Software (mostly Sakai), Education (mostly ePortfolio), Complaints (mostly unreasonable), Thoughts (mostly unintelligible)

Those of you who attended the Sakai conference in Atlanta might recognize that quote. It’s attributable to Eben Moglen (SFLC), uttered during the “lunch discussion” with Matthew Small (Blackboard). “These are the data,” is a quote I’ve used countless times in the past 16 months. I’ll explain in a moment.

So, fast-forward, and we see posts from Michael Feldstein on the initial invalidation of all 44 claims and Blackboard’s response. The latter post (and Bb’s statement) is specifically about the percentages of patents that are upheld, invalidated, or altered under reexamination. This is the exact context of Dr. Moglen’s original quote. He presented some hard figures and summed up with those ringing words.

I’m not going to beat up on Blackboard — they’re looking at the rules and playing the game. I completely disagree with software patents, but they’re still allowed in the rulebook, so I can’t blame them for filing before someone else did. Indeed, the applications were filed in 1999 and 2000. It was a different frontier with respect to the Internet, Free Software, and software patents then (see LZW, Unisys, SCO).

Personally, I thought it was pretty bad karma to file a press release of a patent and lawsuit on the same day, turning the red lights in people’s minds into white hot light on the detailed claims. But then again, I’m not on their strategy team. It’s just too bad that we’re tying up all the energy, time, and tax dollars, bickering over how we play in the same edusandbox and who gets how big a slice.

Anyway, there are 44 patent claims. Of the 10 issues set forth in the reexamination request, the rejections of 6 were adopted with modification, those of one without modification, and those of 3 were not adopted. The union of all adopted rejections deems that all of the claims set forth in United States Patent 6,988,138 are unpatentable. These are the data. -NB

You can download the audio of the lunch session from the Sakai Confluence page. There is also a transcript from Jim Farmer.

Every so often, something goes your way, ya know? So, last Thursday, I posted to sakai-dev asking whether I should use dojox.storage or borrow some stuff from rWiki:

http://www.nabble.com/Flash-storage—-dojo.storage-or-homebrew–td16033853.html

It also just so happens that the main guy behind dojox.storage, Brad Neuberg, apparently felt like being a kind soul, did a ton of refactoring work, and bundled up the smallest, most practical package possible for my immediate need and posted it, not three hours later:

http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2008/03/easy-download-of-dojo-storage-for.html

So far, it’s really easy to use (about 15 total lines, and tastes like HashMap) and moves between browsers very well. I’m only having one issue on IE. It’s choking on line 52 of some unnamed file that a little Googling hints is related to the Flash plugin. (For the curious, it’s an Object Required error in __flash__removeCallback()…)

I guess this can happen with different ways of including SWF files — the confusing bit is that one thread says use the HTML embedding, rather than JavaScript, and another says to use JavaScript rather than HTML. The tricky part is that both seemed to fix it.

So, I’m going to test on a machine that doesn’t have script debugging turned on and hope for the best. If it doesn’t grumble too badly, I’ll poke around for a fix in my spare time.

Either way — Cheers, Brad! You really made my day. -NB

How long should personal artifacts submitted in some official capacity be viewable (by learner or official) in their original state? How we can let learners really own their materials?

We’ve approached this problem to date by ignoring it. We make an explicit step: at some point, we force to student to say “I’m done with this thing and it’s yours forever”, and lock it. Or we just let it be malleable forever.

This is directly analogous to how, in logic, math, and computer science, we sometimes restrict input to maintain a lower conceptual threshold. Persistence and security of artifacts is a really hard problem, so we make sure it can’t destabilize the easier ones we’re solving, by distilling a complex grey gradient into blacks and whites.

It’s a perfectly valid way to get a foundation, but it’s time to move into our version of second-order logic — versioned, purpose-stamped, multi-threaded artifacts — to address our complex realities. We can’t lie to ourselves and believe that hard-locking a student’s file forever is practical in a personal learning experience.

The specific thought that triggered this post was that the notion of estimated secure lifetime in cryptography is relevant to visible/storage lifetime in ePortfolios. However, this post also includes thoughts on the concepts of fluid artifacts being copied and made concrete at submission time, and how this relates to our existing web/email usage patterns.

Lots more below the break.

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Sakai/OSP development is expensive, so it’s hard to find funding prioritized for the “soft” benefits of personal ownership and development that might not jive with the “hard” outcomes understood as necessary for accountability.

I believe these “soft” outcomes can communicate accountability just as well, and even better, but it’s a much more intensive project that needs smart, creative, dedicated people over time. The consumable accountability data needs to be assembled as a secondary product, as opposed to the primary, “automatic” data products of rigid accountability measures. (…which feel a bit like TPS reports to student, faculty, and implementors, in my experience.)

This is one area where the “lower bar” open source systems have an apparent upper hand in development. Good portions of the development happens by motivated folks who have some time to give to personalization. It’s easy enough to “get in” that essentially unfunded effort bolsters those aspects.

I believe that, in today’s higher education climate, any system that doesn’t address accountability in a systematic fashion will fall out of favor very quickly at any institution where the words “ePortfolio” and “assessment” have been uttered in the same sentence. It’s really hard to build a realistic accountability system in your spare time, out of the context of a real accountability project.

This is where Sakai/OSP is uniquely positioned. We’re admittedly a bit behind on personalization, but that is changing quickly. At the same time, we have a depth of reach into the “regular” learning system activities and assessment capacities that’s unparalleled. It’s also a primary goal for a number of us to make raw development much easier. I really believe the 2.6 release has the potential to change the game. -NB

About a year ago, I was anxious that an upgrade from the Visual Editor Project might be included in the Eclipse Europa (3.3) release…

I’m a big fan of the portability, speed, and general native feel of SWT, and I’m generally a fan of the Eclipse setup. I’ve also done a good bit of C# stuff for hacking out GUIs for one-off apps. It’s actually easier than dealing with console scripts and you can hand off an .exe to let someone accomplish something without a proper shell. Given that working with Sakai is pretty Java-intensive, and that I was bouncing between OSX/XP, I figured these lightweight admin-style GUIs could be hacked together in SWT… Boy, was I wrong.

I admire the complexity of a GUI builder that generates all kinds of layout code, etc. It’s definitely not something I want to take on as a project right now. But, I’m pretty frustrated with the VEP. It missed the Europa bundle — no big deal, I thought — “there’ll be a package soon enough; this is important stuff”. Along comes October (three full months later), and this is posted on the main page:

To my knowledge, this is the only official status update from the VEP since. While scraping the blogs and forums, I found one guy who seems to be maintaining unofficial builds, but I don’t see any active development at all. If you’re dangerous, you can check out http://www.ehecht.com/eclipse_ve/ve.html — he even has a Ganymede M3-compatible bundle — I’m too scared disinterested busy to spend the time.

And now that NetBeans has released 6.0 with cleaned up usability and the actually-funded Matisse, I’m really starting to wonder if I should give it another look. Another really cool feature I saw demoed was live model diagrams with full round-tripping right in the IDE. And they seem to have a BPEL designer integrated, which tickles my SOA side.

I’m not giving up on Eclipse, but I treat free software kind of like free agency: I use and probably contribute to what works for me. The adoption/switching cost is based on learning/porting time and, for an IDE, I figure that to be about two weekends of hacking to get productive. If I can crank up and save a few hours at a crack by being able to whip up a GUI and evolve a new data model with autodiagrams, it’s pretty tempting. -NB

Well, I installed Office 2008 for Mac yesterday, and I’m pretty impressed, all in all.

Entourage was the first thing I gave a romp, and it seems to be a big improvement. It feels a lot more natural than my last, admittely brief, encounter. There are some pretty handy keyboard shortcuts and the modes seem practical enough. There are a couple of shortcuts that hurt my brain and scare me a little, though, too. Namely, these are Cmd-K for check mail (empty trash in Mail.app), and Cmd-Enter to send a message (seems pretty easy to send an incomplete message).

The big keyboard atrocity, however, is that Cmd-Left and Cmd-Right jump words exactly like Opt-Arrows. Home and End go to the beginning and end of the line, so it feels 95% Mac except during the rare task of writing an email. I’m really hoping for a patch for some configuration options.

There are three other annoyances that will probably stop me from running it during the day, though. First, when you have 10 folders in an IMAP server and it checks them all every minute, and goes bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk for every one without new messages, it gets a bit old. Second, when there is new mail in any folder, the new mail sound plays, the dock/switcher icon updates to show an unnumbered envelope, and I haven’t found a way to know which folder it landed in. Third, you can’t specify any other sounds based on rules; so my subtle audio coding based on probable importance doesn’t apply.

Word 2008 is a huge improvement at first pass. I could never get comfortable in 2004, and 2008 seems a bit more responsive, which makes sense, given that it’s a Universal app. It still has the obnoxious behavior of opening and closing the inspector panels because it knows better than I do what I want on the screen, but I guess the long-term Mac-Word users would balk at anything else. Track changes frustrates me the same as always. I don’t really care about the missing VBA stuff. The big thing is that it just feels more native now.

I really do wish it had the ribbon, though. I’ve only thought “wow, that’s refreshing” about a handful of things in the past 5 years — the ribbon was one of them. I know it seems like a love-it/hate-it thing for now, but I think they did a really nice job on representing categories of intent (with relevant actions), and that we’ll see ribbon-style stuff replacing the “pile of icons” toolbar mess that is today’s UI world. Just look at Photoshop or any of the Mac apps with icon-paged inspectors for some UX cousins.

I’ve only just launched Excel — I haven’t tried to accomplish anything in it yet. It does look significantly more usable and readable, though. I hard a very hard time handling Excel 2004; probably the most difficult was the keyboard handling. I just couldn’t wrap my head around Ctrl-U for “Edit Cell Contents”. The general tiny/choppy font was tough, too. I’m holding out hope this time around.

If nothing else, I have iWork ‘08/Mail.app and NeoOffice/Thunderbird to round out the options.

As a last thought, when I started typing this, the light went on as to why Firefox looked a little different — and, honestly, a lot better — in the past day or two. Georgia is a pretty nice font compared to the stock replacement in 2.0.0.12. It seems like Verdana and maybe a couple of others got upgrades, too. It’s almost as clean as Safari now.

I’ve held out on this blog thing even longer than I did on ICQ (remember that thing?)… I guess I’ve finally broken down. Three things have inspired me, I suppose:

1. We’re doing some work with the notions of the read-write web (2.0?), ePortfolios, and digital authorship, so I guess I should get on board a little.
2. I need an indexed place to jot thoughts and share them, as we approach a six-month development sprint in Sakai/OSP.
3. I’ve finally accepted that I will never have a chance to make that community knowledge base / code snippet site I’ve been planning for five years.

So, I guess it’s obligatory at this point: First Post!!111