Metamedia

Why Use Online Forums in Teaching?

Here is an answer from Howard Rheingold:

Bollywood Blackboardwala Rides Again!

Blackboard is at it once again, suing Desire2Learn. My, my, seems like only yesterday (though it was February of 2007) we had the trial. In return, Desire2Learn has this counter proposal.

Slumdog Millionaire, anyone?

And I have another chapter in The Adventures of Bollywood Blackboardwala.

• Ep. 10 - My Lawyer Made Me Do It

(Embed is pretty funky, so link above is your best bet.)

Moodle Audio Tools Update

I have updated my page on Moodle Audio Tools to reflect the current situation as of February 2009.

The situation today is much simpler than two or even one year ago, as Nanogong is the clear choice for doing this today.

Release 3 of Nanogong in August 2008 was a distinct improvement, especially integrating with Moodle.

The adoption of the Speex codec has improved the quality of the recording, which was one of its main weaknesses.  And its integration with the Moodle rich text editor means you can record and play back sounds in any rich text  box in a course, not just in the provided assignment module.

That's not to say there aren't some issues - with Gradebook integration of the assignment module, and occasional stability issues, but it has seen continual improvement over the last two years. So good job, Gong Project!

Blackboard's Possibly Pyrrhic Victory

Word has spread around the Higher Education world in the last day or two that Blackboard "won" its patent infringement lawsuit against competitor Desire2Learn (D2L) (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

But did they?  When the score is 35-9 and the team with the nine is called the "Winner" by the corporate media, I question that. And the score is 35-9 because originally there were 44 infringement claims, 35 of which were dismissed by the court on August 4th, 2007, the so-called Markman decision. 

What is the difference between the 35 and the 9? What exactly do those nine claims cover? I asked that question this morning of some colleagues and no one was really sure. So this post is some quick afternoon research about the issue.

The Claims

Here are two sites that give a "plain English" translation of the original claims.

• Michael Feldstein's The Bb Patent Claims
• No Education Patents wiki site

Clearly the first 35 claims are all based on one basic claim, the first, that Blackboard's patent covered access control of files by role. These claims were dismissed as too general and vague. Or according to D2L's (August 4th, 2007 entry) description:

The more significant, immediate result is that the Court found the "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," a "means-plus-function" term, to be indefinite.

The Second Set of Claims

Claims 36 to 44 however are a much more specific version of that general claim. Claim 36 is the key one, the others being elaborations of it. The summary from claim 36 is that:

The system makes it possible to (a) check to see that a user has a valid login, (b) generate an appropriate course shell on the server, including the ability to set access privileges on the pages in the course, (c) assign the role of "student" to some users and have predetermined access privileges go along with that role, and (d) assign some role other than "student" (e.g., "instructor") to some users and have different pre-determined access privileges go along with that role.

In other words, they are claiming that the patent they hold currently covers a system that does all these four things:

a. Check to see there is a valid login
   - it is not open or anonymous like web pages
b. Generate a course shell on the server
   - It is for courses specifically, not other types of groups
   - It generates a standard interface structure for a specific course, the shell
   - this shell contains objects called pages which can have access controls on them
   - this happens not on the desktop, local computer but on a server over a network
c. Assigns a specific role called "Student" with specific access privileges
d. Likewise for an Instructor role

As you can see from this list, every CMS/LMS system is going to have these features: they are essential to it.

Part a: Authentication

Without authentication, you cannot reliably match class enrollments with CMS/LMS access, which among other issues, will invalidate the use of any materials under fair use. Courses are closed on a CMS/LMS for many of the same reasons the physical classroom is limited to enrollees.

Part b:  The Shell

This section of the claim is interesting because it is not about "look and feel" or interface, except to the degree that there is an interface which provides a "shell" for a course. It is a claim about CMS/LMS organizational function rather than what particular content functions are available. Inherent in the claim is that any type of pre-existing standardized look/feel/functionality that is given is the shell for the course: what functions and features it has may vary.

The only specific function the shell must provide in this definition is some sort of access privileges to content.

To give a comparison, in a blog, the equivalent would be "the post."  Imagine that someone had patented the notion of "the post," a system of reverse chronological entries online, where the roles of "Reader" and "Author" have different privileges.

Parts c and and d: Student and Instructor Roles

These two parts of the claim are specific versions of the invalided claim to general roles with permission privileges. The patent says Blackboard invented the specific roles of Student and Instructor in an online course and that they have predefined, differing privilege roles. Once again, as in part b, the claim is foundational - it does not matter what specific privileges such roles might have in any particular version of a CMS/LMS, but just that those two roles do have distinct privileges.

Conclusion?

I find it rather hard to imagine a CMS/LMS that does not have those four components. Take away authentication, a predefined shell, and reduce student and teacher privileges to the same role, and you have... what? A web page?

The definition is so generic, that, except for the fact that it's connected to an analog classroom course and the specific words "Student" and "Instructor" occur, it would apply to most online multi user software: Usenet, BBS systems, forums, blogs, wikis, and practically all social software, as well as document management software, all of which have authentication, a shell, and named roles with predefined privileges.

And that is why Blackboard is so happy -- though the score was 35-9, they won the key point.

"We won on every count," he said. "Yes we could have won more money, but we're perfectly happy with the verdict. 

So, the short answer is yes, Blackboard did win, for the law is not a sport of equal point accumulation like baseball or cricket, but is rather more like Quidditch: though distinctly behind on Quaffle points, Blackboard captured the Snitch and won the match.

Of course, all this only preliminary, based on the claims and reading the charge to the jury. When the detailed ruling comes out, we will know more.

Slinging FUD

So far the legal issues, but many in higher education have decried Blackboard's behavior as more than normal intellectual property protection, but as predatory and detrimental to education. There are some important moral issues here, but Blackboard is clearly not interested in those, though it did attempt to appease critics with its "Pledge" not to enforce its patent claims against Open Source providers or end users, though that has been criticized too. 

The question is: will this translate into a business issue ? Will customers abandon Blackboard over this issue ?  So far the answer is 'not yet,' or at least, 'not for this alone.'

The Next Move

A good summation of the situation is that provided in the Sakai Foundation response:

This jury verdict is not a judgment that Blackboard holds a valid patent. It is an initial verdict that D2L infringed on the Blackboard patent. As such, the verdict is not that surprising. The Sakai Foundation continues to believe that the Blackboard patent should not have been awarded in the first place.

In fact, I would go farther and say that the jury made the correct legal decision. Given the patent, and the description of claim 36 and following above, Desire2Learn did clearly infringe. And so does almost every other CMS/LMS under the sun. 

And that is why the real issue is yet to be decided: is the Blackboard patent valid?

And that will depend on the pending re-examination of the patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

If the Blackboard patent is invalidated, then the interim result will be that the Blackboard business strategy to sling marketing FUD and litigate will have caused D2L to have wasted time and money having to litigate and maybe recode, but that's all: CMS/LMS products will go on substantially as they are.

But if the Blackboard patent is upheld as valid, then it would mean that Blackboard would own the CMS/LMS as we know it.

It would mean that it will have completed its business strategy of eliminating its closest commercial competitors with a one-two punch: the buyout of WebCT (1, 2, 3, 4) and the patent litigation against D2L.

It would move from dominant to sole provider of CMS/LMS systems in the United States, with a legally enforcible commercial monopoly. It could impose licensing fees on competitors or even halt the use of all other CMS/LMS products in use in the United States today, including Open Source products. For only the naive would expect the so-called Blackboard pledge to hold or even retain any relevance in such a situation. (For more on Blackboard's business strategy, read Jim Farmer's analysis.)

The legally conservative American universities that founded the Sakai project will surely not contest Blackboard openly, but rather reach some accommodation with it.

And Blackboard's next move for a monopoly position, now that it has tamed its major commercial competitor (not incidentally a Canadian company) is the just announced major expansion into the Australian market, the homeland of the other major Open Source competitor, Moodle. 

So, a lot depends on the fate of the pending patent re-examination.

The future of Learning Management Systems software in the United States will be decided not by educators or learners, not by the commercial market or school administrators, not even by a jury of our peers.

It will be decided by a single patent examiner.

Sources:

• Desire2Learn Patent Info Blog (Um, D2L, real blogs have permalinks.)
• Blackboard Patent Site
• Michael Feldstein's Bb Patent Claims in Plain English
• And his continuing excellent coverage of the whole affair
• No Education Patents wiki site
• Stephen Downes accummulated BB Patent page
• Alfred Essa at The Nose
• Sakai Project response
• Google Financials for Blackboard
  

Blackboard to Moodle -- bFree

The University of North Carolina has produced a nifty tool for extracting things from Blackboard archive files. It is primarily intended to allow extraction from the archive file into a web page with links to the files.

But it will also be very useful for those who are moving from Blackboard to Moodle or Sakai or another LMS system. In fact, if there were a web page to Moodle converter, you could almost completely automate the job.

The tool is called bFree and is available free at their web site.

Moodle Audio Overview

This is an overview of what I know about the situation with audio support in Moodle which I compiled for a faculty member who is interested in having his Comp Sci students do a project with Moodle.

I should add that our main interest is in the use of audio for foreign language teaching, both conversation practice and homework assignments. Your interests may be different.

1) Moodlespeex

Moodlespeex is a simple java client, used for recording and playing. It hooks into both the Files area and Forums. It was first developed for Moodle 1.6 by an individual developer named Dan Stowell.

It is abandonware. It hasn't been developed since about August of 2006.

I got this to work in Moodle 1.6 on files, but not forums; but both worked in Moodle 1.7.  Other people have had the opposite experience. But both are clearly broken for everyone in Moodle 1.8. It does not use the standard block api, but was directly hooking into the Moodle forum code, so it is no surprise it does not upgrade well.

When it worked, it got good reviews from faculty, mainly because it is ultra simple and the quality of the speex format is very good for what foreign language teachers need.

Here is the Moodle plugin page: http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=418
Here is the main discussion forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50265

2) Covcell

Covcell is a 2 year project funded by the EU, sponsored at several universities. If you ever wanted to go to Iceland, the next Covcell conference is in Reykjavik this fall.

Covcell is actually a suite of applications mostly in Java that will run off the Red5 open source Flash server project (http://osflash.org/red5) also being done in Europe. 

It is still somewhere between alpha and early beta in progress. I tested the online demo site a couple of months ago and liked it, but I could never get the streaming server installation to work. For one thing, it was completely undocumented.

Also, Covcell has a rather different priority set (chat is first on the list) than our faculty who are mostly interested in conversation practice / recording homework.

Main site: http://covcell.org/
The main audio recording software: http://covcell.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=83
Covcell Moodle discussion forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=5368

3) Gong

Gong is a fully mature Java server (Linux or Windows) based application out of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (http://www.ust.hk/en/index.html).

It can run as a standalone application or as a Moodle plugin. It is essentially a discussion forum application that is fully voice enabled. It has a very nice interface.

I tested this in Spring 2006 with a faculty member in Foreign Languages but she complained about the poor quality of the audio.

Back in June, I installed the new version, now up to version 5, but had the same issues with audio recording quality. 

They have switched to a speex format for their chat module, but the main boards still use wav. The main problem seems to be the codec is too good and picks up a lot of extraneous noise at the high end of the frequency range, which is not needed for voice applications.

The result is a sound quality that is tinny, thin, and background noisy.

So one of the issues with audio will be the acceptability of the sound quality to your customers: the foreign language faculty. Gong would be the clear winner if only the sound quality were better.

Gong plugs into Moodle in the cleanest way: it uses the official block api and is just that: its own block. As a result, it is usually not an issue when upgrading Moodle, which is very nice.

Main Gong site: http://gong.ust.hk/index.html
Main Gong Moodle forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50418

The Gong developers are very active in Moodle & very helpful.

4) DimDim

There is a piece of web conferencing software called DimDim which is being integrated with Moodle. I looked at it once last year, but it seems very different from what foreign language faculty are interested in at the moment, but it could be very useful down the road.

Main site http://www.dimdim.com/
Moodle Forum http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50760

5) MoodleVox proposal for Moodle 2.0

There is a proposal to bring something called VoiceXML to Moodle 2.0: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Voice

Moodle 1.9 is about to ship, and will be the last of the 1.x series. Moodle 2.0 will be a big leap and take much longer to ship (nearly a year) than the usual 3-4 month point release. 

See the development roadmap here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Roadmap where the Voice project is listed as "Hopefully."

6) Other useful links:

The foreign language teaching forum: http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=31

and especially see the Voice Application forum at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=1868

FFF: Haiku joins the LMS gang

Link: Create a classroom website - Haiku LMS

Haiku is the name of a new online Learning Management System. 

The leader in this area, so far, appears to be Scholar360 though in a basic way, all the popular LMS systems (Blackboard/WebCT, Desire2Learn, Angel, Moodle, and Sakai) are browser based, and hence online. But such systems are really intended for schools and colleges to set up and manage the servers themselves.

But there is a lot to be said for giving your admin headaches to someone else. Not the least of which is it allows you to focus your time on pedagogy instead of eduministration.

Haiku is new and basic: so basic, it is almost not quite ready for prime time yet. 

For instance, it lacks a gradebook. That's pretty important; and it is on the to-do list for the next version.

It makes up for this lack of a full feature set by having a terrific AJAX based interface. There are nifty drag and drop tools in it that make it easy and fun to use, unlike the traditional heavy duty LMS experience. And it is very friendly to online media storage sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Odeo.

It has the other standard features of an LMS: upload files, make web links, organize the class by topic, create a student list, do discussions.

Haiku has its strengths, but I wouldn't switch just yet. It's a good start though.

Development: Voice in Moodle

Development: Voice - MoodleDocs.

Re: my diatribe post on voice enabling an LMS, what I meant was something exactly like the VoiceXML project for the upcoming Moodle version 2. It proposes to put voice capability into Moodle wherever there is text input capability.

Let us hope it works out. It is exactly the sort of thing we need.

Eyetracking: Text versus Graphics

Link: Eyetrack III - What You Most Need to Know.

Overall, we observed that participants were more likely to correctly recall facts, names, and places when they were presented with that information in a text fo[r]mat.

However new, unfamiliar, conceptual information was more accurately recalled when participants received it in a multimedia graphic format.

So what does this mean?

While overall we did see a slight, although not statistically significant, increase in information recall from text stories, we should note that most of our recall questions were about facts, names, and places.

Story information about processes or procedures seemed to be comprehended well when presented using animation and text.

Hhhm. Not so sure about that. But it would be interesting to test. So, here's a way to do that.

Take two sections of the same course and make two Powerpoints:

1) Facts, names, places info in text; unfamiliar conceptual info in multimedia graphic

2) Facts, names, places info in multimedia graphic; unfamiliar conceptual info in text

Then quiz them. See what happens. (You could do this live or online in an LMS.)

The Extended LMS: Still Deaf and Dumb

Here's a thought experiment about communication.

Imagine a world in which half the people can only speak and hear, and the other half can only read and write.

Imagine how difficult communication would be in such a world.

That's pretty much how it is with personal computers. Oh, things are a little better than on my first IBM PC in 1981; but not much. With some wrangling and crossed fingers, I can play sounds and little 6 inch square movies. Woo-hoo.

Let's face it, PC and Mac both still speak QWERTY as their native language.

And that is still pretty much how today's Learning Management Systems, even the new so-called Extended LMS with their batch of goodies that plug in, still are. They speak QWERTY as their native language; Unicode is their babblefish.

Considering how important the Foreign Language curriculum is to higher education, you would think at least that today's Learning Management Systems would have integrated audio and video. But they don't.

Oh, I can use audio and video blogs and then... then what ? Paste in embed code ? I don't call that "audio enabled."

What we want in an LMS is simply this:

• any place I can type, I can record audio
  
• any place I can read, I can play audio & video
• this is not just possible or doable, but EASY to do

And from a systems point of view, this means that audio and video in an LMS should be a CORE central component of the architecture, not some block or plugin or add on.

And until it is, the LMS will not serve the most basic needs of Foreign Language teachers. Or students, and at good colleges that means all students.

It will remain deaf and dumb.