CALIopolis

The good folks at Creative Commons have put together a Podcasting Legal Guide that is comprehensive and thorough as seen by these non-lawyerly eyes. I thought this quote from Larry Lessig's forward was particularly apt...

"...This Guide is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to figure out how best to follow the law. It is also an outstanding recommendation for the non-profit I run, Creative Commons, for as you will see as you work through the insanity that copyright law has become, Creative Commons is a simple alternative to this complex mess..."

My emphasis.

Reading through guide does give one a sense of looking for the white rabbit or more appropriately, the Mad Hatter. Lots to study here.

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Update: Just realized that one of the authors of the Podcasting Legal Guide has also participated in HigherEdBlogCon with two Quicktime movies that you can watch. The presentation is titled Legal Issues in Podcasting the Traditional Classroom.

Here is a slightly easier way to find podcasts from the 2006 AALS Annual Meeting held in January of this year. I took the lists from all four days, combined them and stripped off any sessions that were not podcast and stripped out the session descriptions. Only the sesctions, titles and speakers (and of course links to the podcast) are included. Using your browser's find function (Ctrl-F), you can find a podcast for the section or speaker that you want.

The text was too big to fit into a blog post, so it can be found here on the CALI website.

As I have mentioned before, I listen to 10-20 podcasts a week and I am going to make it a point to blog about the best that I come across. These types of posts will be rather infrequent.

The first podcast is Stephen Downes giving a talk in Tennessee. He is a Senior Researcher at Canada's National Research Council. In this talk, Stephen goes way beyond the curve to project the end of education as we know it and I found his arguments quite compelling. Stephen is one of our great thinkers in this space and his talks are complex, home-spun and accessible at the same time.

The second podcast is from Mark Prensky giving a talk in Shropshire, England about gaming and its use in education. He ranges widely, but makes insightful points about how gaming has rich possibilities for integration into formal and informal educational spaces.

Give them a listen and let me know what you think.

From page 120-121 of Benkler's Wealth of Networks ...

"... Goods, services, and resources that, in the industrial stage of the information economy required large-scale, concentrated capital investment to provision, are now subject to a changing technological environment that can make sharing a better way of achieving the same results than can states, markets, or their hybrid, regulated industries..."

emphasis mine.

This is one of the most succint expositions of the open source/open access movement that I have ever read. Besides the compelling point that he is making - that sharing can be be better because technology has reduce the transaction costs - there are other benefits as wel.

Good production that is ensconced in market-based firms is opaque. That is, the inputs go in, the outputs come out and the process is often hidden from view. As a result, the input providers cannot know what actions they could take to create a better output or make the process more efficient. This is exactly the point that John Seely Brown makes in a podcast that I recently listened to (link here).

Brown gives examples from the auto industry where Toyota has a close and reciprocal relationship with its suppliers where everyone involved in the production of the automobile can contribute ideas and improvements to the entire supply chain and assembly process. In contrast, Detroit manufacturers exercise top-down command and control over the suppliers and do not encourage transparency or cooperative input.

The sharing model encourages people to not just contribute what is requested or needed, but to examine the entire enterprise and suggest or offer ideas and resources that change the method of production to make it better or more efficient. This is especially valuable for knowledge products (and what isn't a knowledge product these days?) where the no single participant or even organization knows everything and everyone can learn from the experiences of others to the benefit of all.

Applying this to legal education (or education in general), faculty could share their home-grown course materials instead of using the commercial textbook publishers in a cooperative environment that would invite input frmo the adopters of the textbook. Because the good is digital (at least until it gets printed), it could be incrementally improved, updated more regularly than a commercial publisher could afford and the teacher's manual would be distributed and granularized meta-data that travels along with the content itself.

The meta-data would take the form of advice, bias, preference and approach that the author took in the creation of the course material. (i.e. "I am teaching this from the law and economics angle", or "I use tenets of feminist jurisprudence as my teaching approach in these materials...", etc.

Since digital storage is inexpensive, all instances of course materials from many instructors could be made available so that the user could choose from a a wider array of materials. The transparency in the sharing model makes it easier for new entrants (new teachers and instructors teaching a course for the first time) to enter the community and come up to speed faster.

When I got my undergraduate degree in computer science back in 1980's, I studied operating systems - but only as flow charts, block diagrams and theoretical constructs in a book. We did not have any operating system source code available to us. Today's CS students study (and contribute to) the inner workings of Linux or BSD. The transparency side-effect of commons sharing makes for great educational opportunities that were previously locked up in market-based commercial products.

Along with Dave Hambourger of Winston & Strawn, I gave a presentation at the 2006 ABA Techshow this morning. As promised this post contains the links to the Powerpoint slides and an MP3 recordings of the talk.

Slides - JohnMayerABATechShow3.ppt

MP3 (61 minutes/11 MB) - ABATechSHow.mp3

The talk was called Communications, Convergence and the Virtual Firm, but mostly we talked about blogs, wikis, RSS, extranets and podcasts and how they are changing (or can change) the practice of law.

This was during the last track of Techshow, but the attendance was still pretty strong - 40-50 folks by my count.

Hopefully the good folks at the ABA will post podcasts for all of the sessions in the future.

I listen to a lot of podcasts - 10 to 20 per week while I am walking my dog or driving to/from work. Mostly these are presentations given at conferences or talks/brown bag seminars at schools by scholars and the amount of knowledge available in these fora is fantastic.

In the past week, I listened to three mind-expanding talks about the future that really made my head spin with ideas and information.

The first is Peter Cochrane giving the keynote at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony conference given on January of 2006. Peter really brings it all together about RFID, telephones, telepresence and the use of sensor networks and telecommunications. I felt myself getting smarter listening to this.

The second is Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley speaking at the Web 2.0 conference in 2005 and she provides a succinct and rapid overview of the adoption of all kinds of technologies around the world including WiFi, broadband and mobile phones. This podcast is extremely dense and you will benefit from multiple listens.

The third podcast is a talk by John Smart called How to be Tech Futurist and is ostensibly about a new area of education on future planning. He starts out a little slow, but about 10 minutes in, he starts dropping amazing asides and insights about the future of computing, oil, complexity theory, physics and nanotechnology that I had never heard so well expressed. It's a fast, breath-taking and ultimately optimistic podcast.

If you are trying to make sense out of the chaos in the tech marketplace, these three podcasts will expand your thinking and give you perspectives that are difficult to find without extensive research.

Update: It is exam time and that means the CALI servers are running white-hot. We passed 600,000 lesson runs a few hours ago - only 2 1/2 weeks since I posted that we had passed 500,000. Good Luck to all on your finals!

It is often difficult to measure the quality of the work you do and this is especially difficult if you are in the education business. A byproduct of having all of our materials on a website, we can measure their numbers and sometimes how often they are used or accessed.

To perhaps quote Josef Stalin...

"Quantity has a quality all its own"

In the last couple of weeks, we passed two milestones that are worth reporting. CALI lessons were run over 6500,000 times this school year (as measured since 7/31/2005) and there are over 1,000 podcasts posted on Classcaster (including those from the 2006 AALS Annual Meeting), but the great majority coming from law faculty podcasting their classes in the Legal Education Podcasting Project.

Almost 60,000 law students are registered at the CALI website which is slowly creeping up to the 50% mark of all law students in the United States.

The comments we receive from students about the lessons and the feedback we got from the Mid-Semester survey of law students in the podcasted classes indicates that our work is appreciated, and I promise you, ... we are just getting started!

There are many new projects in the works that I will be blogging about here. As always, if you have ideas, suggestions, complaints or comments, feel free to drop me an email at jmayer@cali.org. We are always looking for ways to better serve our member law schools and law students.

From page 55 of Professor Yochai Benkler's book Wealth of Networks ...

"...A billion people in advanced economies may have between two billion and six billion spare hours among them, every day..."

(a) There are about 10,000 law faculty employed in US law schools today.

(b) There are 30 subject areas in the CALI Lesson Library which more or less represent the topics of most of the classes taught in law schools.

(c) Most law school classes are 3 credits or 3 hours a week for 15 weeks or 45 hours of classtime.

Multiple b x c = 13,500 hours of classtime.

Divide by a = 13,500/10,000 = 1.35 hours/faculty.

Now, let's say it takes 10 hours to assemble a really excellent collection of materials for that 1.35 hours of classtime, and let's say every faculty member did that and shared it with everyone else. 10 hours or a little more than a single day and all class materials are covered.

Now, let's get more realisitc.

Let's say 500 law faculty did this (5% of the total). They would have to create 20 times more materials or 20 x 1.35 = 27 hours of classtime each to cover everything which would take 270 hours from each of this mighty 500 or about 270/50=5 1/2 hours a week for a year.

5 1/2 hours a week for a year from 5% of all law faculty to create teaching materials for 30 different subject areas covering almost all of legal education.

There IS wealth in networks!

From page 56 of Wealth of Networks ...

"... The economics of production in a digital environment should lead us to expect an increase in the relative salience of nonmarket production models in the overall mix of our information production system, and it is efficient for this to happen - more information will be produced, and much of it will be available for its users at its marginal cost..."

Now, how do we coordinate this?

This is my third post on my reading of Professor Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks.

Quote from page 31...

"...Technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice..."

I am enamored of Benkler's choice of the word "feasibility". It implies what is possible, not what is certain and this is certainly a central theme of the book. Just because the web allows for new ways to do things - different approaches to education, example, does not mean that they are going to happen. At CALI, we are constantly exploring the feasible as new ideas and technologies become available or more widely available.

While working for Chicago-Kent in the early '90s, we developed electronic casebooks using Folio Views, but sustaining that project was not feasible because it required laborious conversion from the paper book and difficult-to-obtain permission from the print casebook publishers. We could only experiment with electronic casebooks if every student purchased the paper work. We could not change, update, mix or add to the electronic version. We could not share our products with other law schools either. The net doesn't solve the permission problem, but if that could be dealt with, the adding, updating, mixing and sharing problems are made feasible by the web.

... and further on page 32..

"... we can harness many more of the diverse paths and mechanisms for cultural transmission that were muted by the economies of scale that led to the rise of the concentrated, controlled form of mass media, whether commercial or state-run... "

Once you have a mechnism in place for adding, updating, mixing and sharing, new paths of production and new products become possible. The casebook in not inviolate. It is a collection of edited and commented material. It is almost entirely text and a good portion of it is public domain.

Two snippets from Wealth of Networks ...

"...the networked information environment offers us a more attractive cultural production system in two distinct ways: (1) it makes culture more transparent, and (2) it makes culture more malleable..."

and,

"... culture is becoming more democratic: self-reflective and participatory..."

Both are from page 15.

My interests lie in how the Internet can legal literacy and legal education. Substitute "legal education" for "culture" in the previous two snippets and we have...

"...the networked information environment offers us a more attractive legal education production system in two distinct ways: (1) it makes legal education more transparent, and (2) it makes legal education more malleable..."

and,

"... legal education is becoming more democratic: self-reflective and participatory..."

This syncs perfectly with work that I have been working on for many years. How to bring to the surface what faculty do when they teach and how to get them to share best practices or even all practices and let the best float to the top.

One of the aspects of podcasting that we want to explore with the Legal Education Podcasting Project is the improvement of the lecture. We already have anecdotal evidence of this from faculty who have told us that they have listened to their own podcasts and used this to improve on the delivery of their classroom lectures.

It is not a far stretch to imagine that faculty can listen to each other's lectures and learn from them - especially if they are teaching the same class.

This thinking was not accidental. We have explicitly designed the CALI Fellowships so that the participants review each other's draft lessons and contribute ideas and suggestions as to how best teach a topic or explain a concept. On a related note, CALI Fellows have told us that the process of writing CALI lessons and interacting with the other Fellows improved their teaching. It made them more reflective of how they are communicating to students. Professor Stephen Bradford gave a talk about this at the 2004 CALI Conference in Seattle. His Powerpoint Slides for the talk are illuminating and hilarious.

What are the obstacles to creating a community of law faculty that share their teaching techniques in a sufficiently granular way that the participants benefit from the knowledge and experience of the group?

One obstacle is a shared vocabulary about teaching specific concepts, but we overcame that by designing the CALI Topic Grids by culling the language from faculty syllabi and chapter/section titles in casebooks. In Web 2.0 speak, we created our own folksonomy of tag phrases that roughly correspond to one hour of teaching. That's how they are listed in a syllabus and that's (roughly) how long it takes for a student to do a CALI lesson covering that topic.

What we have not done is create Topic Grids for all legal subject areas and we have not opened them up for the larger law faculty population to comment, amend, suggest or change.

Doing this might be a very good idea, and a way to start would be to create a sort of syllabus commons for legal education so that we can run a concordance to see what the most popular terms of art are for teaching any particular hour of class.

Will a critical mass of faculty participate?

Professor Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School has a new book out that promises to be stimulating and revelatory. I have ordered my copy from Amazon and have also started to read the free PDF version he provides under Creative Commons license from his website.

I expect this to expand on thinking that was first excellently illustrated in Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Amazon link, Free Online Link), Eric Von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation (Amazon, Free Online) and Steven Weber's The Success of Open Source.

The theme of the 2005 Conference for Law School Computing was Open Source, Open Law, Open Education, which was intended to explore the expansion of the open source ideals to education and especially legal education.

The 2006 CALI Conference theme is Rip, Mix, Learn extends these ideas to what faculty and students actually do when they create education environments.

Professor Benkler has setup a wiki where readers can interact with him and each other as they react to his ideas.

I will be posting more as I read.

I was reading an interesting article over at the TeleRead blog titled "ThoutReader Meets Scholarly Book: An Experiment and Review" and one particular passage really caught my eye.

"...Until hardware comes out that makes me feel like I’m reading a book instead of cruising the web, the decrease in concentration caused by my web-ADD will constrain me to p-books; when I’m reading something serious, I want to get away from all the distractions of the Internet, not have them at my fingertips...."

Emphasis mine.

This is the aspect of ebooks that makes devices like the Sony Reader more interesting and compelling. It's similar to a description I once read about watching movies on a computer. When you are using your computer, you are leaning forward - ready to interact. When you are watching a movie on your television, you are leaning backward, expecting not to interact. These postures are indicative of the context and so the interface or device must take them into account.

Reading books on your computer when you are leaning forward invites interaction, linking and distraction. Why do you think they call it a "browser" and not a "reader".

Oddly enough, this was one reason why we discarded the idea of putting CALI lessons into a DVD format. The context was all wrong. Students expect to interact with CALI lessons - leaning forward, and CALI lessons on the television invite the user to lean backward - be passive. (I should note that it was suggested that CALI lessons on the television would make an interesting drinking game for law students on Friday nights like Trivial Pursuit DVD).

It's not as simple as this, however.

When you are reading a novel or a long passage, there is some passivity to this. When you are interacting, there is some interactivity to this. Duh. But reading a textbook or studying an educational subject can have elements of both. Sometimes you are absorbing the information, sometimes you want to take notes, make links, look something up, etc. Some people are constantly in this mode with everything they read, but I would suggest that most people are in this mode more often when they are reading textbooks. Learning is a series of interspersed periods of absorb and integrate, passive and active, learning backward and leaning forward.

When I am browsing the web or reviewing new articles in my news reader, I am in a semi-between state of passive and active (pactive?), and when I find something where I want to drill down, I lean forward and become active. If it is a long-ish article, I lean back and become passive.

I could lay this on the device manufacturers and say that they must design their ebook readers to be capable in either situation so that I can transition easily between active, pactive and passive. The television is pretty passive, with a small amount of active via the remote. The laptop is pretty active and too heavy to lean back on. The new lighter, smaller, ebook readers that are coming out in the next few weeks might hit that sweet spot that is pactive.

We'll see.