Month: September 2011

It is still a great idea

We got into the book publishing game by being rejected. Our original idea was to repurpose topical coloring books as digital files and provide them to teachers/students with some project ideas. Houghton-Mifflin liked our focus on technology projects for the classroom and offered us a book deal for a more general product.

I still think the thematic clipart idea was great.

We came to this idea from developing and distributing a clipart collection for North Dakota Game and Fish. I just happened to think of this clipart collection again today. You can still reach the site and download the clipart. We received funding from ND Game and Fish to develop this clipart in 1992 and placed the images on our server in 2001. We originally distributed the images on disk. Images for reptiles, birds, mammals and fish are available.

These are gif files (remember the time frame here) but it should be easy to download (right click on the images) and use a “paint” program of some type of convert to jpg files. The files could be transfered to an iPad and used a wide variety of ways. These files are intended for noncommercial use only (I guess I need to say that).

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Told you so

In several posts over the years, I have wondered aloud about what I thought was a poorly conceived connection between NCLB and politicians concerns with the capacity of the U.S. to compete economically. While getting a higher proportion of students to a minimum level of proficiency is a worthy goal, I have suggested that this goal seemed to me to be different from the goal of generating the creative and advanced types needed to move the economy forward. If resources are limited and fixed and if the goal was to focus on education as economic development, wouldn’t it make more sense to focus more resources on gifted education?

Research just released appears to support my prediction that NCLB would be detrimental to more capable students.

The point is we have so many goals for education and we are cutting rather than increasing resources. I still like what my wife has proposed as a motto – “move every child forward”. It appears that where we focus our limited resources does matter.

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Glean

I have written on several occasions about the problem of finding what you look for rather than what you should see. This is my way of describing what Eli Pariser calls the Filter Bubble (also the name of his book). 

For educators, thorough online exploration is part what might be called digital literacy. Public Learning Media has introduced Glean – an interesting tool for exploring the variety of reactions to a given issue one might find online. You first identify a topic – say Obama jobs program. You then select terms that might describe different positions on the initial search phrase – say “pro” and “con”. The search tool returns hits offering these different perspectives. Pretty cool!

 

Glean Input

Glean compare

 

 

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Trolls and Mutually Assured Destruction

Educators may have limited awareness of the patent battles that now plague technology industries. Everyone seems to be suing everyone. Educators are more likely to be aware of copyright. They tend to understand that the whole sale duplication of content generated by someone else (music, text, video, images) is prohibited. What you may also recognize is what you can do. Perhaps you have heard this described as you cannot copyright an idea. Hence, you cannot copy and distribute what I have written, but you can identify key ideas in what I write and express them in your own words.

The problem with patents appears that you can protect an idea and the idea can be expressed in vague terms. A great piece on this problem has been generated by This American Life (listen or read). The concern is that common functionality of most Internet and phone functionality is described in these general patents even though a general function can be accomplished in many different concrete ways (kind of the opposite of copyright). Supposed to be a breakthrough and not necessarily a common sense good idea. Supposed to be. In other words, an invention and a patent are not necessarily the same thing. For example you might be surprised to learn that a 2000 patent for thermal refreshing of a bread product could also be described as “toasting” or perhaps “microwaving” (an example provided the This American Life). Clearly, multiple ways for refreshing a bread product predated the patent.

That battles among major companies further complicate the patent problem in a different way. They did not necessarily contest a given patent but purchase a huge collection of patents themselves in order to attack any company willing to challenge what they are doing by claiming the complaining company violates a different patent that they hold. It is not even about attempting to get to the point of understanding true ownership, but a threatened battle of attrition that mostly benefits lawyers and mostly fought based on the patent portfolios of the various companies. This situation is sometimes referred to as “mutually assured destruction”.  So, with many ambiguous patents that can be picked up by the thousands if you have billions, you can basically keep the other big companies at arm’s length, but threaten or force any small company out of business.

It is pretty difficult to interpret this situation as protecting the rights of inventors, bettering the economy, or assuring that consumers have access to the best products and services possible. Like the lack of regulation that led to the recent stock market and banking crisis, this seems to be a failure of oversight that would seem best placed under the control of the government. There appear to be secondary businesses that built on the need to protect the legitimate rights of inventors but rather function primarily to take advantage of broad patents to make money for the companies rather than the inventors.

Example of technology patent battles

 

 

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