OSS

I've been reflecting recently on the subject of open courseware and, more specifically, OpenCourseWare following the keynote for the Sakai conference in Amsterdam delivered confidently and enthusiastically by Hal Abelson (a podcast is available). In this post I'll briefly recap some of the core aspects as I understand them and then go on to explore this area, based on personal experiences and ideas I've been formulating at Oxford.

Very quiet in the office this week... Almost all the developers, and a good chunk of everybody else, are away at the 7th Sakai Conference in the Netherlands.

From the conference homepage, I found a nice use of Sakai Confluence, to help conference attendees do travel planning and find out where to spend their free time (when they're not attending BOF sessions :-) )

 

EDUCAUSE has posted a new Patents resource page. The page features resources such as information about copyright lobby groups, government policy surrounding open source software, and working with patents in the higher education arena.

To update my post on the Blackboard patent, here is some more detail on the requested reexamination of the patent claim and the Sakai Foundation's response.

As Paul Erickson notes (thanks, Paul!), the news initially started bubbling up when the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) announced that it has formally asked the Patent Office to reexamine and ultimately cancel all 44 claims of Blackboard's patent on e-learning systems.

The request has demonstrated the very real sense of unity and common purpose among the educational open source software community. It was filed on behalf of the Sakai Foundation (sakaiproject.org), the Moodle Community (moodle.org), and the ATutor Community (atutor.ca).

In their press release, the Sakai Foundation refers to the "the surrounding fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) being spread by Blackboard", and states: "We, the Sakai Foundation, consider the Blackboard patent to be a prime example of a bad patent in the area of educational software.  It is a threat to open source developers, providers and users of educational software."

...Or so says the grapevine. I've just heard via John Norman, Director of CARET and Chair of the Sakai Board, that the patent claim filed by Blackboard (#6,988,138: Alcorn et al, Internet-based education support system and methods) has been rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

[Update 26/01/07: Apologies to John, who I've misquoted here. He confirms the patent has not been rejected, but the USPTO has accepted the SFLC request for a reexam. See my subsequent post for further details].

OSS Watch, the UK's non-partisan advice service on open-source software and open standards, have just published a survey report last week about software use in UK higher education.

The survey, carried out in February-March 2006, reports on the take-up of open-source software (OSS) in UK Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) institutions. By default, it also gives a picture of the NON-takeup of open-source solutions. The survey is based on data collected from nearly 1 in 5 UK institutions (18%), making it a useful information baseline from which to extract trends and make future predictions.

There's a lot of good reading in the report, but the thing that interests me most is that it shows that there is currently no clear leader amongst Content Management Systems (CMS) in UK HE. Why is this?

Stuart and Paul will probably have opinions about this :-) What follows is my 2p worth. (NB: Stuart responded before I could upload the rest of my post -- however I think we agree on many points).

One argument for diversity in e-learning systems and services for higher education is that instutions are themselves diverse, and have specific needs – particularly in relation to pedagogy. But is this really true? Are the needs of HEIs actually that diverse? If we look at the range of software in use within HE, we see that within particular domains, a handful of commercial providers dominates the landscape: such as Oracle’s PeopleSoft within administrative services; or Microsoft’s Windows Explorer for staff/student web access. Indeed, the OSS survey report shows that Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer are deployed by all institutions on most desktops. And this software is not necessarily restricted to administrative functions: for example, web browsers and email applications are commonly used within teaching and research practice, too.

This weekend, I was in Manchester for the second workshop of the Live Sociology research methods course. I met Jen Patashnick from the VIA Project, who travelled over from Boston to give a talk about her experience using video-based research methods.

VIA is a fascinating research project based at Boston Children's Hospital. Founded by Dr Michael Rich, the project uses digital video and a participative research design to investigate patients' experiences of living with chronic illness. Jen has been working on VIA for eight years now, and has overseen the transformation of its analytic methods from using paper-based forms, through to computer-assisted qualitative analysis using Visual Basic macros and NVivo, through to using the open-source software Transana.

CARET has also used Transana for video-based education research projects, so I was really interested to hear from Jen how the VIA project has evolved its particular methodology over time. We agreed that one of the main benefits of using OSS is the possibility for direct dialogue with developers.

ELI recently came out with a new rendition of their "Seven Things" series.  This one is on screencasting.  I love screencasting and have learned a lot from some of the screencasts that I've consumed.  The article mentioned above has an instructional technology slant to it, but the area that interests me most about the potential for the technology is for demonstrating the features and functionality of open source software. 

Just recently, I used a screencast to get a preview of some new, open source functionality that some people in the drupal community are working on ... http://www.zacker.org/node/30

If you take a peek at it, you can clearly see that these are things that just don't translate well into text or audio only, and this seems like a really rich model for demonstrating open source products that can't provide sales teams to go out and hock their wares.  Furthermore, it is one thing to provide demos and community rankings of open source software like the great site over at OpenSource CMS or to provide really rich profiles of software that aid in decision support -- like what's been done over at EduTools, but I think it is another to provide guided tours of key features of software products.   I think screencasts can provide a really nice intermediary by enabling folks to get a feel for a product with out having to invest a lot of time blindly learning from a base install of software. 

This is the podcast of the third general session of EDUCAUSE's 2006 Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference. This session was recorded on Thursday, January 12, 2006. The session featured panelists Patty Gertz, Carl W. Jacobson and Tony Stanco and was moderated by H. David Lambert. Below is a brief synopsis.

"The higher education software marketplace is undergoing rapid change. Understanding the role of open source software in this volatile market is crucial. Panelists will bring the perspectives of higher education and the government sector as they discuss the pros and cons of open source licensing and collaborative, community development."