Sakai and

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."

The Sakai Project is a major open-source development, which aims to produce a robust, scalable collaborative learning environment for higher education.

An article by Stephen Downes in the latest issue of Innovate! provides a good overview of the Sakai project website and helpfully steers newcomers towards the best content and resources.

This is one of those Really Useful articles that the open-source community needs to do more - a lot more - of. Downes is right: the Sakai site is confusing to navigate and, in many sections, is dominated by technical language. This can be highly off-putting to non-developer stakeholders who choose to visit.

And this is precisely where many open source projects fall down: in terms of communications and outreach towards those who are located "outside" the developer community. The problem is that an open-source project website is (normally) both the public and the private face of the community. The website has to serve a dual purpose, looking "outward" towards casual visitors and end users, and "inward" towards its own members. You can't solve this problem by shutting the developers' mud-wrestling, sorry, complex and interesting discussions, off into password-protected areas of the site; because that usually means that the information left  within the "visitor/user" sections of the site is far too thin to be useful.

I met with usability specialist Michelle Bejian Lotia yesterday, to talk about GradTools and how we might use it at the University of Cambridge. Michelle works for the Usability, Support and Evaluation Lab at University of Michigan, which seems to be a very  similar institution to CARET. In the context of our move to Sakai (known as CamTools at Cambridge), it looks as though GradTools may be the tool we are looking for to help us track graduate progress through the multiple processes involved in completing a research degree.

We have two specific issues that GradTools may help us to address. First, audit requirements. UK universities now have access to a specific pool of government money (known as "Roberts money", after the 2001 review of postgraduate research and training by Gareth Roberts) which they are required to use for graduate training and skills development. At Cambridge, the Roberts money is divided up between the Faculties, who decide amongst themselves how they are going to spend it. There is an obvious need to ensure parity of training provision across the institution, and to record, at least at the departmental level, the number of students subscribing to training opportunities. GradTools relies on external data (at Cambridge, this would be provided through our PeopleSoft system, run by the student information services division) so it does not produce "authoritative" top-level data that meets formal audit requirements. But with some development, it could be very useful as an informal / internal reporting mechanism.