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.  

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.

Nathan Pearson has been doing some very exciting conceptual work on Sakai's user experience. This is part of a larger focus on Sakai's user experience. I'm just starting to get familiar with the 2.5 release and it's amazing when I think about where Sakai was 2 years ago. The work Nathan's leading now is going to cause some jaws to drop next year.

Check out the series of 4 narrated conceptual videos:

Week 4, Week 3, Week 2, Week 1

This past week the Blackboard patent trial began. I've been following the blogs and news coverage hoping to hear some positive signs that the ridiculousness of the whole thing had been exposed. No such luck from any of the accounts I've read as of yet. I am hopeful for next week though. Any reasonable person is sure to see the absurdity of Blackboard's claim right? I sure hope there's a few reasonable people in Lufkin, TX where Blackboard filed suit.

For anyone reading this that's not familiar with the case there are plenty of summaries out there. Alfred Essa's blog from yesterday is my new favorite. I love his comparison of Blackboard's approach to that of the conquistadors:

Old-style conquistadors used to lay claim to land on behalf of the monarch by looking yonder and chanting some such phrase: "We claim this land in the name of God and our Savior by killing everyone who already lives here. By this land we mean all the land as far as the eye can behold and way beyond also for good measure." These days modern-day conquistadors lay claim to "intellectual property" by going to the Patent Office and chanting the modern version of the mantra: "We claim this intellectual property in the name of Innovation and our Shareholders by killing anyone who dares use that Idea for the next twenty years." In order to qualify as a patent the idea, at least in theory, must be "non obvious" to a skilled practitioner and there must be no "prior art" (i.e. there is no record of someone else beating you to that idea).

With all the existing prior art and the sheer obviousness of Blackboard's claim, it's baffling how it could have been approved in the first place. It's incomprehensible that it could have made it this far and wasted so much of the education community's time and money fighting.

Alfred also does a nice job of articulating the essence of Blackboard's claim (the part that hasn't already been thrown out) in straightforward terms that make the obviousness and sheer ridiculousness of the claim clear. I worry that, as he points out, the claims are dressed up in so much unrecognizable legalese that they might actually succeed in confusing even reasonable people. It is good to know that there are two other endeavors to destroy Blackboard's patent. The USPTO has approved two independent requests to re-examine the patent. Odds are that between these two re-exams the patent will be invalidated. The only question is how much damage Blackboard will do before it's gone.

I do wonder why Blackboard's customers (educators with high ethical and moral standards) continue supporting a company who's actions are so "ethically challenged." I empathise with their clients who are locked-in and hope that projects like Sakai and Moodle provide an escape route. This absurd patent is costing the education community millions of dollars and has only one objective: To further conquer and lock colleges, universities, and primary/secondary schools into Blackboard's monopoly. Leaders in education should tell them clearly, in the only language Bb understand$, that this behavior isn't acceptable. I hope the court sends the same message by finding in favor of D2L.

The following excerpt is from a short article in the Chronicle pulled from Martin Weller's blog.

“...in order to understand web 2.0 you have to act 2.0. I think too many academics are guilty of seeing social networking, or any popular tool, as something to be researched, but not something to be experienced and used. This is both rather a snobbish attitude and also misses the point. Signing up for an account, dropping in for a couple of weeks, doing a survey and then disappearing does not gain you an understanding of how these things are really being used.”

This excerpt got me thinking about what we're doing with Sakai. In some ways, thinking about a new eLearning platform seems to miss the point just as Martin points out. The Sakai community is sure to outpace the innovation capacity of the 1st generation of eLearning tools, and of company's like Blackboard using traditional development models that don't leverage the power of community.

That said, even the amazing pace of innovation in the Sakai community will have a hard time replicating the current state of the art... or the current 2.0 thing that educators should be trying. If the Sakai community were simply developing the next generation eLearning system I think we'd 'miss' just like Martin suggests. We'd miss the opportunity to make it easy for educators to experiment with the latest technologies and to use them effectively with students. But Sakai's goal is much more ambitious and compelling than creating YALMS (Yet Another Learning Management System)...

For me, this is where the view of Sakai as a platform for innovation is really exciting. Sure the CLE is an eLearning application that can be used out of the box as easily as any of the proprietary systems like Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Angel, and others. It has a place for a syllabus, a grade book, assignments, and all the standard features you need. But it's also a platform for innovation. It gives the worlds leading institutions a way to make applications like Facebook and Google gadgets easily accessible to educators. Then, because these capabilities are built on an open platform accessible to anyone, the platform may actually make it easier for educators to experience and use these "2.0" technologies.

This morning my Google alerts and RSS feeds (and a few email forwards) pointed me to several articles based on Datamonitor's report (Nov 2007) on open source in education. The report details spending on software and services for open source solutions within the Education Market. I haven't had a chance to read the report (it's $1500 US) but I did pick up a few key findings from the few articles I read:

• Spending will increase 70% between now & 2012 to $490M
• Spending estimate only covers operating systems and eLearning systems (no ERP)
• Recognition that although there isn't a license to use the software, maintenance, support, and services spending continues

Top attractors to open source according to the report:

• More control over how the applications are developed
• Better return on investment
• Increasing government interest
• Dissatisfaction with Blackboard

One thing that strikes me about this report and many others like it is how ineffective open source software communities and companies are at getting the word out that there are great support and services options that make open source applications as easy to "consume" as proprietary applications. And how effective those that profit from the status quo are at amplifying the FUD factor that you have to have a cadre of developers to support open source software.

"Primarily among these issues is a lack of experienced personnel within an institution. Maintaining and upgrading open source solutions is not a simple process and while communities exist behind open source solutions there is no one at the end of a phone to help fix glitches--as with proprietary software."

On the one hand I'm happy to see continued validation that there's a clear and growing need for the kind of service my company (The rSmart Group) provides. On the other hand we (the Sakai and Kuali communities) and we (rSmart, IBM, and others) clearly need to do a better job at getting the word out than the old guard (Blackboard and others) are at keeping it from being heard.

Correction: I corrected the link to Joe's response. Thanks for pointing that out Trent.

Last month I commented on The ePortfolio Hijacked by Trent Batson. This month there's a great response written by Joe Shedd at Syracuse University. Joe is one of the leader's responsible for implementing the concepts he describes in Sakai's ePortfolio and assessment management capabilities.

A very interesting blog post from Jonathan Schwartz this morning! Sun is acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL. Under the heading "helping dolphin's fly" Jonathan goes into some detail behind the motivation and the plan for their investment. My gut reaction is that this is a very positive move for Sun and could be very positive for MySQL.

Nearly every analysis of open source adoption I've seen, and reinforced by my own experience with rSmart, commercial support is the greatest inhibitor (or enabler) for enterprise adoption of open source software. Over the years I've come to appreciate how important it is to the open source movement for large vendors like Sun and IBM to support open source software. So I certainly appreciate Jonathan reinforcing it as a key motivating factor:

"CTO's at startups and web companies disallow the usage of products that aren't free and open source. They need and want access to source code to enable optimization and rapid problem resolution (although they're happy to pay for support if they see value). Alternatively, more traditional CIO's disallow the usage of products that aren't backed by commercial support relationships - they're more comfortable relying on vendors like Sun to manage global, mission critical infrastructure.

This puts products like MySQL in an interesting position. They're a part of every web company's infrastructure, to be sure. And though many of the more traditional companies use MySQL (from auto companies to financial institutions to banks and retailers), many have been waiting for a Fortune 500 vendor willing to step up, to provide mission critical global support."

In the past 10 years I've really lost track of Sun's direction. Recently I've had an opportunity to see them engage around in discussions about the Sakai and Kuali projects. I'm enthusiastic about the kind of things they seem to be gearing up to do and I'm happy to see Jonathan's remarks about their commitment to education:

"... And finally, this acquisition will kickstart a new set of investments Sun will be making into the academic community. Why universities? As we continue to invest in open source software development across the world, it's apparent that nearly all roads lead to academic environments - and it's high time we (as an industry) started watering the trees at their roots. It's one thing to say you're committed to education, it's another to put your money where your mouth is."