Accidental Pedagogy

Lamest injury ever

Talking with a friend of mine 9also in academic technology) recently, she revealed that she had suffered a "sports injury" -- tennis elbow to be exact, from playing scrabble. This was so serious that she was unable to put on her underwear unassisted for several weeks. Turns out she and her husband have a serious scabble addiction which includes playing in bed on a travel scrabble set. This was the source of the injury. Turns out her husband has also kept an Excel spreadsheet listing the scores and statistics for every game of scrabble theyve ever played, since they started dating some time ago.

But this got me thinking about lame sports injuries and I wondered how many others there were out there. The Accidental Ball and Chain it turns out once sprained her ankle while lying down in bed and sprained a finger dailing a phone number. Another friend -- a philosophy professor at a large midwestern university broke her nose watching tv: she was resting her head on her hands and it slipped, slamming her nose into the coffee table.

Any others?

Blackboards patent claims

There has been surprisingly little posting about Blackboard's being issued a very very broad patent seemingly covering every single aspect of e-learning technology. Stephen Downes has some on it as does Michael Feldstein.

One of the case studies in my PhD dissertation was on the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) negotiations of a new copyright treaty in 1996. The real problems affecting the US Patent and Trademark Office were obvious at that point and the Blackboard award makes it clear that things have gotten worse since then.

There is unconfirmed word on the street that Blackboard has already filed suit agaqinst desire2learn -- but that is as of yet an unconfirmed rumor. However surely it cant be long until it does so -- and against Angel and Moodle and Sakai and Boddington and nuovo etc etc. They still have to survive the challenges and I can think of quite a few examples of "prior art." In addition, I wonder what the anti-trust implications of all this might be and if that even comes into play.

I wonder though whether this would be a humongous public relations disaster for Blackboard -- filing suit I mean. There is a particular kind of ethos in higher education that values fairness and openness and the sort of behavior that the patent suggests might really annoy a lot of people in higher education to the point that they choose not to buy their products.

Who knows, maybe the patent will actually force us to stop thinking of e-learning systems in the antiquated silo-esque course-oriented manner that the patent covers and makes us start building systems around learning (someone please patent this quickly).