Accidental Pedagogy

More on Swivel and Many Eyes

Via Juice Analytics and Eager Eyes a nice review of the Swivel and many Eyes services.

Borrowing, creativity and the problem of copyright

Jonathan lethem has a lovely and frighteningly literate essay in the recent harpers magazine about how we rely on borrowing to create new art. It warns about drawing too narrow an understanding about both copyright and plagiarism.

From If:Book

A plethora of links

I have been trying to get a short (but hard to write) document out and so haven't been posting quite as assiduously as I would have liked.

But in that time some interesting stories have come down the pike.

a. An interesting article from the Wall Street Journal called the "Wizards of Buzz" about how relatively small numbers of people drive a great deal of traffic on the Internet. We have known that for quite a while, most notably through the popular writings of folks like Malcolm Gladwell and most recently the Heath brothers. Those individuals are the information brokers, or connectors, or mavens. One of the things I have been wrestling with lately is trying to figure out if and how this sort of insight is at all applicable to academia and with faculty using technology. As we think about ways to raise the impact of our programs and projects surely we need to find a way to use this phenomenon. We have instinctively tried to do this in the past -- identify influential faculty leaders as a means to drive innovation -- but I am not sure if its worked or we have gone about it the right way. And maybe there isn't a way to make it work. As I have started to have conversations with faculty in my new job something they consistently raise is a bit of a feeling of isolation - expressed as the fact that they don't know people out of their department and certainly not well enough to talk about teaching.

b. An interesting piece about the woes besetting the University of Phoenix, from the New York Times. Last year I was shocked to learn from someone at Cal State east bay that most of the requests for transcripts from students transferring out were from the U of P.

c. Via Blogdriverswalz Laura Cohen's librarian 2.0 manifesto. There are pictures of sort of naked women on the powerpoint so bear this in mind.

Privacy in personalized Google searches

Via John Battelle's Searchblog a really interesting post about how Google's personalized search and how it can really compromise one's privacy.

Inside Higher Ed summary on the patent pledge

A nice summary article from Inside Higher Ed.

The comments are interesting, especially one from Trace Urdan, an analyst at Signal hill Capital Group. She comments:

The point of Blackboard’s patent claim and lawsuit, in our opinion, is to scare away any larger administrative software vendors that are currently serving the post-secondary market, such as Sungard SCT or Oracle-PeopleSoft, from entering the academic software arena through acquisition or otherwise, and providing a more substantial alternative to Blackboard. Though we believe the market would embrace such an entrant long-term, customer switching costs are still high and Blackboard’s solution set and market position are still dominant in our opinion.

Blackboard patent pledge response

John P Mayer has an interesting take.  He does point out Blackboard's selective quoting of the Sakai and Educause statement. Those organizations seem far less enthusiastic than one might originally gather from the Bb press release.

Seb Schmoller also has a response.

Lev Gonick, CIO of Case Western Reserve has an interesting post up. He sees the bundling issue as likely to be very tricky and problematic and  argues that we are likely to see quite a bit of tension around the pledge and that issue in the next few years.

Blackboard pledges not to sue open source projects for patent infringement

From Al Essa, Blackboard has pledged not to sue open source course management system projects.

Heres the text.

Blackboard hereby commits not to assert any of the U.S. patents listed below, as well as all counterparts of these patents issued in other countries, against the development, use or distribution of Open Source Software or Home-Grown Systems to the extent that such Open Source Software and Home-Grown Systems are not Bundled with proprietary software.

The commitment not to assert any of these named U.S. patents and all counterparts of these patents issued in other countries is irrevocable except that Blackboard reserves the right to terminate this patent pledge and commitment only with regard to any party who files a lawsuit asserting patents or other intellectual property rights against Blackboard or its parent or subsidiaries.  This pledge is binding on Blackboard’s successors and assigns.

This certainly changes the game in all sorts of interesting ways. They key thing I think is going to be the notion of bundling with proprietary software. It will be interesting to see what sharper minds than mine have to say.

Update: Here is the press release.

And here is the Sakai statement. It includes the following:

Although Blackboard has included in the pledge many named open source initiatives, regardless of whether they incorporate proprietary elements in their applications, Blackboard has also reserved rights to assert its patents against other providers of such systems that are "bundled" with proprietary code. We remain concerned that this bundling language introduces legal and technical complexity and uncertainty which will be inhibitive in this arena of development.

As a result, the Sakai Foundation and EDUCAUSE find it difficult to give the wholehearted endorsement we had hoped might be possible. Some of Sakai's commercial partners and valued members of the open source community will not be protected under this pledge.  Furthermore, EDUCAUSE and Sakai worked to gain a pledge that Blackboard would never take legal action for infringement against a college or university using another competing product.  While Blackboard ultimately agrees that such actions are not in its best interest from a customer relations viewpoint, it could not agree for reasons related to its existing legal case. Our organizations will remain vigilant on this point as protecting our member institutions is of top priority.