TALL blog

A few months ago I spent a frustrating few days trying to get to the bottom of IPR and Phoebe. This is a question operating on quite a few levels as indicated below.

1. IPR around the tool itself and how we release it to users – ok a pretty straight forward open source software issue, I think we are going to use GPL2 which seems to be fairly standard for JISC projects.
2. IPR in the guidance within Phoebe – again not too bad, all the usual plagiarism and copyright issues, but as we produce online content all the time we know what we are doing here so not a problem
3. IPR on the designs or templates an individual creates in Phoebe and opts to share – much more confusing. It seems obvious that creative commons or something like it is the way to go, but which one exactly?

Anyway after much trolling around it seemed there were a lot of people out there who were happy to explain all the problems in this space but not many who would suggest concrete solutions.

Hopefully this has started to change, at the pedagogic planners review meeting earlier this month Lawrie Phipps suggested I look at the Web2Rights project JISC has funded which at a first pass seems to be offering all that practical advice that was missing before.

Now all I have to do is read this all and decide what license to use and how to use it. I will try and remember to blog our final decision – or in the next month or so of course you should be able to go to Phoebe and see it in action!

As everybody in the education blog world has commented in the last few days, Blackboard won their case against Desire2Learn and this is a bad thing for eLearning. As I was busy reading the excellent summaries of commentary across the board provided by Stephen Downes, here, here, and here , Dave forwarded the reaction on Slashdot here.

As the bloggers I was reading were lamenting this for issues around patent law, IPR, trust in vendors and wider philosophical perspectives, all the comments on Slashdot were busy criticizing Blackboard as a system, by tutors, students and sys admins. Personally I have not used Blackboard since 2001 so I cannot comment on the truth of these crisicisms, but it was an interesting jolt back to the practicalities of it all.

It also reminded me about one of the best things of working in TALL, and actually how unusual it is, that we are a big enough team to represent most points of view in eLearning, but small enough that we all talk to each other and (hopefully) manage to avoid getting too caught up in our own perspectives….although I don’t think there is anyone on the team who would defend Blackboard just at the moment.