The great myth about open source is that in order to adopt an open source application like Sakai, Kuali, or Moodle is that you have to hire developers to support it. It baffles me that this is still how most CIOs seem to understand the option: They can either purchase proprietary software, or they can adopt open source and replace the license fees with development staff.

There's a conversation underway today on the EDUCAUSE CIO list about whether one could look to open source applications like Moodle (or Sakai) as a way to deal with the enormous financial pressure today and the severe budget cuts many are experiencing.

It's disappointing that the conversation is a simplistic comparison of license cost vs. hiring developers. The reality that open source can be easily aquired and supported with the help of companies that specialize in supporting open source is entirely missing. Yet most institutions who adopt open source do so with help from a company that supports it. The Mellon Foundation who supports a lot of open source projects in Education estimated that most of the software they've helped develop is adopted this way. I think it was ~ 70%. And there can be considerable savings. rSmart did a simple comparison last year between Sakai and Blackboard, for example.

As a community there's still a lot of education that needs to take place. Many just don't fully understand the options they have. And while there are many benefits to the open source path beyond cost savings, there can be significant cost savings. And it's an important time to understand how to benefit from them.

In the past few months I've attended the most recent Sakai and Kuali community events. Aside from adding to my collection of great polo shirts I'm also reminded how important these face to face gatherings are. While these communities are very productive working as a globally distributed team, there's no substitute for the connections made face to face.

Attendees at these community events often remark that they need a forum to engage campus leaders who don't typically attend the community events.

I'm really pleased to see and support a new event with this in mind. Mark your calendars for The OPEN Forum. It takes place December 7-9 in Palm Springs, CA.

From the event website: 

The OPEN Forum provides an opportunity for leaders and decision makers from colleges and universities to come together to enhance their understanding and vision for openness across higher education.

The vision for The OPEN Forum is lofty. We seek to increase the strategic benefit of technology in higher education. We believe that this can be done by bringing together a diverse group of great minds and investing time to understand and to evaluate the intricacies of this new open environment.

To this end, the forum will be centered on A DIALOGUE, fed by insightful keynotes and facilitated to allow for talking, listening, debating, sharing, building, debunking and learning. We believe that the dialogue must ADDRESS THE OPPORTUNITIES AND COMPLEXITIES of openness that often require a fundamentally different approach to defining and evaluating options with a broader scope of impact.

The participants include HIGHER EDUCATION EXECUTIVES who have the ability to affect change, as well as the insight of corporate colleagues who have grappled with similar issues.

There's an elegantly articulated post in the Blackboard blog about educational choice and diversity and an interesting thread of conversation among the Sakai community commenting on it. Though the post is superficially supportive of choice, openness, and diversity, it seems to me that it's more a marketing attempt to lay claim to the platform on which scholarly technologies will run. In other words, choice and diversity as long as you get to it through the Blackboard platform and pay them for it.  

The commentary from the Sakai community have been diverse. Some have asked good questions like "how can we ensure open collaboration that will benefit all." Others have noted that the Sakai community is already well on it's way to delivering the platform that Bb is marketing but has yet to really commit to (note the disclaimer at the end of the post). Brad Wheeler, CIO at Indiana University made some very lucid points about the purposeful design of the Sakai community and our IP that permits Blackboard to use Sakai software to accomplish its goals, and about the divergence of their goals from those of the education community, and probably most importantly about where the education community should focus it's attention.   

It seems to me that the education community, and particularly the Sakai community is better positioned to deliver and sustain the platform. We have a proven ability to innovate and have been on the platform course for some time. Further, it seems in the community's best interest to keep the platform open and encourage those interested (commercial and non-commercial) to innovate and build on it. A key motivation for many of the universities who have chosen the Sakai path is to regain control over their destiny on the technology that is so core to delivering on their mission. Relegating the platform to a monopoly just isn't consistent with this goal.

Blackboard realizes that if they are to achieve their revenue growth and profit goals they must do more than sell course management systems. They clearly have their sights set on owning the platform and monetizing anything that runs on it. The Sakai community also has it's sights set on becoming the platform and doing it in a way that is open and accessible to everyone: truly providing choice and diversity as Blackboard's marketing positions their ProjectNG. I think this puts their goals for the platform at odds with the Sakai community's goals for the platform because if it's "owned" (by Bb) then institutions will continue to have insufficient control over their own destiny.

In my estimation, Sakai's challenge won't be developing and sustaining the best platform on which to build and connect educational software and content. Our challenge will be competing with Blackboard's powerful marketing machine.  We'll need to be cautious as we proceed to make sure we don't help feed the machine in ways that prevent the market at large from understanding their options.

In "The Educational Software Paradox: Can We Learn To Unlearn?," Trent Batson talks about how educational software like the Sakai CLE, Blackboard, Angel, D2L, Moodle, and other systems are caught in a paradox. Though technology would seem to be capable of transforming the way we learn and teach, the systems are stuck reinforcing the status quo. Instead of being designed for transformation they are designed in a way that mirrors the way things are done today and caters to the majority of stakeholders who'd just assume not change.

Trent mentions a hope that open source software might be part of the answer but acknowledges projects like Sakai and Moodle seem to be stuck similar to the proprietary systems--another paradox. We'd certainly expect that, free of the economic limitations of the proprietary model, open source educational software would be "breaking the mold."  Some open source educational software, LAMS for example, arguably is. Mostly though I think Trent is right.

Sakai and Moodle, two of the best alternatives to the proprietary systems, don't really break the mold... yet. At least the software doesn't. But Sakai, for example, is more than just software. Sakai is a community that's capable of developing and sustaining software collaboratively. It's a path one can travel along with other education institutions. I believe it's a path that will consistently produce the best software, and yes, I believe it will eventually break the mold. But first it has to satisfy the majority.  

What we have today is the foundation for change. The latest Sakai release performs at the status quo as well as Blackboard (better in many ways). It's being adopted and used much like the proprietary systems. But unlike the proprietary systems, Sakai is more than just an application. It's a platform on which many of the world's leading institutions are beginning to innovate. Sakai is a single environment that provides the expected capabilities to serve the status quo *and* serves as a platform on which the innovators and early adopters can drive the more transformative agenda--a foundation for change.

The fact is, we've seen lots of innovative and transformative technology used for teaching and learning. Though it often fails to reach the mainstream users. One reason is that there hasn't been a widely adopted platform on which innovators can build. Until now. Sakai is a platform on which transformative educational technologies can be developed, sustained by a large community, and on which these innovations can reach the mainstream users. 

Of course, changing culture and habits is the truly difficult part. Like Trent, I wonder how many are ready to "unlearn their comfort zone."

Great presentation on Opencast, an open-source project aimed at building a technology infrastructure and community sharing best practices around lecture/event capture, processing, archiving, distribution, and effective use of podcasting for teaching and learning. Mara Hancock talks about the importance of Opencast in a post about the planning grant. 

The Opencast community appears to be organized around many of the same community values as the Sakai and Fluid communities. In fact the Opencast software is being developed to work with Sakai and to use Fluid. In the presentation they talk about how the application is architected so that it could also be run standalone or integrated in other eLearning environments like Moodle.  

I haven't seen the actual gartner survey yet but based on the interview posted this morning in Campus Technology it apparently points to two interesting trends:

1. Many are moving to open source (partially driven by a rejection of Blackboard's behavior).
2. A non-trivial amount are moving toward "home grown" though it appears that this is more about "assembling" from small pieces loosley joined, rather than the traditional "build."

It's not at all surprising that Gartner Research Director Marti Harris says:

[Blackboard is] seen as [having] a certain arrogance to think that they developed something [themselves], when so many academics feel they've contributed to it all along. I can't speak to the legal issues at hand, but that's the perception, and it's global. I hear that wherever I go.

So has the suit had an impact on our clients? One thing I hear from clients is that it's irritating to think that their license fees are going to support a big legal battle. They feel as if they're paying for that.

It's good to know that Blackboards customers realize they are paying for senseless litigation driven by arrogance instead of product innovation or support.

It's also interesting that Gartner believes it's accelerating interest in Desire2Learn, Sakai, and Moodle. I've been living and breathing the movement toward open source for some time so none of this is surprising.

What's really interesting is point #2 about the trend toward assembling solutions based on Web 2.0 applications living out in the cloud (if you're playing buzzword bingo you just scored). I was in Sausalito last week with some customers and Michael Korcuska talking about future directions and Nate Angell whipped together an example that mirrors much of the functionality found in Sakai/Moodle/Blackboard/Etc. using Ning as the base framework and tools like Hiveminder, pbWiki, and DabbleDB. Keep an eye out for a Jing screencast of what he did. It's representative of what many are doing on campus today.

I'm glad to see the Sakai community recognizing this and envisioning a future in which Sakai plays a role making it more effective to do that sort of thing while dealing with some of the things that make assembling something like that difficult, hard to support, or hard to scale.

Last week Google faithfully notified me that Blackboard had responded to the USPTO rejection of their 'Alcorn' patent. It's maddening to think how much of a drain this whole thing has been to the education community. I didn't want to contribute any more to so I resisted posting anything about it. This morning I see that they are petitioning to have the USPTO drop the whole thing so that they can just get everything worked out in East Texas where they've been successful to-date.

It would be a real shame if the USPTO allowed Blackboard to circumvent the whole process and deferred to the courts. Remember that there are two filings in the USPTO against the patent. The inter-partes filing between Blackboard and Desire2Learn, and the ex-partes filing by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) who filed on behalf of the education community. Blackboard is asking the USPTO to abandon both of these and let the courts settle it.

The latest D2L post :

April, 2008 – Matthew Small, Blackboard's Chief Legal Officer:

"Certainly we believe the reexamination process is a healthy process. It serves to generally strengthen patents, and this case is no different."

http://www.thejournal.com/articles/22358

May, 2008 – Blackboard's filing with the Patent & Trademark Office:

"Patent Owner Blackboard Inc. ("Blackboard") hereby petitions the Office to suspend the inter partes reexamination between Blackboard and Third Party Requester Desire2Learn Inc. . . ."

Petition To Suspend Inter Partes Reexamination Under 35 U.S.C 6314(C)

Kim Thanos sent me a link last week to an interesting thread of discussion that I hadn't been paying much attention to: The Creepy Treehouse:

creepy treehouse
see also creepy treehouse effect

n. A place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids.

Example: “Kids … can see a [creepy treehouse] a mile away and generally do a good job in avoiding them.” John Krutsch in Are You Building a Creepy Treehouse?”

n. Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.

Such institutional environments are often seen as more artificial in their construction and usage, and typically compete with pre-existing systems, environments, or applications. creepy treehouses also have an aspect of closed-ness, where activity within is hidden from the outside world, and may not be easily transferred from the environment by the participants.

n. Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to it’s closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution.

n. A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.

With respect to education, Utah Valley University student Tyrel Kelsey describes, “creepy treehouse is what a professor can create by requiring his students to interact with him on a medium other than the class room tools. [E.g.] requiring students to follow him/her on peer networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook.”

adj. Repulsiveness arising from institutional mimicry or emulation of pre-existing community-driven environments or systems.

Example: “Blackboard Sync is soooo creepy treehouse.” Marc Hugentobler

It's a very relevant conversation to consider as the education community tries to figure out how to evolve the technologies that support education in communities like Sakai and Moodle.

There's an excellent article in the most recent Educause Review called "In Search of Certitude" by Brad Wheeler. It's about the needs, challenges, and support systems used to find quality information. It deals with the abundance of information and how the support systems and technologeis are adapting to provide those seeking information with an appropriate level of confidence in what they find.

The post is an interesting read from an information seeker perspective, which we can all easily identify with. It's even more interesting if you're involved at all in architecting systems (people, technology, organization) to support the complexity of connecting information seekers with the appropriate information. My experience at rSmart, and in the Sakai, OSP, and Kuali communities all have elements of this.