41 figures from the Blackboard patent (and some other resources)
04-August-2006
permalink comments (2) forum (2) email this- Flickr set: Figures from Blackboard's Patent
- as a Flickr slideshow
- mmalloch/tagviewer?tag=blackboard
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The figures as a zip-ful of TIFFs
[ Download ]
(blackboard_patent_figures.zip
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4.40 Mb
)
I thought I'd share these figures/drawings from the notorious patent, since they were such a pain to access and organise. You can read the Blackboard document at the US Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Full-Text Database, but it refers to 41 figures/drawings, and these are organised in a very awkward navigational format, viewable one at a time in a pane that requires a lot of scrolling (the uspto site says this is because some patents are 5000 pages long, and thus they cannot afford in general to allow omnibus downloads).
I wanted to read the patent, so I downloaded all these images, gave them meaningful names and rotated them as necessary so that I could make reference to them in a sensible way. That was such a pain that I thought I'd spare others the trouble, so I uploaded the images to flickr, gave those images complete titles based on the captions in the patent document, 
and placed them in order in a Flickr set: Figures from Blackboard's Patent (also available as a Flickr slideshow). If you want to have a local copy of all the figures (for printing etc), I also uploaded the figures as a zip full of TIFFs to my yahoo briefcase.
While I'm at it with links to resources... I've collected a good set of links in my del.icio.us tag 'blackboard', and will continue to add items I feel are particularly useful or important. Best viewed in our shiny new interactive tag-viewer: 
mmalloch/tagviewer?tag=blackboard.
By the way, I hope to post next week about these slick new tools we've been writing for interactive viewing of del.icio.us tags, clouds, items and related tags (and even for live-searching tagged sites!). Lots of goodness on the way and we'll release variants for Plone and plain html embeds under GPL as soon as the interfaces are complete.
And I also hope to post sometime soon with my own feelings about the Blackboard patent issue. For the moment, let me just say that having spent the summer of 1998 in Blackboard's DC offices (seconded there from the UK to do some IMS work on metadata), and having spent a lot of that time interacting with the architects of Blackboard's subsequent systems, I know that these guys did not 'invent' the VLE, and that they knew they weren't 'inventing' the VLE.
On the other hand, I've never understood why people are interested in these 'L' blinking 'E's in the first place. I prefer to call these things 'procurement-ware', since their sole use in the real world is to get bought by IT departments as evidence that they 'offer online learning'. I agree with those who've pointed out that outlawing the monolithic VLE really doesn't matter - it'd be wonderful if anybody peddling such monstrosities could be sued (and not just BB's competitors :o) ...I think a bit of student protest would be very welcome, against the injustice of this nuisance patent, but also against the injustice of cramming procurement-ware down students' eyeballs ... "No L Es" anyone?
Technorati Tags: blackboard, patents
2 Replies (comments)
1 Thanks Mike
I don't track patents so this was news to me. Incredible! The stupidness of software patents. I bet BB can't believe their luck.
Do you recall the BT Hyperlink Patent? There was a great quote in the subsequent Wired article that might apply to 'autonomous VLEs' (such as KNotes for example) rather than the monoliths. Patent attorney Vincent Jerham said:
"It's conceivable that a jury could rule in BT's favor, and that BT would impose a fee every time a hyperlink is used from that day forward. But how they would go about monitoring such usage, and enforcing payments, is beyond my imaginative abilities."
Hey, how about 'autonomous learning environments' (ALEs) - it's about time we had a new piece of jargon. I fancy an ALE.
2 Desire2Learn have posted a 3.5M printable PDF of the patent with figures (together with the complaint against them)
If you want to print the patent with figures, it would probably be more convenient to use the omnibus pdf file that Desire2Learn have posted in their new patentinfo blog. Very community-minded of them to post this - thanks!
The file is 63 pages long - 4 pages is the complaint; the rest is the patent. All for only 3.5MB of bandwidth :o)
They also ask, in their blog, to be emailed (at PriorArt _at_ Desire2Learn _dot_ com) with info about prior-art, but I assume that they are also watching the wikipedia prior-art page and maybe tracking some del.icio.us tags - I've started noting prior art as I encvcounter it in vle/prior-art, and most bookmarkers seem to be including the tag 'blackboard' when collecting material related to the patent issue. I've continued to bookmark some of the especially interesting new commentary and news, and as ever Stephen Downes has been doing a thorough and astute job of summarising the emerging discourse and news (if that link is broken try this one).
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