i’m sorry, i just don’t know

Blackboard just won a lawsuit against a Canadian-based learning management system called Desire2Learn and is well on their way to becoming evil.

In 2006 Blackboard was awarded a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a Teaching Assistant might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. <http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/02/1217219&tid=155> Mr. Small (the trial lawyer for Blackboard) said Blackboard never claimed to have invented the course-management system. What the company did invent, he said, is “a course-management system where a single user with a single log-on could have multiple roles across multiple classes.” For instance, a person who was a student in one course and a teaching assistant in another could log on once and access all of his course materials.- Francis Long of Knowplace

Blackboard promises to play nice with open source or as they say “home-grown” course management systems as long as they aren’t bundled with proprietary software. But we’ll see. Having multiple roles in an LMS is often critical for the LMS administrators to function. So, to quote another organization that I watch with doubtful hopes that it won’t take over the world, to Blackboard I say…”Don’t be Evil.” -Google.

All of my flickr images are licensed under Creative Commons, and it’s always fun to see where they end up.  Thanks Dave for leaving me a note and letting me know where and how you’ve used my photo.

There was a Star Trek episode where Geordi La Forge (the blind, but brilliant engineer) was kidnapped by smallish round people who looked like weeble-woobles.  They took him because, in their own words, “You’re smart.  You make things go.”  Good job Creative Commons. You made my picture go.  (and please don’t tell my that I like Star Trek.  He already thinks I’m a sci-fi nerd because of Firefly).

JCMC just put out an issue dedicated to social networking sites.  Articles cover blog behavior, dealing with I/M interruptions at work, and of course, social networking sites.  You Tube, Facebook, Creative Commons, political discourse online, and more.  Happy reading.

Google has just applied for a patent (more on that in a bit) for Product View, a search system that lets you find text in images.  Could be incredibly cool for semantic webbites, if it weren’t for the whole patent thing.

So Google announced a project called Knol where people can author articles on any subject about which they seem to know something. In contrast to Wikipedia, there is only one author whose reputation and identity are emphasized. This obviously is meant to be competition for Wikipedia which takes a more collaborative approach to article development. I’ll be interested to see a comparison of article quality once Knol is actually released.

Here’s what I like about knol, as it’s been explained…

• Support for Creative Commons content licensing
• Peer reviews of each article
• Recommendations for related articles
• Identity and reputation management for the author (I think this will at the least encourage the generation of tons of content).

Here’s what concerns me about this… Google is the indexer of content - this project also makes them content generators. Which content do you think they’ll list first in a search? It gives them a LOT of power, and LOTS of opportunities to generate revenue via ads. Google is, after all, a really big, cool, helpful ad agency.

The National Academies Press has over 3,700 books online.  View them free, or buy a pdf version.   Google books is a good choice if the book you’re looking for is in the public domain, otherwise, you’ll be frustrated by the huge chunks left out by publishers wanting you to buy the thing.  And of course, a perpetual favorite of mine is Project Gutenberg.  They work on a volunteer model, anyone can help get books that are in the public domain up and available for free in a variety of formats. The COSL Microlibrary project is working with Project Gutenberg books right now- pretty cool.

For the first time since I heard about the project long, long ago, I finally had use for Google Books.  Today I was searching for an architect in the 1800s named Andrew Jackson Downing who wrote a book about Country Homes.  In the past, Google books has really just felt like a tease- because I wasn’t looking for books in the public domain.  The books I’ve been presented previously just had excerpts, and a link to whatever vendor showed up on top.  Today, I found the book I wanted, was able to read through the parts I wanted, and even was able to see which passages were popular (ta da).

Last week I posted about open source fonts.  Brent Lambert showed me the da fonts site where many fonts are available and the license requirements are visible right up front… i.e. you can tell if it’s actually free and available before you design an entire project around it.

So I did some design work today and was thwarted by a lame “free” font that I installed at some point in the past. I learned the hard way to scrutinize license requirements before basing a design on a lame-o not-really-free font rhat looks nice in Illustrator, but won’t print to PDF (the required file type for this design). So, after gnashing my teeth, I went out and found a pretty cool open font repository where you can really get openly licensed fonts to download and use, for real. I found a couple of possibilities: one designed by Bhikkhu Pesala called Veluvanna, or another called Kabala. His site. I did have to install a random open source file decompresser called 7zip, to get these, but it eventually worked. Another font I like is called the Breip. Very cool.

The Open Education License circumvents problematic licensing incompatibility for the remix and reuse of open educational materials.  David talks more about this incompatibility in his blog post which also provides a draft of the Open Education License.  Kim Tucker, with Libre Learning out of South Africa has a similar license on his site.