iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

I’m both excited and to be able to announce that Sakai will bro Brock’s next Learning Management System. Terry Boak, Brock University’s Vice-President Academic finally officially announced the move to an open-source Sakai-based Learning Management System (LMS) at Wednesday May 14th, University Senate meeting. Thus I feel I can now start blogging about it.

This new system will be based on the community-based LMS: Sakai. Brock’s new Sakai-based system will be built upon a cluster that will have all the features of a strong system that is redundant, reliable, scalable, and with sufficient capacity. More about the new cluster is available here: kumu.brocku.ca/sakai/Brock%27s_Sakai_System

The spring of 2008 marks the beginning of a phased transition to Brock using exclusively a Sakai-based LMS for the 2009 academic year. Instructors have the option to use Sakai right now and students may already be taking courses that make use of Sakai.

As of July 31st 2009 WebCT will no longer be available at Brock. An implementation plan has been drafted and posted at kumu.brocku.ca/sakai/Implementation_Plan. It should assure that this transition can be accomplished without incidents and discontinuities.

The Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies (CTLET) and others are already beginning the process of documenting Sakai and training faculty and will be posting updates here soon.

A contest to name the new Sakai-based system has been announced and can be found at http://www.brocku.ca/ctlet/sakai/contest.php – you can win an iPod.

Because of the steps, rules and accommodations we had to adhere to between the decision and the announcement we (Me, iMatt and we, Brock University) actually got scooped by another blog, sakaiblog.korcuska.net/2008/04/05/brock-university-adopts-sakai/, that probably read our non-announcement confirmation statement that we made to facilitate some presentations etc. and academic planning that needed to be done. That’s Brock.

All Brock Sakai information (wheres, whats, pilot results, etc) are located at www.brocku.ca/ctlet/sakai and we’ve got a wiki started for Sakai at Brock at kumu.brocku.ca/sakai.

Most Firefox users know about the super-fast in-page search (ctrl+F/Command+F) – it’s one of those features that have been there since Firefox 1 and prevent users from switching back to other web browsers.

Did you know that you can instantly search for any text on a web page by hitting the forward slash and typing that word? For example, you want to find “Firefox” on this page, you would type /firefox. Then the first instance of “Firefox” will appear highlighted. This slash search feature is really just a shortcut to ctrl+F/Command+F but it shaves precious micro-seconds off of your workday.

It’s finally here, the Apple iPhone will be in Canada later this year! Here is the Rogers’s press release confirming the agreement: http://micro.newswire.ca/release.cgi?rkey=1604292519&view=5804-0&Start=0

The only tantalizing statement is:

We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year. We can’t tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.

I’ve ditched my clavicle splint, affectionally known as “my bra”. I still have some healing to do, and I’m not allowed to climb etc. for a few more months, but at least I don’t have to wear that thing in the heat and I can once again sleep on my sides.

Campus Technology posted an interview they did with Matthew Small today. It’s very interesting in that it gives insight into his mindset with respect to the patent and he refers frequently to any perceived problem with the patent to be with software patent law itself, not Bb’s patent. It’s a good point, software and business practise patents are a bad idea to begin with!

I’ve met Mr. Small a few times, and blogged about at least two of them (Bb v. SFLC, Sakai, Moglen, rational thinkers, et all., Follow up with the Bb team). The problem I have with him is he’s a bright, reasoned individual who is operating quite logically upon assumptions that I (any many others) simply can’t accept.

The Bb assumption seems to be: one can get away with anything one wants to with a software patent, the only test is tricking the USPTO; we’re surprised you all didn’t know that and we don’t know why you’re trying to stop us. Small argues that the “Obvious to someone trained in the art” test has to be applied to 1998 when they claimed to apply the concept of one user multiple roles to eLearning. He then points to the fact that no other commercial product on the market allowed for it when they got their product to market, thus it must not have been obvious and that they invented it.

Small also concedes that the concept of one user multiple roles was being used in other non-eLearning tools but not in eLearning tools, thus they applied it first and thus invented it.

Again, if you accept that this is the kind of thing that one can be patented, then it is a reasoned argument. My (and many other’s) problem with this is that eLearning does not simply consist of 4 or 5 commercial products. Many tools at universities (including Brock’s) applied this principle on a few of the tools that create the list of 44 items in the Bb patent. I’ve got the patent pinned to my office wall and the words “and then selling it” do not appear — though it does reference existing “legacy network-based systems” that waste a lot of students’ time. I don’t know if that acknowledgement strengthens or weakens the patent, but if you look at the statement over the last two years the answer might be “both”.

Additionally the concept of one user multiple roles was adapted to eLearning (according to the patent in 1998) but since then its been adapted to things like on-line tax software, wikis, blogs, etc. and my Googl’ing of the USPTO site can’t find similar patents.

So sanity appears to prevail. One thing that also wasn’t as obvious in 1998 was how to make your customers revolt against you via the internet — the record industry invented that. There’s one business practise that was always going to be applied in 2006 when Bb actually filed their patent, and that one should have been obvious to them.