document will be ready to print and/or send.

Corporatism run amok

by

I am beginning to think that corporatism is the root of much evil.

It starts by focusing on profit above all else. There is nothing wrong with making a profit, as I even try to do this, so that I can feed and clothe my family. The problem begins when you do this “above all else”. When corporations were granted rights of persons, without any social or moral obligations, we started down a slippery slope as a society. Now we have too many people making their livings on behalf of a disembodied entity that only wants to make profit.

Add to this amoral mix the notion that ideas can be owned and patented. For instance, software programs, consisting of nothing more than lines of code, are ideas. So now we have an information society, moving into a knowledge society, where some greedy people think that corporations should own ideas and make profits off these ideas for a very long time. The problem is that we cannot grow as a society without the free flow of ideas. Patenting ideas will slow down our collective ability to learn. However, the US Patent Office thinks that it is a good thing to protect ideas, as do other national patent offices.

Take for instance a software company that has bought and borrowed ideas from multiple public sources (processes, code, how-to) and put a brand on it and called it a unique idea. So far, no one has taken the idea to patent the concept of zero and stop further development of any computer programs (see The People Who Owned the Bible, for another analogy). In the case of computer code or ideas, it is impossible to say where the original idea started. In the case of ideas, pretty well everything is based on some prior art.

I have been accused of being an “open source evangelist” for several years. My support of open source as a system for innovation and sharing of ideas stems from my short, but intensive period in the corporate world. Here I saw many cases of greed and arrogance wrapped in the corporate flag. I saw little original thought and many corporate entities had the capability to suck the humanity out of those who climbed the ladder. The open source community is transparent, rewards merit and gives everything back to the community. That cannot be said for any corporation.

Last year I asked, “Is intellectual property an oxymoron?“. Using property laws for ideas only serves the lawyers and the existing power structure. It does not advance individual freedoms nor the public good. Now I am certain that intellectual property laws must be changed if we are to advance as a knowledge society. We cannot have corporate interests defining the direction of our society by patenting ideas that belong to all of us.

This is a big issue; but we citizens, voters and taxpayers have to frame the conversation with our elected officials. Let’s start with one fundamental concept – Ideas cannot be patented.

Update: here is a new site, No Education Patents! that may become a rallying point for the learning community.

Sir Ken Robinson on TED Talks

by

Spend fifteen minutes and listen to Sir Ken Robinson speaking about education and creativity at this year’s Technology, Entertainment, Design Talks. Here are some snippets from his hilarious, but at the same time serious, presentation:

it’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp

creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status

if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original

we are educating people out of their creative capacities

suddenly degrees aren’t worth anything

our education system has mined our minds in the way that we have strip-mined the earth for a particular commodity

Blackboard Sues D2L over LMS Patent

by

Well I guess the rumours are true. Not only did Blackboard receive a comprehensive patent (US and other countries) on LMS technology, but they have filed a suit against Canadian company Desire2Learn – their main competitor in the academic market. The Inquirer has posted a PDF of the suit, filed on 26 July 2006, which states:

“… including but not limited to all D2L products based on the D2L learning system or platform, such as the D2L eLearning Technology Suite, which includes the D2L eLearning Environment, Learning Repository and Live Room, and all services supporting these D2L products, such as hosting services, training services, help desk support services, implementation and customization professional services, and content services.”

Personally, I don’t really care if one corporation sues another, as that seems to be in their nature. I’ve also noted in my last post that the course online model may have reached the end of its natural life anyway. However, there is still cause for concern. If Blackboard wins the suit, then some open source communities, such as Moodle, may be next in line.

It will depend on how generous the courts are in determining the extent of Blackboard’s patent. Blackboard’s claim is extensive, comprising 44 claims with the US Patent Office:

1. A course-based system for providing to an educational community of users access to a plurality of online courses, comprising: a) a plurality of user computers, with each user computer being associated with a user of the system and with each user being capable of having predefined characteristics indicative of multiple predetermined roles in the system, each role providing a level of access to a plurality of data files associated with a particular course and a level of control over the data files associated with the course with the multiple predetermined user roles comprising at least two user’s predetermined roles selected from the group consisting of a student role in one or more course associated with a student user, an instructor role in one or more courses associated with an instructor user and an administrator role associated with an administrator user, and b) a server computer in communication with each of the user computers over a network, the server computer comprising: means for storing a plurality of data files associated with a course, means for assigning a level of access to and control of each data file based on a user of the system’s predetermined role in a course; means for determining whether access to a data file associated with the course is authorized; means for allowing access to and control of the data file associated with the course if authorization is granted based on the access level of the user of the system.

2. The system of claim 1 wherein the instructor user is provided with an access level to enable the creation and editing of a plurality of files associated with a course.

3. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise an announcement file.

4. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise a course information file.

5. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise a staff information file posted to all registered in the course.

6. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise a course document file posted to all registered in the course.

7. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise an assignments file posted to all registered in the course.

8. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise a dropbox file.

9. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise an asynchronous communication file.

10. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise a synchronous communication file.

11. The system of claim 2 wherein the student user is provided with an access level to enable reading of a plurality of files associated with a course.

12. The system of claim 11 wherein the student user is provided with an access level to enable modification of a subset of the plurality of files associated with a course.

13. The system of claim 11 wherein the user is provided with an access level to enable creation of a student file associated with a file for which the student user is able to read.

14. The system of claim 13 in which the file that the student is able to read is an assessment file created by the instructor user, and the student file created by the student user is a response to the assessment file.

15. The system of claim 14 wherein the assessment file comprises a plurality of examination questions selected by the instructor user to assess the ability of the student user.

16. The system of claim 15 wherein the examination questions are selected by the instructor user from a predetermined pool of available examination questions.

17. The system of claim 15 wherein the examination questions are created by the instructor user substantially at the time of the creation of the assessment file.

18. The system of claim 15 wherein the student file is reviewed by the instructor user and assigned a grade.

19. The system of claim 18 wherein the grade is made available to the student user.

20. The system of claim 18 wherein the instructor user collates a plurality of grades obtained from reviewing a plurality of student files, and wherein the collated grades are made available to all student users associated with the course.

21. The system of claim 13 in which the file that the student is able to read is an assignment file created by the instructor user, and the student file created by the student user is a response to the assignment file.

22. The system of claim 8 wherein the dropbox file comprises a plurality of files transferred to the server computer from one or more student users associated with the course.

23. The system of claim 22 wherein the instructor user is provided with access to the files in the dropbox file, whereby the instructor user may download, edit and upload the files in the dropbox.

24. The system of claim 1 wherein a user is required to enter a login sequence into a user computer in order to be provided with access to course files associated with that user.

25. The system of claim 24 wherein the user is provided with access to all courses with which the user is associated after entry of the logon sequence.

26. The system of claim 25 wherein the user is provided with a web page comprising a plurality of course hyperlinks, each of said course hyperlinks associated with each course that the user has enrolled in.

27. The system of claim 26 wherein selection of a course hyperlink will provide the user with a web page associated with the selected course, the web page comprising a plurality of content hyperlinks to various content areas associated with the course.

28. The system of claim 27 wherein said content hyperlinks comprise an announcement area hyperlink, a course information hyperlink, a staff information hyperlink, a course documents hyperlink, an assignments hyperlink, a communications hyperlink, and a student tools hyperlink.

29. The system of claim 28 wherein selection of the announcement area hyperlink provides a web page comprising a group of course announcements.

30. The system of claim 28 wherein selection of the course information hyperlink provides a web page comprising information regarding the associated course.

31. The system of claim 28 wherein selection of the staff information hyperlink provides a web page comprising data regarding the instructors of the associated course.

32. The system of claim 28 wherein selection of the course documents hyperlink provides a web page comprising a listing of documents associated with the course.

33. The system of claim 32 wherein the listing of course documents comprise active hyperlinks to the documents.

34. The system of claim 28 wherein selection of the assignments hyperlink provides a web page comprising a group of course assignments.

35. The system of claim 28 wherein selection of the communications hyperlink provides a web page comprising hyperlinks to a group of communication tools comprising an asynchronous communication tool and a synchronous communication tool.

36. An method for providing online education method for a community of users in a network based system comprising the steps of: a. establishing that each user is capable of having redefined characteristics indicative of multiple predetermined roles in the system and each role providing a level of access to and control of a plurality of course files; b. establishing a course to be offered online, comprising i. generating a set of course files for use with teaching a course; ii. transferring the course files to a server computer for storage; and iii. allowing access to and control of the course files according to the established roles for the users according to step (a); c. providing a predetermined level of access and control over the network to the course files to users with an established role as a student user enrolled in the course; and d. providing a predetermined level of access and control over the network to the course files to users with an established role other than a student user enrolled in the course.

37. The method of claim 36 wherein at least one of the course files comprises a course assignment, further comprising the steps of: e) the student user creating a student file in response to the course assignment; and f) the student user transferring the student file to the server computer.

38. The method of claim 37 further comprising the steps of: g) the instructor user accessing the student file from the server computer; h) the instructor user reviewing the student file to determine compliance with the course assignment; and i) the instructor user assigning a grade to the student file as a function of the determination of compliance with the course assignment.

39. The method of claim 38 further comprising the step of the instructor user posting the grade to a file on the server computer accessible only to the student user with which the grade is associated.

40. The method of claim 38 further comprising the steps of the instructor repeating the steps (g), (h), and (i) for a plurality of student users that are enrolled in the course.

41. The method of claim 40 further comprising the step of the instructor user performing a statistical analysis on the grades assigned to the plurality of student users.

42. The method of claim 41 further comprising the step of making results of the statistical analysis available to the student users enrolled in the course.

43. The method of claim 36 further comprising the step of providing an asynchronous communication tool accessible to student users enrolled in the course for enabling asynchronous communication amongst the student users.

44. The method of claim 36 further comprising the step of providing a synchronous communication tool accessible to student users enrolled in the course for enabling synchronous communication amongst the student users.

Sorry about the long blockquote, but I think that it’s important to consider that these kinds of functions can be found not just in LMS but also LCMS and even some non-traditional online learning systems. Is there an online learning system, proprietary or open source, that does not include ANY of these functions?

Update: On reviewing these 44 items, I would say that Elgg Learning Landscape does not use any of these. So, I guess that makes your decision easy. Choose Elgg if you want a lawsuit-free learning system ;-)

Blackboard patents the LMS, but does it matter?

by

Via Stephen Downes, is this post by Michael Feldstein that Blackboard (aka BlackWeb) has been granted a US patent on the learning management system (LMS). My initial reaction was indignation that a greedy corporation was once again trying to stifle innovation in education. Then I read Brent Schlenker’s reaction to my post on the lack of open source learning applications, and Brent correctly noted that there are a lot of learning applications, just not that many “educational” ones;

My point is that we don’t need any specific open source learning applications. That would be just another thing that people need to learn…another interface to learn…another login id and password to remember. We are at our best when we evaluate the existing technologies and leverage them for the purpose of learning. We are at our worst when we try to create our own little system and call it the Learning thingy.

The Blackboard patent may become a defining moment for learning technologies. Let’s use this as an opportunity to cast off the classroom and course metaphors:

In yet another aspect of the invention, provided is a method for providing online education, which includes the steps of establishing a course to be offered online, offering the course to be taken online to a group of student users; and providing access over the network to the course files to a student user who has enrolled in the course. The establishment of the course includes an instructor user generating a set of course files for use with teaching the course, then transferring the course files to a server computer for storage thereat, and then making access to the course files available to a predefined community of student users having access to the server computer over a network.

Let’s use all those wonderful Web 2.0 tools for learning, not schooling. Blackboard spent a lot of time and money filing for this patent and they can have it, because it has no value. It’s no longer about online courses, it’s about learning and performing.

LMS? We don’t need no stinking LMS!