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Microsoft Seeks 1-Click(er) Patent
theodp writes "Assuming things go patent reformer Microsoft's way, answering multiple choice, true/false, or yes/no questions in a classroom could soon constitute patent infringement. Microsoft's just-published patent application for its Adaptive Clicker Technique describes how 'multiple different types of clickers' can be used by students to answer questions posed by teachers. The interaction provided by its 'invention', explains Microsoft, 'increases attention and enhances learning.' Microsoft's Interactive Classroom Add-In for Office (video) provides polling features that allow students to 'answer and respond through their individual OneNote notebooks, hand-held clickers, or computers, and the results display in the [PowerPoint] presentation.' So, did Bill Gates mention to Oprah that the education revolution will be patented?"
Claim 1: A computer-implemented process for allowing different types of clicker devices to be used in a personal response system, comprising:
receiving inputs from more than one type of clicker device;
formatting the inputs from the more than one type of clicker device with at least one clicker adapter for the type of clicker device to adapt the inputs from the more than one type of clicker device to a common single polling controller;
processing the adapted inputs from the clicker adapters with the polling controller to interface the adapted inputs with a personal response system software application to allow user polling data to be obtained,
wherein the receiving, formatting and processing are performed by at least one processor.
goodness. i'm teaching a large lecture class and we already do this. i think it's been going on, on a large scale, for 5-10 years. this doesn't matter? seriously?
My guess is that theodp has grossly over simplified what the patent is really about and the summary is nothing but a troll. Welcome to Slashdot.
This is new functionality. The claim to fame here is using multiple input devices, not just one. If it were just one, I'm sure iClicker would already have a patent on it. Does anyone have examples of an application where students can answer through iClickers, OneNote, etc. at the same time to answer a prompt thrown by a professor in an auditorium?
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
In Minnesota an in classroom system called DISCOURSE had this in the early 90's -- should be an easy patent to knock down.
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
https://www.microsoft.com/multipoint/mouse-sdk/
"Windows MultiPoint Mouse Software Development Kit (SDK) gives education publishers the ability to build interactive applications that allow up to 25 students, each with their own mouse, to simultaneously engage on a single PC. "
Its a freely downloadable SDK. Should we be worried?
OK, so how does this patent differ from what America's Funniest Home Videos did back in the 80s? Each audience member had a clicker (so there was more than one) and made a simple selection based on 3 choices. The information was aggregated and a prize was given. I really don't see why anyone would allow MS's patent on this.
Education, despite looking like a big institution, is affected just as hard as small companies and individuals.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Of couse as Gates is able to keep his money, he is able to direct it towards personal projects. One seems to be destroying the profession of teaching and replacing it with an elite corps of of recently post-adolescents that are paid in forgiveness of student loans rather than a professional rate of pay. This of course will minimize taxes, and consequently minimize the chances that we will have a strict inheritance tax. Gates, of course has no concern that urban public education will be decimated as he, and the foreseeable generations of his offspring, will never have to be educated in such an environment.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Compared to Keynote, PowerPoint looks like something that has not been updated since 1995.
Since I can't effect any change on the systems in place I'm more than happy the live my life refusing to believe in any property that I can't kick. So no IP for me ( or them in my world ) As and when I do something that doesn't fit with the 'real world' rules they can come and lock me up for as long as they feel it will suit the public good. In the mean time, how the hell do you opt out of any microsoft (or mac or US government or IP or think of the children/terrorist) stories. Personal preferences seem broken. I want a keyword filter or something.
I thought Apple was the evil one this day and age and Microsoft was the good boy. ^^
Then the professor didnt ever use it. No refunds, YAY!
Patent attempt is a waste of money, but the "zeal" and "company loyalty" demonstrated by wasting time and money while increasing hatred for Microsoft will undoubtedly get someone a nice promotion. This is the way corporations work ... and the military, educational establishments, and governments.
More Evil from Bill Gates, Microsux and Fiends.
Software patents should be banished.
Patents on life should be banished.
Virtually all patents should be banished.
Any granted patents and copyrights should expire in the original time set out.
So they want to patent a button/switch in effect. Oh man: an invention that registers when someone pushes it. Or am i seeing this wrong?
Maybe if they patent "clickers using student-generated response" I could avoid taking tests all together.
There was a game show in the 70's where the contestants, rather than pushing a button on the lectern to indicate a desire to answer a question, pushed a button on a hand-held device. I don't recall the name of the show, and I don't even remember whether the hand-held device was "electronic" (i.e. SPST switch). But the home version (the board game) came with metal mechanical clickers -- a metal half-shell with a metal reed extending over the shell. Pushing down on the reed made a sound similar to X-Wing laser blasts (which were created by tapping telephone pole guy wires).
It is called the Slashdot Poll. Some people use computers with Linux, some Windows, some OS X, and others use "phones" running iOS or Android. Some use mouse, some use trackballs, some use touchscreens, etc.. In some cases Opera is used, in others Firefox, Chrome, or even IE in a pinch. It doesn't matter if students use it in an auditorium with professors, or geeks use it to waste time, for the same reason that patenting a car and qualifying the patent as "used by professors to dodge oncoming traffic" is meaningless.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
For those of you who are too lazy to click on the link for the abstract:
An adaptive clicker technique is described that provides a standardized polling control and a registration system to support mixed types of clickers and integrate the polling data. One embodiment of the adaptive clicker technique operates as follows. User inputs from more than one type of clicker device (e.g., personal interactive response system device) are received. The inputs from the more than one type of clicker device are formatted with a clicker adapter for each type of clicker to adapt user inputs to a common polling controller. The adapted inputs are then processed with the common polling controller to interface the adapted inputs with a personal response system software application to allow user polling data to be collected and assessed.
So no, there is no prior art as far as I can tell. This is like a middle-man approach so that a variety of inputs can be used in any setting such as a classroom. I presume this means a student could respond to a question via text message, laptop running One Note, a tablet running Chrome, an iPad app, or a generic clicker device hooked up to who-knows-what, and all the data is aggregated together.
The advantage being twofold: the administrator (teacher) doesn't have to somehow write code for 10 different inputs, and the students don't have to standardize on one input device.
Why patent it? Because Microsoft has to. If they don't, then someone else will and they could waste time and money in courts over it. That's why Microsoft and others are pushing for patent reform.
-David
I haven't been in a classroom for a while, but when I took tests, I don't remember using a clicker, a tablet or a laptop, and I don't remember it updating any PowerPoint presentations.
I saw this idea in Physics classes at K-state. It uses any device which has a web browser (smart phone, pda, laptop, etc). I think it was called In-class or something like that. It was very bare bones and basic, but also very useful for what they wanted. The research seems to show an improvement in the students that use it. It even had some functionality not mentioned in this patent such as allowing for groups of students to pool their answers and then reevaluate based on what their group had answered.
This is clearly not patentable.
I have been taking machine graded (optical) multiple choice tests since the 60's, there must be hundreds of clear cases of prior art. For example the "radio buttons" that have existed since windows 1.0. Also remote control "clickers" have also been around for almost that long. Even though this is "computer" related does not make it patentable since that extension of an existing process should be considered "obvious" by everyone.
There is firm prior art.
Jeopardy!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
In Disney world of all places. From http://allears.net/tp/ep/ccore.htm
Now, one thing that (at the time) was VERY cool was the Epcot Poll at the Electronic Forum that opened on December 23, 1982. Guests entered the 175-seat Future Choice theater and watched short films about current events. After the watching the clips, viewers could take part in a poll and vote by pressing one of 5 buttons marked A through E on their seat armrests. The cool thing was that the results were instantly tabulated. Topics ranged from people's thoughts about nuclear energy, to our most important freedoms, etc.
If God wanted Microsoft to have 1-click patent, why he let them use mouse with more than one button?
We need a 'goodluckwiththat' tag on this article!
(Calm down, this is what I refer to) :-D :-D :-D
Automated and multiple choice "tests" are bane and cancer of education process. If schools will be prevented from using them, students would have to actually solve problems, and teachers will have to ask meaningful questions instead of inventing plausible but wrong answers to trick students into revealing how little they understand.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Generally these sorts of "clicker" activities are not designed for testing (though of course they could be used for that purpose). Rather they are an attempt to engage to audience in some participatory activities that from an educational standpoint are hoping to encourage the participant to be in a more "active learning" mode rather than the "passive learning" mode that is common in a lecture situation.
Generally speaking, humans learn more efficiently when they actively participate in activities that incorporate newly desired knowledge into their existing frameworks. Thus the popularity among educators of "project based learning", "workshop" models of instruction and other hands-on types of programs. These types of programs however tend to scale linearly - twice as many students require twice as many instructors and other resources. A lecture format however scales fairly nicely - adding more students is as easy as adding more seats - instructor costs are constant since lecturing to 5 students is "no different" than lecturing to 5 thousand (for some values of "no different").
People who do learn a lot in a lecture do seem to be more actively involved in the lecture compared to those who learn less. They think about what is being discussed, they ask questions of the instructor, or their classmates, or just themselves about the material. They anticipate the future direction of the lecture and consider the implications of the material. All of these activities seem to correlate with increased retention and understanding. Thus the desire among instructors to assist more students in a lecture class to get into and remain in this more active mental mode. Specifically including these types of internal mental processes in the actual lecture material is one way ("With this new idea we just discussed, you might think that things would work like blah, but actually they work like bleck"). What seems to be even more effective is to encourage introspection ("What do you think will happen in this situation? Why?") and encourage collaboration ("What do the people around you think? Why?") It is difficult however to get students in a large group to all participate in these activities, so getting them to have some personal emotional investment in the outcome of the activities can be used as well ("Raise your hand if you think blah. How about bleck?")
Using a clicker type of device is thought to be even more effective to encourage student participation and "buy-in" compared to raising hands or voting ABC cards. Clickers can allow for completely anonymous reporting, or alternatively individual tracking of individual responses. It can allow presentation in graphical or numerical format in real-time of the student responses which might have an impact on students learning (hopefully positive, possibly negative). They certainly can give people doing research on learning and teaching some insight into how the students respond to different things.
Since at least the 1990s, Mazur (among others) has been a strong proponent of this in physics education: http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/research/detailspage.php?ed=1&rowid=8
As an aside, there does seem to be some research indicating that not all multiple-guess exams are crap from the point of view of evaluating student ability in comparison to evaluating them based on "work it out" problems. See for example the "previous projects" links at the UIUC Physics Education Research page: http://research.physics.illinois.edu/per/Research.html
Of course there is also the question of what we want our graduates of various programs to be able to do well. In most cases we do not expect our graduates to be answering exam questions in their final career activities, so there are legitimate questions about the value of almost any type of exam format.
Let's see, so if I use an IR mouse, my friend uses a bluetooth driven mouse, and another friend uses the touch screen on his mobile device. One person is networked in via Cat5, etc. All to select "B" as the answer to a question, and the web server collects the data and syncs it up to produce a right/wrong poll for the teacher.
Exactly what part of the mouse, the bluetooth, the touch screen, or the network, the web server, or the education application software (which can be copyrighted but not patented) does Microsoft claim to have invented? Or even a business model? (sorry, Blackboard et. al have something along those lines first, for all the good it will do them)....
So, if the biggest bully in the neighborhood tells you that he means you no harm, do you silently give in and give him the keys to not only your house, your car, but also to your kid's online educational future?
I think not.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Claim 1: A computer-implemented process for allowing different types of clicker devices to be used in a personal response system, comprising:
receiving inputs from more than one type of clicker device;
This is a blatant attempt to corner the voting machine business.
In that a computer is a mechanism then they are attempting to patent voting machines.... even the old mechanical ones where you pulled levers. The levers clicked...
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.