SIIA: Software & Information Industry Association

In planning two education-focused conferences this summer for SIIA, I was struck by similarities – and of course the differences – in the two events. This week we host, “Innovate to Educate: A symposium on [Re]Design for Personalized Education.” After returning to DC, we go full steam ahead planning the 2010 Ed Tech Business Forum, which will focus on “Re-Inventing Business Models.”

First, the obvious differences: The former conference is our first major component of SIIA’s new initiative on Personalized Learning and is being held in collaboration with ASCD and CCSSO. Two-thirds of the invited attendees represent leadership within the K-12 education sector – school districts, state agencies, professional associations, the federal government and education foundations. Attendees will focus on the policies, practices and technologies needed to enable the redesign of our education system from an industrial-age structure to one that is student-centered to meet each student’s personalized learning needs.

The Ed Tech Business Forum will be 10th annual and has become part of “Education Week” in New York, taking place each year the first week after Thanksgiving. Attendees are primarily from the industry, and represent ed tech platform companies, publishers, and financial firms. They’re there to learn and share information about the shifts they see in their business models.

The similarities: Some of SIIA members will be attending both conferences. While the purpose of the Symposium is to look at system re-design, the Forum will be looking to re-design their business. There’s a cause and effect, and hopefully, they’ll happen in tandem with each other. Our members do react to customer needs … and Personalized Learning is a major one right now. By working with industry colleagues at the Forum, they will gain major insights to Re-Inventing their business models.

Posted by Karen Billings, Vice President, SIIA Education Division

[From a Symposium on Personalized Learning interview series by New Media Partner edReformer.com]

Joel Rose, CEO of School of One in New York City, addresses how personalized learning provides equity of student outcomes, and the need to address the design flaw of the traditional classroom model with with personalized systems and technologies.

Where does technology fit into [personalized learning]?
I think we need school designs that accomplish that personalized vision by integrating, instruction, professional development, leadership, options and technology. It’s one of the necessary components of an integrated design that serves that need. It doesn’t end or begin with technology, but technology is a piece of it.

What are some of the challenges being faced by the effort to bring personalization into the education system?
There is one big challenge, and that’s how nearly impossible it is for an individual teacher to personalize learning for 28 kids, during five periods a day. Even if we do that, it’s not enough. We have to complement the work of great teachers with systems and technologies that can enable personalized learning. It’s a design challenge. [Challenge is] the way we designed our schools, by putting 28 kids in a room, calling that sixth grade and putting one teacher in that room. And making that assumption that a kid can make that one year of growth . . . that’s a design assumption that is incredibly flawed. We are so accustomed to think of school in this way, the idea that there’s a different way of doing it doesn’t really enter into our minds. How we narrowly redesigned roles in school that have kind of calcified how we think about school. A lot of things we have done have just cascaded on top of this system. Until we fundamentally get to this design question . . . “This is where we want kids to be at the end of the year,” “This is the best way of doing that,” until we start asking these fundamental questions, we are going to stay where we are.

Read More from Joel Rose on how personalized learning and technology can address the design challenge of our school model, a roadmap for redesign, and how personalization flips the pursuit of equity from inputs to outcomes.

[From a Symposium on Personalized Learning interview series by New Media Partner edReformer.com]

Harvard professor Howard Gardner shares his vision for personalized learning in an age of education reform which grows out of his theory of multiple intelligences. Gardner believes the educational world of the future belongs to those educators and technologists who can create robust ways to present important but challenging concepts.

What is your vision for personalized learning?
My vision of personalized learning grows out of the theory of multiple intelligences, which I developed thirty years ago. Personalized learning involves Individuation and Pluralization. Individuation means that each student should be taught and assessed in ways that are appropriate and comfortable for that child. Pluralization means that anything worth teaching could and should be taught in several ways. By so doing, one reaches more students. Today, we live in a computer age. For the first time in human history, individuation and pluralization are potentially available to any young person. And so the ideas of non personalized, remote, or cookie-cutter style teaching and learning will soon become anachronistic.

What are the challenges being addressed and the opportunities being leveraged?
The major challenge is a system that has proceeded for centuries on the basis of ‘uniform’ schooling and uniform learning: teaching everyone the same thing in the same way. That tack has seemed fair, because all are being treated in the same way. But it is actually unfair, because school is being pitched to a certain kind of mind–in my terms, a mind that is strong in language and logic. Added to that is our system of standardized assessment, which focuses on particular bits of knowledge and which often simply presents a set of choices. Once we have more personalized education, we can provide far more realistic assessments and allow students leeway in how they approach the problems and puzzles that they are presented.

Read More of Dr. Gardner’s views on the intersection of personalization and equity, the research on personalized learning, and the role of technology.

In a decision today affirming the Federal Circuit and the United States Patent & Trademark Office, the Supreme Court held that a patent application on a method of hedging risk in commodities trading is not patentable subject matter. All nine justices concurred in the result, though the “majority” opinion, authored by Justice Kennedy, only included five justices (and two parts of the opinion only included four).

The Court refused to adopt the “bright line” rule applied by the Federal Circuit, and instead held that Bilski’s claimed method was merely an abstract idea ineligible for patenting. The Court’s decision confirms that typical software — running on hardware and accomplishing non-abstract results — continues to be patentable subject matter as it has for several decades, and also suggests that some business methods are patentable as long as they are not abstract ideas like Bilski’s claim.

Scott Bain, SIIA Litigation Counsel, commented: “Today’s decision preserves a delicate but important balance. It keeps the door closed to patenting mere abstract ideas, which many ‘business method’ patent applications have been. But just as importantly, it affirms the continued viability of patenting useful software applications, which will allow software companies to continue in their role as a driver of economic growth.”

“However, much work remains to be done in improving patent quality,” said Bain, referring to ongoing patent reform discussions in the U.S. Congress.

Bain had authored the amicus brief submitted by the SIIA, urging rejection of Bilski’s application but continued viability of software patenting.

[Guest blog by Judy Seltz, Deputy Executive Director for Constituent Services, ASCD — Symposium Partner)

In April, the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee made a whole child approach to learning part of the ESEA reauthorization discussion when it heard from a series of speakers about the importance of thinking beyond a narrow definition of academics and accountability in designing an education program for the future. ASCD believes that each child, in each school, in each of our communities deserves to be healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. That’s what a whole child approach to learning, teaching, and community engagement really is.

These 21st century demands require a new and better way of approaching education policy and practice — a whole child approach to learning, teaching, and community engagement. We need to redefine what a successful learner is and how we measure success. It is time to put students first, align resources to students’ multiple needs, and advocate for a more balanced approach. A child who enters school in good health, feels safe, and is connected to her school is ready to learn. A student who has at least one adult in school who understands his social and emotional development is more likely to stay in school. All students who have access to challenging academic programs are better prepared for further education, work, and civic life.

Personalized learning is central to this approach to learning. We talk about each child, not every child. Each child learns differently; personalized learning supports differences in talent, interest, style and pace.

ASCD is pleased to collaborate with SIIA and CCSSO in bringing together a unique group of thinkers from policy, practice, government, and business to learn from and listen to each other about the promise and challenges of making personalized learning a reality for each student.

[From a Symposium on Personalized Learning interview series by New Media Partner edReformer.com]

Symposium speaker Roberta Selleck, Superintendent Adam’s County School District 50, Colorado talks about her district’s shift from a teacher-led to a student-centric learning system.

What is the vision for personalized learning?

We just finished our first year using non-graded time as a variable this year, in other words, grade levels went away as we know it. They are based in their instructional level, not their frustration level. That’s a huge paradigm shift. The words we are using are mass customization. We recognize that every child is unique, so we must look at every child as a unique individual. Where are they on that continuum so that we can help them continue that academic unique journey?

Where does personalization intersect with equity?

We certainly believe that what happens in our traditional system is a travesty. The kdis are put on a conveyor belt, and nine months later they are popped out and for the most part if they are almost ready to go to the next level, they go, regardless. That for us is not equity. We have broken that model and tried to look at each child as an indidvidual. It’s not the teacher just talking about her 25 kids in the class. All teachers are owning all kids’ education and graduation goals, even at the elementary level. We all have a piece of the game.

I wish people could come and really see this in action. Once a month, we host these tours and we have 25 and 30 people, come, we put it in context. We put it in the classroom. These kids can clearly articulate what their goals are, and where they are at, academically. What it is they are working on, and they can tell you what they know, and they can tell you what they don’t know. It’s really remarkable to see. Kids are not shy about sharing that with others.

Read more of the inteview on the challenges being addressed, system design, curriculum and technology, teacher role and professional development, and opportunity for public-private software development partnership. Read more about the Adams County initiative.

[From a Symposium on Personalized Learning interview series by New Media Partner edReformer.com]

Symposium speaker Wendy Battino is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition, which grew out of reforms in the Chugach School District in Alaska. We spoke with her about vision, personalized learning components and policy-making strategy and how her implementation at RISC helps her students achieve.

What is the vision for personalized learning as your organization pursues it? One thing we have known for quite a while is that students learn in different ways. We have worked to create a system that meets the needs of every student. The vision is allowing students to engage and have responsibility for their own learning. The way we use personalized learning plans, students get a choice of what kind of topic they want to master. They get to start driving some of their learning and the teacher facilitates that.

What are the challenges being addressed by practitioners in this system? Our biggest mission is tackling the creation of systems so that individualized learning can happen. It’s systematic reform. The challenge is that reform itself is challenging, because of all those moving parts, it means change, and change is all a process for people to go through. To go through a change from a hundreds of years old model, to delivering personalized learning to each student, is not a minor challenge.

Videos of the RISC System.
MORE of the Interview on the personalized learning transformation and scale path, evidence and policy barriers.

While much of the national education attention has been focused on Race to the Top (RttT), a growing movement is focused on the race to redesign our education system before it becomes too outdated to meet our students’ and nation’s needs in today’s digital society and knowledge economy. The reforms in RttT are necessary, but most would agree are not sufficient. We must educate to innovate, but just as importantly, we must innovate to educate. In response, SIIA, in collaboration with ASCD and the Council of Chief State School Officers, is convening 150 education leaders for the invitation-only “Innovate to Educate: A Symposium on [Re]Design for Personalized Learning.”

Leading foundations (e.g., Nellie Mae), associations (e.g., CCSSO) and non-profits (e.g., RISC) are challenging our long-standing notions of education, while local (e.g., Adams 50 School District, CO) and state education leaders are accepting the challenge. Recognition that our assembly-line, agrarian-calendar based model (symbolized by a classrooom of students in rows of desks) is unchanged since the industrial age a century ago and calls for anytime, anywhere, anypace personalized learning are not new. What has changed? As the new U.S. Department of Education Report “Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology” recognizes, what has changed is our ability to respond with an ever more sophisticated arsenal of research, alternative models and technologies. A number of initiatives are leading the way, but as is often the case in education, they are too often isolated and not at scale.

The SIIA-ASCD-CCSSO Symposium will bring together SIIA members with national, state and local education leaders. They will develop a common vision, share models and practices, identify key policy and systems change enablers, and spec the technology, curriculum and human resources needed to power this student-centered customized learning system. Perhaps more importantly, they will continue building a community of practice needed to further develop the vision, models and tools and an action network to drive the change of policy and practice.

by Scott Bain
SIIA Litigation Counsel

With approximately one month left in the current Supreme Court term, it is likely that the highly anticipated decision in Bilski v. Kappos (formerly Bilski v. Doll) will be issued soon.  This may occur as soon as Monday June 7, when the next round of opinions is scheduled to be released, and almost certainly will occur by the end of the month, when the Court recesses for the summer.

The decision may be one of the most important intellectual property law opinions in years, and could have far reaching ramifications for the software, IT, and financial services industries among others.  Indeed, more than forty companies and organizations filed amicus briefs to advance their respective positions – including a brief I filed on behalf of SIIA and the software industry.  At issue in the case is perhaps the most fundamental of questions in IP law:  what things and activities are eligible to be patented?

The SIIA’s brief argued that software should remain eligible for patent protection, as it has for the past several decades.  The industry has grown, thrived, and matured during that time, and patent protection and eligibility has played a role in that success.  While problems with the patent system remain, those problems relate to other aspects of the law, and/or its application, such as weeding out purported inventions that are obvious in light of the prior art.  Problems also exist in the examination system itself, including the fact that the Patent & Trademark Office is widely believed to be underfunded, resulting in long delays in examination, and limited time and expertise that can be spent on any single application.  An ongoing concern of the patent law community is that Congress annually diverts a substantial portion of PTO user fees for unrelated purposes.  Patent Reform debate and proposed legislation have occupied Congress for the past several years.

Bilski’s invention is a “business method,” claimed as a series of steps to “hedge options and risk in commodities trading,” and does not expressly require software or any machine. The U.S. Patent Office rejected the application, and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the Office’s rejection.  In attempting to define the boundary between patentable and non-patentable subject matter, the appeals court ruled that a process or method must (1) be tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) transform an article into a different state or thing, in order to be patentable.

The Supreme Court seems likely to eschew the bright-line rule imposed by the Federal Circuit, and perhaps return to a more general inquiry as described in its 1981 opinion Diamond v. Diehr.  In that and prior opinions, the Court held that an invention purporting to claim laws of nature, physical phenomena, or abstract ideas was not eligible for patent protection.  That test had proved difficult to implement in practice, leading to the Federal Circuit’s attempt to create a more bright-line rule.  However, a similar theme has played out recently in other patent cases working their way up to the Supreme Court.  In both eBay v. MercExchange (injunctions) and KSR v. Teleflex (obviousness), the Supreme Court rejected bright-line tests developed by the Federal Circuit and instead reiterated more fundamental holdings of its own prior cases.

Whatever test is employed by the Court, it would be surprising if Bilski’s purported invention were deemed patentable subject matter.  The Court may simply deem Bilski’s claims to be too abstract.   But whatever the case may be, thousands of patent owners, licensees, and would-be patent applicants await the Court’s decision.  A broad holding that strikes down Bilski’s application might embolden challenges to other “business method” patents, such as declaratory actions as to existing patents.  Depending on the scope of the holding, software patents could be affected.  On the flip side, if Bilski’s invention is deemed eligible for patenting, one can expect a massive flood of new applications to the patent office.  It would be interesting, to say the least, to see how an already backlogged PTO would handle such a challenge.

Taking full advantage of all of SIIA’s offerings, including those in other SIIA divisions, is a great way to maximize your membership benefits. The Content Division recently held a Brown Bag Lunch event, “Beyond eBooks: eReaders and Information Content Opportunities.” And although the session was not geared towards the education market, there was education industry representation (Kaplan) and discussion on topics that were industry-agnostic.

The link to view the recorded session is now live: http://bit.ly/SIIA_Beyond_eBooks

A main theme was a caution about being too focused on shiny new devices. Focus on your customers. All content providers want to deliver content how and where customers want it. But be careful about generalizations, even within the same market. Folks at Wolters Kluwer STM businesses, for example, discovered that Doctors access content VERY differently than Nurses do. (Doctors = mobile / Nurses = Desktop). Kaplan discovered that students actually like PAPER. Unlike the web where students are a click away from a “garden of temptations,” paper is free of distractions. Spending some time delving deeply into your customer’s habits and needs (Kaplan has several pilots going at once) will prevent development dollars from going into the wrong functionality.

Another recommendation was to be “nimble”. Easier said than done in a world of competing and complex approaches to content delivery. Though bets were on Open Source winning the battle, single standard has a lot to offer. For Educational Publishers, converting legacy content isn’t easy, or cheap. Especially if the same content has to be converted multiple times for different formats. (Hence the allure of standards!). But standards issues aside, certain educational content, unlike text-only content, has elements, like complex graphics or tables, that are not well suited for eReaders or Mobile devices. And educational concepts can’t always be disaggregated into neat $9.99 chunks of information. Developing new content that fully leverages interactive capabilities – let’s not even get into geospatial – has a host of training issues for those well-respected authors.. That stuff can’t just be slapped on at the end of a development process.

All that being said, the world is marching forward. FT and Foursquare announced a deal that will be interesting to watch. HTML5 is replacing flash. Zinio, an eBook and digital magazine platform, was ranked as a number 4 App. But with all the shiny new things swirling around, keep focused on your customer. Good advice for any industry.

The Content Division holds periodic Brown Bag Lunch sessions that are run from 11:30am – 1:30pm Eastern and can be attended virtually or in-person at the McGraw-Hill offices in New York City. A current list of upcoming events http://bit.ly/SIIA_Events for all SIIA Divisions is always available.

Written by Paula Maylahn for SIIA.