Nine days ago, Apple announced iBooks 2 and iBooks Author. While everyone else was writing “me too” columns critical of the license agreement, I was busily downloading the software, converting my Sakai book to iBooks Author, getting an iTunes Connect Account, figuring out iTunes Publisher, and getting a book published.

My conclusion is that virtually everyone has it wrong. iBooks Author is a brilliant move on Apple’s part.

I have long called for a decent desk-top tool as the single MOST CRITICAL missing link in empowering teachers to become authors. I rail over and over that most of the Open Educational Resource funding effectively wasted on organizations that are trying to enhance their own brand by republishing faculty products in their name instead of trying to improve teaching and learning.

Here are a few of my recent rants with a theme of editable exchange formats for authors:

What are the Key Challenges for the OER Movement?

OER Rant 2.0 (Angry teacher and student)

Open Educational Resources (OER) – Rant-Fest

So now someone has heard my lonely cry for help and answered. Apple (like it always does) saw the massively obvious missing use cases in the endless lame offerings for authors and given us a tool that it the right use case (at least the best we have seen so far).

Apple’s iBooks Author tool was announced Thursday January 19 and my Sakai book was uploaded by midnight on Friday January 20. I little mistake in my metadata took a few days to figure out (their tech support is obviously swamped). Once I figured the metadata out and fixed it – 36 hours later I am in the book store with a very pretty book with swipe-style table of contents, revenue model, distribution channel and the whole works.

You can click the link below or search for “Charles Severance” or “Sakai” in iTunes and you get my book. It is free for a while because a pay account takes longer to get approved than a free account. So hurry and download the book while it is free.

Technically, the path was not too bad. I downloaded a LaTeX to RTF convertor, then imported the RTF into Pages and then pasted the text into iBooks Author one chapter at a time, cleaning up extra whitespace here and there. It could have been better and the documentation could have been more helpful – but you cannot argue with moving 230 pages from LaTeX to iBooks Author in 5 hours. And it even caught a couple of spelling errors I had missed.

But this book (Alpha) is just the start. I want to add pictures, multimedia, and supporting material like E-Mails that will slide out over the text. Over the next few months, I will enhance the book with these materials and create an awesome enhanced book that I will call (Beta) and sell. I want to see how Apple handles all the extra stuff and makes a truly beautiful book.

I need to do a rewrite of my Python for Informatics book because of copyright issues. I am simply going to convert to iBooks Author first and then do the rewrite there because it is far easier for me AS AN AUTHOR (are you getting the picture????) to be creative and produce an excellent book where I am spending my time on the creative aspects of creating an enhanced book and not worrying about the technical pain of HTML5 that is still emerging.

(This next bit is the MOST IMPORTANT PART of this entire post.)

People complain about the state of iBooks Author at this moment in time. What they miss is that we authors have a pipeline of work. Some books take 6 months and others take two years, there is a need to revise over and over. I can live with the few imperfections in today’s iBooks Author because by the time my next books come out, nearly all of those problems will be resolved. I really do not like the Pages/iBooks Author interface – but I have years to figure it out. This is a moving target and Apple is just getting started.

The Market Impact

Remember that it was *years* before iTunes became profitable – it was not an overnight success. All the people nay-saying iBooks Author are reacting to what it is *right now*. Already it is surprisingly impressive – but what is more important is that if folks could stop complaining about the EULA for a second and imagine where this roadmap leads – they would immediately see that the publishing industry has about five years before the door is completely shut by Apple.

The good news is that it will take Apple some time to strangle the industry. Companies like Amazon or Pearson or some startup could build a good tool or a funding agencies like Gates and Hewlett could fund an open effort to build a tool. Or perhaps one of the startups that are trying to multi-publish book authoring “in the cloud” (whoever came up with this idea never spoke to a single author) will change direction and build a desktop tool. One way or another the market can and will build a “Zune Author” to compete with iBooks Author. The “Zune Author” will likely be better, cheaper, more usable, and more open, and better in an infinite number of ways. But since so many people in this industry think about the next six months rather than the next five years, “Zune Author” will arrive too late, and technical superiority will not matter.

So the question is who in this educational space will take this on this problem head-on. I predict that no one will. Venture capitalists and philanthropic funders will continue to fund last year’s good ideas that we see over and over in keynote speeches from education futurists in the pursuit of the quick buck while Apple quietly sits in their spaceship-like headquarters and quietly builds on their lead in the publishing market and then all the “futuristic thinking geniuses” will wake up one day gasping for air and with their last breath, saying “DAMN YOU APPLE!” and wondering where things went wrong.

And on that day in 2017 when the publishing industry has been killed by Apple, please do a google search and find this blog post where I told you what to do and you did not listen. Of course it won’t change anything. And whatever I am telling you in 2017 – you won’t listen to that either. It is very frustrating to be right and have no one listen.
——-

If you liked this rant, you can read 200+ pages of my ranting about what worked and what did not work in the Sakai Project on your iPad –
Sakai: Free as in Freedom (Alpha) is now available in iTunes and the Apples iBookstore.

Rev Dr James Robson ‘Supporting Tutorials: WebLearn’ is the most popular podcast on Oxford Podcasts this week and has had 60 likes on YouTube.

Revd Dr James Robson is a Winner of the OxTALENT 2011 Award for ‘Best Use of WebLearn to Support a Course or Programme of Study’.

Now that I’m finally editing OAE code in this dandy IDE, here’s what I wish I’d done first:

• Go to “Settings” / “Keymap” and select “Mac OS 10.5+”. Otherwise your muscle memory will become bruised very quickly.

• When you create a Project, go to “Project Structure” / “Platform Settings” and explicitly set your chosen JDK. Otherwise you will be inundated by bogus warnings.

• Once you’ve got your umbrella Idea Project, add Maven code to it like so:

1. Go to “New Module…”
2. Select “Import module from external model”.
3. Browse “Root directory” to the directory with the base POM. (There are other ways to import Maven-based projects, but this is the one which didn’t drive me mad.)

• Add two lines to your “.gitignore”:

.idea
*.iml

I am doing a good bit of video editing these days and I want to send the original HD video to my collaborators around the country. The data ranges from 10GB to 40GB depending on how long the interview ran. I basically need to get it to one other person – one upload, one download, and delete the data.

DVD is completely useless here as it would take 3-10 DVDs and there is no easy-to-use spanning software. I have an ISP that gives me 630GB of storage and unlimited bandwidth – but any one connection only sees 350KB/sec – which leads to a 15GB taking over 40,000 seconds – most of a day.

Amazon’s S3 charges for outgoing bandwidth and storage but does not limit outgoing bandwidth. That drops the 15GB transfer time to less than an hour on a wired connection. Doable given that I only need to do this 3-4 times per month. The S3 charge for a week of storage and a single transfer of a 30GB file is about $4.50.

If I purchase a 32GB USB stick and put it in a photo mailer, it can be sent for $2.00 first class each way. I have a photo mailer that can be reused both ways that costs about $0.50. So sending 30GB via mail ignoring the cost of the 32GB memory stick is also about $4.50 as long as I get my 32GB memory stick back.

Interestingly I can pay an $20.00 per month to get an extra 30GB of space on the University of Michigan AFS servers. Which if I moved 30GB of video four times per month, turns out to be about $5.00 per transfer.

I think that I am going to give up and compress the video to H.264. If I could get it under 3GB, then a whole host of options open up – one-way sending of a DVD or upload/download any number of free resources I already have.

Period: Oct 2011- Jan 2012

Software

New WebLearn was upgraded in Jan 2012 – it now stands at v2.6-0×10. For more detailed information please looked at the relevant blog post:

• https://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/adamweblearn/2012/01/new-weblearn-was-upgraded-on-10th-january-2012-to-version-2-6-ox10/

We will move to Sakai 2.8 at Easter.

Improvements & Bug Fixes

• The owner of a template can be changed. This is the most frequently requested feature enhancement and will effectively allow the authoring of Survey Templates to be a collaborative process. Templates can now easily be passed from user to user.
• When a template is a copied, an annotated duplicate of each individual original question now appears in the owner’s question bank
• Events from merged calendars are now part of the ‘subscribe’ (Private URL) link
• One can subscribe to a calendar via the synoptic view of the schedule
• There is a publicly accessible Graduate Training WebLearn site containing most courses (link from front page)
• Training on this site can now be categorised according to the Researcher Development Framework

• Two-factor authentication (2FA) went live on 24th Jan, users must register to use 2FA sites and sites can only be created via the Examinations and Assessment team. It is now possible to use SAML2 to protect a WebLearn site with an extra “password” which is sent to a registered user as an SMS. Work has been undertaken to ensure that there are no “back doors” into such a site, eg, webDAV access has been disabled.

Training and Guidance

The revamped WebLearn Guidance Site went live just before Christmas. We are planning several new courses:

• WebLearn: Assessment and Feedback
• Plagiarism: Turnitin Fundamentals
• Plagiarism: Interpreting Originality Reports using Turnitin
• Plagiarism: Information skills for students
• Plagiarism: Tackling and managing plagiarism in the internet age

Projects

The Student Enrolment System II finished at Christmas.

The OXAM Migration project formally finished at Christmas – the software is currently undergoing user acceptance testing.  This replicates and improves upon the incumbent OXAM service and is now deployed within WebLearn.

The Nexus-WebLearn integration project has made slow progress, next on the hit list is insertion of (Tutorial) sign-up events in personal calendars.

The WebLearn team has now started work for the Blavatnik School of Government (BSG) as part of their project to provide their students with an iPad App interface to their learning material.

The OxCAP Phase I project was successful and now OxCAP Phase II has started (in January) and will run until March 2013. This is a JISC funded initiative to expose data (as a public XML feed) about graduate training courses at Oxford. OxCAP II addresses local needs: we will develop an internal protected feed, a new WebLearn tool which will allow a search of all graduate skills training courses at Oxford to be performed, a Share Point site for entering courses data and a JavaScript library to allow basic searching on institutional websites. This project offers a solution to a problem that students (and staff) have been demanding for a while now; this project has the explicit backing of the PVC for Education and the Registrar.

Staff

A new member of staff, Roger Pearson, will started work in the WebLearn team on Nov 1st. He is working on the “assessment and feedback” project known as SIPA, he will be reviewing and developing our support of Turnitin, investigating GradeMark and PeerMark (which will also be piloted), and recommending improvements to the WebLearn Assignments tool.

A new Java developer Colin Hebert has now started, he will also work on the SIPA project but will initially do general WebLearn and BSG development work.

Upcoming

• Improvements to Sign-up tool
• Site templates facility – it will be possible to base a new site upon a selection made from a choice of templates each tailored for a specific situation and each containing their own help and guidance.
• Integration of the Behaviour Composer and Epidemic Game Maker (modelling tools) into WebLearn using IMS Basic LTI (see: http://m.modelling4all.org/)
• Move to Sakai 2.8 (incl. collapsible LHS menus, academic network creation, improved WYSIWYG editor plus lots more)
• Sign-up tool enhancements (categories, change organiser, auto create groups, prevent withdrawing when closed, better export)
• Formal announcement of OXAM database of past exam papers service.

By Michael Feldstein

Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of good coverage of the Apple announcements already. I’m partial to Phil Hill’s pre- and post-announcement write-ups here at e-Literate as well as Audrey Watters’ analysis at Hack Education. Nevertheless, I do think there are a few more things that can be said about the announcement.

From a functional perspective, there really isn’t anything new about the e-textbooks that Apple is touting. Pretty much all of the functionality can be found in one, several, or even all of the entrants in the product category that I have occasionally referred to as “nextbooks,” e.g., Inkling, Kno, MIYO, DynamicBooks, and my own employer’s MindTap product. In fact, as I’ll go into in a later post, Apple’s entrants are missing some features that are critical to this product category. But the facts of the product announcement alone don’t tell the whole story. I don’t think you can really tease out the full impact without understanding the company’s commercial goals—particularly when the company is Apple, which has a history of moving markets in ways that other companies can only dream of. In the next couple of posts, I’m going to tease out what I believe Apple is trying to accomplish for itself, and then use that context to explore where their efforts are likely to have progressive effects on education and where there are gaps or problems.

Let’s start with Apple’s prime motivation. They want to kill paper.

In the oft-quoted passage from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, it is clear that Jobs wanted to displace textbooks with digital content on an iPad:

“In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. ‘The iPad would solve that,’ he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. ‘The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,’ he said. ‘But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.’ “

Let’s be clear about what this vision does and does not encompass. This isn’t about radically changing the way our education system works. It isn’t about improving teaching and learning. Not directly, anyway. It’s about freeing children from the weight of the backpack and freeing teachers and schools from the prescriptions of state textbook selection boards. Above all, it’s about selling iPads. Apple wants every child to be required to have an iPad for school, and the way they will attempt to accomplish that is by making the iPad the source of all curricular content, displacing the paper textbook in the process.

But there’s a problem. Every couple of months, another study or article comes out saying students don’t like e-textbooks. If you read a couple of these pieces, you’ll quickly see there are two common themes: loss of functionality and cost. Students want to be able to do what they can do in their print books, such as highlighting and making margin notes. The e-textbooks the students in these studies are getting, by and large, are inferior copies of print. Think PDF. And, of course, the number one affordance that college kids miss about their physical textbook is the ability to resell it to recoup some of their costs. So if Apple wants to displace paper, it has to close the functionality gap, lower the price, and add some unique features that make the product attractive. They have certainly narrowed or closed the functionality gap and demonstrated some compelling digital-only features. (Cost is more complicated; I’ll get to that shortly.) But again, none of these features are new to digital textbooks. So what is Apple attempting to accomplish by weighing in this way?

Textbook publishers have a chicken-and-egg problem. While they are building out some “born digital” textbook replacement products, there’s a limit to the size of the bet they can make as long as they have to address the needs of students who don’t have the right device, i.e., a decent tablet. Right now, that’s most of them. As long as that is the case, publishers are going to be inclined to stay with their current (cumbersome) print-optimized production processes and try to add digital features as they can. The publishers don’t feel they have the clout to drive the transition to digital, so they are constrained by whatever the market mix is at the moment.

Apple is different. First of all, unlike the textbook publishers, they get zero revenues from analog print products and have no installed base of textbook users to support. They can drive hard toward tablets and it’s all upside for them. Second, Apple is a taste maker like no other technology company in human history. They can raise the profile of these innovations. They can drive demand. They can make digital textbooks cool.

Just stop for second. Think about that.

Also, by releasing the authoring tools, Apple is trying to get around the whole print-first production apparatus at traditional publishers. They’re supplying a tool that makes it easy to create born-digital textbooks. And by releasing the tool for free, the implicit threat is that if the traditional publishers don’t come on board, others will.  Apple is attempting to accelerate the creation of these (relatively) higher-value eBooks by stimulating demand and lowering barriers to entry on the production side.

But even that is not enough. That is why I expect several announcements to follow this one.

What’s Next?

Apple hasn’t yet cracked the affordability problem with these textbook offerings. Remember, the pricing is for K12 books. Typically, those books will sell to schools for around $75 and will be used for about five years. Do the math. That’s $15/year, or roughly what these iTextbooks are being sold for on a per-student basis. Apple needs to make this more affordable. As a first step in that direction, I think we can count on an announcement of a significantly cheaper iPad some time between now and September. This strategy just doesn’t make sense at a $500 price point. But if Apple were able to get the price down to Kindle Fire territory, that would change the dynamic considerably. Since these books take heavy advantage of multimedia and really want a larger screen, I don’t expect Apple to save money by coming to market with a smaller screen. They are much more likely to take the same strategy that they have with the iPhone, i.e., drop the price substantially on the current model when the new one comes out.

Then there’s the challenge of administering all these iPads in a school environment. Remember, Apple is targeting K12 first. It’s not really clear whether Apple’s strategy is to get schools or parents to purchase the devices. If the former, then the company will have to release administrative software that lets schools find the iPads, control what’s been installed on them, monitor what students are doing on them, and so on.

But all of this still doesn’t get us to Steve Jobs’ original vision. Remember what he said:

 ’The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,’ he said. ‘But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.’

Let’s say that Apple is successful at creating a market and, in a few years, has a rich selection of textbooks in Bookstore that span the entire K12 curriculum. What’s their next move? Think Netflix. The school pays a flat subscription in order for the students to access whatever textbooks they need. If done right, it is possible that this structure could circumvent the textbook approval boards, since the schools are not specifically buying any particular textbooks. (I have a feeling that state boards won’t give up control so easily, but that’s another post for another day.) And Apple controls pricing.

There is no question that Apple wants to control the revenue stream from the textbooks in addition to selling the iPads. Much has been made of the fact that iBooks Author doesn’t quite publish to the EPUB standard and has a EULA that requires authors sell any products that were created with the tool through Apple and give Apple a cut of the revenues. They could have charged $5 or $10 for the tool and sold it straight up without the restrictions as part of iWork. But from Apple’s commercial perspective, this isn’t fundamentally about capturing the revenue from unleashing creativity for the creation of educational content. It’s about capturing the revenue stream from the consumption of educational content. That’s a very different business driver that will result in very different product development plans, both now and down the road.

Obviously, there’s a lot to unpack here regarding the implications for education. In my next post, I’ll write about how this approach shapes and limits the vision for what textbooks (or their digital replacements) can be.

Possibly related posts:

1. Apple Visit, Day 1 This is part 1 of a series of posts documenting...
2. Apple's Stake in Higher Education This is part 3 of a series of posts documenting...
3. Apple Trip, Day 2–the Warm-up This is part 2 of a series of posts documenting...
4. Why Apple May Beat Microsoft to Workflow Learning The evolution of workflow learning follows the evolution of workflow...
5. More on Apple's Workflow Taxonomy More good stuff: The prerelease version of Automator currently comes...

Apple and Textbooks, Part 1: The War on Paper by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

By Jim Farmer

On Friday January 20, two helicopters and “76 police staff, including armed offenders squad members” raided the home of Kim Dotcom north of Auckland, New Zealand. He was sought by the U.S. for copyright infringement and racketeering under an indictment from the U.S. District Court of Virginia, Eastern Division. Three associates were also arrested.

The issues of whether links to documents can be copyright infringement, acts that preclude DMCA safe harbor, and barring legitimate users from their files may be resolved as two legal teams—the U.S. Department of Justice and a yet to be named legal team representing “the Mega Conspiracy” in the U.S.—clash in Virginia These are issues that will affect colleges and universities because of the similarity between these sites and the way some students use the Internet.

Under the indictment the U.S. seized, without notice, “The following domain names: Megastuff.co; Megaworld.com; Megaclicks.co; Megastuff.info; Megaclicks.org; Megaworld.mobi; Megastuff.org; Megaclick.us; ageclick.com; HDmegaporn.com; Megavkdeo.com; Megaupload.com; Megaupload.org; Megarotic.com; Megaclick.com; Megavideo.com; Megavideoclips.com; Megaporn.com.” Kim Dotcom is associated with the website called Megaupload, based in Hong Kong. A Palo Alto Networks study found 57% of their sample or organizations use Megaupload.

The 72 page indictment describes the processes and pricing in detail to support its conspiracy argument. The indictment is available here.

The New Zealand police made clear “The men have not been charged by police in New Zealand and are being held in custody on the warrant issued by the U.S. Government.” This is similar to the U.S. request to extradite Richard O’Dwyer, a student at Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K., even though most believe that his website was legal under British law.

The New Zealand police completed their search on Saturday “seizing assets such as luxury cars and artwork, as well as computers and documents as evidence.” The New Zealand Herald reported that Detective Inspector Grant Wormald “confirmed that the team of four FBI staff working on the searches would also continue to do so ‘for the next few days.’”

This case again brings up two issues. What actions must a website take to identify and remediate materials infringing copyright? Mega argues it provided a “cyberlocker” which is a private data storage provider. If there is infringing content, Mega would be unaware of it since uploaded files are not reviewed for copyright infringement (which for some users would be in invasion of privacy). This is similar to college and university websites that are unaware of all of the content stored by students and faculty. The U.S. argues a website should know if there is infringing content.

This also brings up the issue of whether links to copyrighted files are themselves copyright infringement as the U.S. argued in the U.K.

In an interview with CNET, Ira Rothken, an attorney [representing those arrested] well known in the tech sector for defending Web sites accused of copyright violations, said that his clients “are assembling a team of crack copyright, criminal and technology attorneys to defend them in courts across the globe.”

“There are significant issues of due process,” Rothken said early this morning. “The government has taken down one of the world’s largest storage providers and have done so without giving MegaUpload an opportunity to be heard in court.”

Mark Lemley, Davis S. Levine and David G. Post commented on due process in their article “Don’t Break the Internet” published in the Stanford Law Review.

The procedures [this month being implemented by the courts without the referenced SOPA and PIPA legislation] fail this fundamental constitutional test. Websites can be “completely removed from circulation”—rendered un- reachable by, and invisible to, Internet users in the United States and abroad— immediately upon application by the government, without any reasonable opportunity for the owner or operator of the website in question to be heard or to present evidence on his or her own behalf..

Eric Goldman, University of Santa Clara Law School, commenting on Deckers v Liyanghua wrote:

Ex parte orders regarding foreign alleged infringers are out of control. Without sufficient regulation and without any adversarial pushback, rightsowners have learned that they can ask for ridiculous relief on an ex parte basis and get a judge to sign off on most or all of it. It’s clear that rightsowners are asking for way more than the law allows, but judges seem to acquiesce. The results are two fold:

1) the rightsowners are taking control over third-party domain names on an ex parte basis and with questionable notice given to the domain name registrants

2) worse (IMO), judges are issuing orders that purport to bind third-party non-litigants, such as domain name registrars, search engines and shopbots.

Although few stored their files on the Megaupload computers, seizing the domain names meant the users storing this work files would not have access unless they knew how to access their files without a URL. The FBI was silent on the issue.

Using “cyber lockers” to store personal files carries a risk for the unaware.

Subsequently TorrentFreak reported: “Filesonic, one of the Internet’s leading cyberlocker services, has taken some drastic measures following the Megaupload shutdown and arrests last week. … the site has disabled all sharing functionality, leaving users only with access to their own files.” The site is among the top 10 file-sharing sites on the Internet, with a quarter-billion page views a month.

These actions suggests colleges and universities consider making their faculty and students aware their domain name can be seized without notice eliminating links to websites content.  It may be helpful to suggest faculty and students to store critical files on personal storage devices.

Although losing a domain name should be rare, copyright owners may disagree.

Possibly related posts:

1. Search, Copyright, and Course Pack Affordances I’m still very much interested in the idea of creating...
2. Blackboard Files Patent Infringement Suit Against Desire2Learn in Canada Once again, Jeff Bohrer gets the scoop. (Add this guy...
3. Blackboard, Inc. Sued for Patent Infringement A company called TechRadium is suing Blackboard in East Texas...
4. Desire2Learn Strikes Back Desire2Learn filed their response to Blackboard’s infringement suit, and they...
5. Blackboard's Patent FAQ #2: The Empire Strikes Back Thanks to Al Essa for discovering Blackboard’s latest FAQ on...

U.S. Copyright Infringement – U.S. Strikes in New Zealand by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

This is my first column for IEEE Computer magazine’s Computing Conversations column. The idea of the column is to make it about people who make up the field of computing and getting to know those people. The January issue is called the “Outlook” issue dedicated to looking a bit more and encourages fritters to think a bit “out of the box’.

For this column, I figured that IEEE Computer (the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society) needed to acknowledge the passing of Steve Jobs. But since IEEE Compuer is a magazine with several months of lead time, it would look a little silly for us to write an article similar to the plethora of articles that appeared back in October, two months afterwards. So I wanted to take a more reflective view on what Steve Jobs had accomplished in terms of how we in computing who used his technology to accelerate our own thinking and innovation. I wanted to highlight the second order / knock-on effects of the products that Jobs produced. The column looked at several examples of where Steve Jobs simply pushed us forward and made us think differently.

Audio version of the column.

Here is the associated video:

I also have a High Quality Archive on Vimeo (with download link).

Other Videos in The January Issue

I also produced the following video for the January issue of IEEE Computer associated with an
article in the issue.

Bjarne Strostrup: The Inventor of C++

I also have a High Quality Archive on Vimeo (with download link). I think this would be a great video to use in a C++ class.

If you want to comment on the videos or the article – you can comment here or at the YouTube videos.

By Jim Farmer

On January 13, a UK magistrate ruled a 23-year-old student can be extradited to the United States for running a website posting links to pirated TV shows and films; this despite significant doubts over whether such sites break any UK laws. He has become the “guinea pig” of expansive U.S. justice.

About four years ago Richard O’Dwyer, a computing student at Sheffield Hallam University, began a website registered as TVSHACK.net. It “posted links to pirated material. It did not directly host any files, which meant, according to the student’s lawyers, that it acted as little more than a Google-type search engine and did not breach copyright.” The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized the domain name in July 2010 and subsequently TVSHACK.cc in November. (Seizure must be challenged with ten business days, difficult for someone outside the U.S.).

The defence team pointed out that the only UK prosecution of a similar site, TV-Links, ended last year with the case being thrown out. [In Europe, copyright infringement requires that the copyrighted material themselves be hosted on the website in question.] O’Dwyer has never been to the U.S. In his case, UK authorities did not attempt to prosecute for copyright infringement. The U.S. Department of Justice argues the U.S. has world-wide jurisdiction over all .com and .net domain registrations. Both registries are operated by Verisign under contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Verisign is based in Virginia.

In July, ICE’s “assistant deputy director told the Guardian that ICE would now actively pursue websites similar to TVShack even if their only connection to the US was a website address ending in .com or .net.” Those familiar with the operation of the Internet know that traffic between two U.K. websites would not flow through the U.S. The domain names—TVShack.net for example—would yield only an Internet Protocol numeric address that determines routing of the message traffic.

In addition to arguing that registration of a domain name in the U.S. is sufficient to give jurisdiction, ICE also argued jurisdiction because the referenced materials had a U.S. copyright. Unlike the U.S. interpretation of the law, an index site—one that refers to rather than contains material—does not violate European law. In a similar case:

Judge Ticehurst gave his judgment, announcing that TV-Links had won their case. He ruled in detail for the first time in a Crown Court in relation to Section 17 of the European Commerce Directive 2000, stating that Section 17 indeed applied and afforded TV-Links a complete defense in criminal proceedings in England and Wales for their linking to other web sites. In a nutshell and to coin a familiar phrase, the site was deemed a mere conduit of information

But on January 13, the UK district judge, Quentin Purdy, ruled that O’Dwyer should nonetheless face trial in the U.S. “There are said to be direct consequences of criminal activity by Richard O’Dwyer in the USA, albeit by him never leaving the north of England,” Purdy said. “Such a state of affairs does not demand a trial here if the competent UK authorities decline to act, and does, in my judgment, permit one in the USA.”

Now the extradition treaty itself has been criticized. The Daily Mail reported:

Former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell yesterday attacked efforts by the U.S. to extradite a British computer student for trial.

The QC said the extradition treaty between Britain and America was “never intended” for people like Richard O’Dwyer, whose offences are not even a crime in this country.

Sir Menzies’ comments have extra weight because he is leading a review of the UK’s extradition arrangements on behalf of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg.

The U.S. approach may have some unintended consequences:

• Websites may re-register outside U.S. jurisdiction and practices, especially when, as in the UK, indexing sites are not illegal. There already are examples.
• Websites that do provide copyrighted materials—Bit Torrent sites are estimated to provide 50% of movies and music subject to copyright—will begin to encrypt these transmissions. Early this month Torrent Privacy was introduced. The software addition permits any Bit Torrent site to encrypt their transmissions. The software uses the same encryption technology and level of security during transmission typical of websites that handle financial transactions, including ordering goods.
• There is now are conflicts between U.S. law and the provisions of U.S. extradition treaties as practiced and the European Union Directives on electronic commerce, copyrights in the information society, enforcement of intellectual property rights and processing of personal data and the privacy in the electronic communications sector taken collectively.
• The O’Dwyer case may be motivation for countries to review their free trade agreements and extradition treaties with the U.S. The protection of U.S. intellectual property has been a major provision of recent free trade agreements with Panama, Columbia, and Korea.

U.S. Internet Domain Registries have become an enforcement agent. In a December Intellectual Property Magazine interview Verisign’s Pat Kane said: “I think the registry operators will always have to live within the laws of the jurisdiction in which they operate in. … When it comes to content take down, the reality is that the registry operator doesn’t end up taking down the content. We basically remove a route that gets to that content, and if you want to have real effectiveness from a take down it really must go to the hosting company. For a lot of websites out there, there are multiple routes than go through multiple top-level domains.” He was careful to say that “we don’t identify [infringing] content and we don’t act upon content.”

Germany has taken a different path to protect intellectual property. Indexing is not a crime. The copyright holder first identifies specific infringement, and then the copyright holder may seek a reasonable license fee. For the major U.S. studios this fee has been between 500 and 1000 Euros or US$ 650-1,300 (unlike the multi-million dollars claims in the U.S.) The typical response has been to pay the license fee. This avoids the frequent intense enforcement and litigation found in the U.S.

Most U.S. colleges and universities have domain names registered with EDUCAUSE using .edu as their top-level domain. EDUCAUSE operates the education domain under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce. On September 11 of this year it was extended through 2016. EDUCAUSE is subject to the same enforcement actions as Verisign.

Internet search providers and higher education are vulnerable to demands for enforcement. All of these websites have, intentionally or not, material subject to copyright. Faculty and students, intentionally or not, may post materials subject to copyright. A copyright holder can seek to “take down” a site that, under current U.S. practice, only points to a source. For example a posted syllabus can point to copyrighted articles, books, movies, audio, and even, under U.S. law, blogs. Institutions need to have a way of removing content and links to external websites before court action seizes the domain name and deletes references to the site by U.S. based search engines.

.

 

Possibly related posts:

1. More on RSS, the Power Law, and Blogger Sites Reader Alan Levine (of MLX and cogdogblog fame) writes in...
2. All 44 Blackboard Patent Claims Invalidated by USPTO This just in: On March 25, the U.S. Patent &...
3. Court Re-affirms Invalidation of First 35 Blackboard Patent Claims This just in from the D2L patent blog: On August...
4. Moodlerooms and the Cambridge Global Grid for Learning I know it’s been a little quiet here on e-Literate...
5. Global Trends in Education Costs? I got into an interesting discussion on Twitter with Rosa...

U.S. Claims Global Jurisdiction of .net and .com Web Sites: Is .edu Next? by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award Competition Opens

The Sakai Teaching and Learning community announces the official opening of the 5th annual Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award (TWSIA) competition. The award recognizes innovation and excellence in technology-supported teaching, academic collaboration, and student engagement.

Entries are accepted in the following five categories, and may be implemented in Sakai CLE or Sakai OAE.

• Higher Education: Face-to-Face
• Higher Education: Fully Online or Hybrid Course
• Primary & Secondary Education (K-12)
• Portfolios
• Project Sites & Other Uses of Sakai

Entries are now being accepted on the Open Ed Practices site www.openedpractices.org/twsia .  Open Ed Practices serves as a repository for new entries and for submissions from past winners. The site also provides information for entrants on how to enter the competition, including award entry categories, the rubric which is used to judge entries, a definition of innovation and a series of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about the entry process.

The closing date for entries is March 2, 2012.  Winners will be notified in early May 2012 and may have their expenses paid to Atlanta, Georgia to present their winning entries at the 13^th annual Sakai Conference June 10-15, 2012.

To apply for the award, and for more information, please go to www.openedpractice.org/twsia.

It’s pretty common while developing an OSGi bundle that your imports and exports won’t quite match what you need or what exists in the server you’re deploying to. This can show up as NoClassDefFoundError, ClassNotFoundException or as log output in a stacktrace from bundle resolution. Hall, Pauls, McCullough and Savage did a great job of covering NCDFE and CNFE in “OSGi In Action” (chapter 8), let’s take a look at figuring out what the bundle resolution stacktrace is telling us. (I make nothing from the sales of “OSGi In Action” and suggest it to anyone interested in OSGi.)

Just like learning to read the stacktrace from an exception in Java is key to debugging, so is true about the dependency resolution messages from an OSGi container. Below is the output from Apache Felix when it encountered a missing dependency required by a bundle:

ERROR: Bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Error starting slinginstall:org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr-1.2-SNAPSHOT.jar (org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Unable to resolve 124.0: missing requirement [124.0] package; (package=org.apache.solr.client.solrj) [caused by: Unable to resolve 84.0: missing requirement [84.0] package; (package=org.sakaiproject.nakamura.api.lite) [caused by: Unable to resolve 86.0: missing requirement [86.0] package; (&(package=com.google.common.collect)(version>=9.0.0)(!(version>=10.0.0)))]])
org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Unable to resolve 124.0: missing requirement [124.0] package; (package=org.apache.solr.client.solrj) [caused by: Unable to resolve 84.0: missing requirement [84.0] package; (package=org.sakaiproject.nakamura.api.lite) [caused by: Unable to resolve 86.0: missing requirement [86.0] package; (&(package=com.google.common.collect)(version>=9.0.0)(!(version>=10.0.0)))]]
    at org.apache.felix.framework.Felix.resolveBundle(Felix.java:3443)
    at org.apache.felix.framework.Felix.startBundle(Felix.java:1727)
    at org.apache.felix.framework.Felix.setActiveStartLevel(Felix.java:1156)
    at org.apache.felix.framework.StartLevelImpl.run(StartLevelImpl.java:264)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)

What you have here is a stacktrace with a lengthy message. The important part of the stacktrace for us is the message.

ERROR: Bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Error starting slinginstall:org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr-1.2-SNAPSHOT.jar (org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Unable to resolve 124.0: missing requirement [124.0] package; (package=org.apache.solr.client.solrj) [caused by: Unable to resolve 84.0: missing requirement [84.0] package; (package=org.sakaiproject.nakamura.api.lite) [caused by: Unable to resolve 86.0: missing requirement [86.0] package; (&(package=com.google.common.collect)(version>=9.0.0)(!(version>=10.0.0)))]])

This message is pretty simple but the structure is common for nastier messages (i.e. deeper resolution paths before failure). Let’s pull it apart to see what’s happening in there.

ERROR: Bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Error starting slinginstall:org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr-1.2-SNAPSHOT.jar

This very first part tells us that an error occurred while trying to load the org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solrbundle. Nice start, but not quite the crux of the matter. Let’s keep reading.

org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Unable to resolve 124.0: missing requirement [124.0] package; (package=org.apache.solr.client.solrj) [caused by: Unable to resolve 84.0: missing requirement [84.0] package; (package=org.sakaiproject.nakamura.api.lite) [caused by: Unable to resolve 86.0: missing requirement [86.0] package; (&(package=com.google.common.collect)(version>=9.0.0)(!(version>=10.0.0)))]])

Phew, that’s a lot of text! This is the heart of what we need though, so let’s break it down to make more sense of it.

(
    org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Unable to resolve 124.0: missing requirement [124.0] package; (package=org.apache.solr.client.solrj)
        [
            caused by: Unable to resolve 84.0: missing requirement [84.0] package; (package=org.sakaiproject.nakamura.api.lite)
            [
                 caused by: Unable to resolve 86.0: missing requirement [86.0] package; (&(package=com.google.common.collect)(version>=9.0.0)(!(version>=10.0.0)))
            ]
        ]
)

What are those [number]s in the message?

The numbers in the message tell us the bundle ID on the server.

Unresolved Package Name	Bundle ID Where Resolution Failed
org.apache.solr.client.solrj	124
org.sakaiproject.nakamura.api.lite	84
com.google.common.collect	86

Once you pull apart the message it becomes more obvious that it has structure and meaning! The structure of the message tells us that bundle 124 depends on a package from bundle 84 which depends on a package from bundle 86 which is unable to resolve com.google.common.collect;version=[9.0.0, 10.0.0). The innermost/very last message tells us the root of the problem; the dependency resolver was unable to find com.google.common.collect at version=[9.0.0, 10.0.0). Now we have somewhere to start digging.

How To Fix This

I suggest one of the following steps:

1. Add a bundle that exports the missing package with a version that matches the required version
2. Change the version to match an exported package already on the server

In this particular environment, com.google.common.collect;version=10.0.0 is what our server has deployed. The descriptor above specifically blocks any version not in the 9.x.x range. We generate the OSGi manifest by using the Maven Bundle Plugin which uses the BND tool to generate the manifest. In BND version > 2.1.0, the macro for versions was changed. Our solution has ranged from rolling back to bnd version=2.1.0 OR define the macro differently. The results are the same; the version segment in the manifest header becomes com.google.common.collect;version>=9.0.0 which finds our bundle of com.google.common.collect;version=10.0.0.

Notes about environment

The above message and stacktrace originated from a Sakai OAE environment which is built on Apache Sling and thusly Apache Felix. We use an artifact ID that is the root package of the bundle (org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr). This has the side effect that our bundle names look like package names in the message but gives a very clear naming convention.

The tutorial system lies at the heart of Oxford’s educational experience, to further this practice LTG have produced a video case study entitled WebLearn: Supporting Tutorials.

Supporting tutorial practices through the use of technology can enable both tutors and students to interact with each other and relevant content, before and after the tutorial sessions. Revd Dr James Robson is Senior Tutor in Theology at Wycliffe Hall. He has used WebLearn for tutoring and supporting his students in their learning and formation.

For more information, look at the LTG case studies blog.

Revd Dr James Robson is a Winner of the OxTALENT 2011 Award for ‘Best Use of WebLearn to Support a Course or Programme of Study’.

Instructors making innovative use of CourseWork, Stanford’s course management system, are encouraged to apply for the 2012 Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award. This award goes to an instructor making exceptional use of Sakai (the system upon which CourseWork is based on) in the following five categories

• Higher Education: Face-to-Face
• Higher Education: Fully Online or Hybrid Course
• Primary & Secondary Education (K-12)
• Portfolios
• Project Sites & Other Uses of Sakai
• Learner Support

Last year Dr. Niem Huynh of Texas State University won first place in the face-to-face higher education category for her World Geography course. While students learned about and created different types of maps individually, a major goal of the class was the development of teamwork skills; Sakai played a large role in facilitating team research, communication, presentation, and feedback.

The 130 students formed small groups research on how their personal diet and fuel consumption compared to people in their selected countries and based on climate data, predicted the issues these countries would be facing in the form of a fictional newspaper from 50 years in the future. They also did first-person research on health issues in their local communities and documented these in videos shared. They used the Materials tool to share links and media for their research and Mailtool to communicate amongst themselves. They used the Wiki tool to share their media-rich reports with the rest of the class. Teams left feedback for each other about their projects using the comments feature within the pages. Students gave the wiki projects positive rankings for engaging them (3.54 our of 5); students commented that they found these projects a fun, bonding experience and more interactive than writing a paper.

Visit the TWSIA Web site to learn more about the award and view the winning applications applications. You can also see Huynh’s presentation at the 2011 Sakai conference

Applications for the TWSIA must be made electronically by March 2, 2012 at the TWSIA Web site. Winners will have the opportunity to present at the 2012 Sakai Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

Please leave a comment below to let the CourseWork team know if you are applying so we may offer support. Your comment will be read, but not published.

This is a know issue and has been reported here:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=353503




The workaround is to change the following Mac OS X System Preferences.

1. Open the Mac OS X System Preferences
2. Click on General
3. Change the "Show scroll bars:" setting to "Always"

I have long thought one of the problems with OpenSocial is its openness to enable any Gadget based app anywhere. Even if there is a technical solution to the problem of a rogue App in the browser sandbox afforded by the iframe that simply defers the issue. Sure, the Gadget code that is the App, can’t escape the iframe sandbox and interfere with the in browser container or other iframe hosted apps in from the same source. Unfortunately wonderful technical solutions are of little interest to a user whose user experience if impacted by the safe but rogue app. The app may be technically well behaved, but downright offensive and inappropriate on many other levels, and this is an area which has given many institutions food for thought when considering gadget based platforms like Google Apps for Education. A survey of the gadgets that a user could deploy via an open gadget rendering endpoint reveals that many violate internal policies of most organizations. Racial and sexual equality are often compromised. Even basic decency. It’s the openness of the gadget renderer that causes the problem, in many cases when deployed, it will render anything its given. It’s not hard to find gadgets providing porn in gmodules the source of iGoogle, not exactly what an institution would want to endorse on its staff/student home pages.

For too long there has been an assumption that it’s the responsibility of the user to self police. That’s fine where the environment is offered by an organisation that can claim to be ”only the messenger”, but when an environment is offered by an organization that is more than a messenger, self policing doesn’t hold water. The weakness of the OpenSocial gadget environment is its openness. It’s hard, if not impossible to control what gadgets are available and put the onus on the container to control what is loaded.

Trusting Mobile Apps

There is a parallel to this problem in the mobile device industry seen in the difference between Android and iOS. Android is open, the environment allows developers to do almost anything they like and have full access to all features of the phone. The Android Market with over 400K apps on it is often reported as being “wild west”  to quote “…Unlike Apple’s strict approval policy, the Android Market is seen a little like the Wild West of the mobile, with many applications getting through which would never make the cut on iOS…. “. That leaves the user with plenty of choice but exposed to a lot of risk. It’s spawning an industry of FUD, based on real fears and dangers generating a new revenue stream for those that profited from virus and malware explosions on PCs. This time it’s a mobile device where the user may have placed far more trust in the device than they know (money, bank details, authentication, liability), and has far less ability to do anything about it (there I go, adding to the FUD).

Don’t get me wrong, as a developer, I don’t like the iOS approval process, but I think it’s a necessary evil to ensure that those providing the market place or store know that what they are pushing onto the unsuspecting public won’t do harm. Firstly the iOS platform protects the device from the rogue developer. Secondly the approval process ensures that the app conforms to the guidelines, not eating the battery or using up all the users monthly bandwidth allowance in a day. Thirdly, although not always the case, the approval process ensures that the soft factors of the app are acceptable. I haven’t tried, but I suspect an app that worked as a terrorist bomb trigger app, and gave step by step instructions how to do it would not pass the soft factors inspection. Consequently users of the iOS platform feel that they can trust the apps they are being sold. There is no aftermarket industry in end-user protection as there is no business case to support it.

In the Gadget environment, it’s the gadget renderer that is the equivalent to the store. By rendering a gadget, the renderer is not just a “messenger” not to be blamed, it’s saying something about what its rendering. If the gadget renderer doesn’t do that, then I have to argue that you should not trust the gadget rendered. It could be pushing anything at you, you might trust it, but if it doesn’t trust what it’s sending you, how can you trust what it sends? Would you accept a package from a person in a uniform before boarding a plan, just because the uniform had a badge with the word “security” on it? No, neither would I. If they had a gun and ID, I would still ask them why I should be trusted to carry it.

OCLC WorldShare

There are some OpenSocial gadget renderers that care about their reputation. Most Libraries are considered to be trusted sources of information and OCLC with a membership of 72000 libraries, museums and archives in 170 countries has a reputation it and its membership cares about. OCLC recently launched WorldShare, an OpenSocial based platform that uses Apache Shindig to render Gadgets and provide access for those gadgets to a wealth of additional information feeds. It does not provide the container in which to mount the Gadgets but it provides a trusted and respected source of rendered Gadgets. This turns the OpenSocial model on its head. A not for profit organisation delivering access to vast stores of information via OpenSocial and the Gadget feeds. Suddenly the gadget rendered feed is the only thing that matters. The container could be provided by OCLC, but equally by members. OCLC has wisely decided to certify any gadget that it is prepared to serve. Like the iOS certification and approval process, WorldShare’s certification is based on technical and soft criteria. That process will hopefully ensure quality, add value and protect its uses from the wild west. Just as we trust our libraries to truthfully hold and classify knowledge, I hope that the WorldShare’s realisation that the vendor has a responsibility, will give as all the confidence to continue to trust OCLC as a source.

 

 

I was looking to investigate some connection problems we were having to a MySQL database and wanted to be sure that the client was connecting to correct machine. MySQL 5.1 doesn't provide this information on it's own, but it is contained in the general log. However the log contains all statements executed against MySQL so will have a performance impact on a production machine. The general log can be enabled/disabled while MySQL is still running which means you can enable the logging, capture the events your interested in and then disable it again. Todo this connect to MySQL as a user who can set GLOBALS (typically root) and run:

mysql> SET GLOBAL general_log_file='/var/log/mysql.log';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> SET GLOBAL general_log = 1;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Then the file /var/log/mysql.log should start filling up with statements. Once your done disable the general log:

mysql> SET GLOBAL general_log = 0;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

In my case I was looking for connection messages so a simple grep pulled out the lines I was interested in:

grep Connect /var/log/mysql.log | less

(Reposting from my open education blog) As 2011 slowly drifts away, I'd like to come back to a topic that has been on my mind a lot this year, and speculate on some trends for the upcoming decade. That topic is curation. As we have all noticed, information available on the internet is limitless, and the frontier of that universe is expanding exponentially at every instant. People struggle with

Save the dates for the first Joint Jasig/Sakai Annual Conference!

Sunday, June 10 through Friday, June 15, 2012 at the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. Supplementary half-day Jasig and Sakai Seminars on Sunday, June 10

More details to follow soon.

If you are interested in participating in either the Conference Planning Committee (logistics) or the Conference Program Committee (content) please contact Patty Gertz at ed@jasig.org, or Ian Dolphin at iandolphin@sakaifoundation.org .