CALIopolis

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an article called "How Big is the Biggest Library:" that was riffing off of the Kevin Kelly NYTimes article "Scan This Book". In it, I estimated that the total size of all data was about 39 petabytes which came close to Kelly's estimate of 50 petabytes.

From a recent post at BarronsOnline...

"...Responding to a question about reports that Google plans to offer a hosted data storage service for consumers, Gates acknowledged that Microsoft is planning to offer “petabytes in the sky” to store data...."

Emphasis mine.

What an extraordinary statement. We have two mega-companies vying for storing all of our personal and business data.

Of course, the reason is that ability to attract page views to turn into targeted ads or attract attention or some other monetization of our own data back at us.

Fair enough, I think.

Back in the '90's we used to say that Content is King in order to attract attention to your website. Now it seems to be true all over again, but it's not just any content it's ALL content. This is surely the longest of the long tails and it is enabled by cheap disk space.

Maybe there are diamonds in those petabytes ...

Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
With tangerine trees and petabytes in the skies... (actual lyrics here)

Apologies to John L.

This is the second in a series of podcast interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project. This interview was conducted on Friday, May 26. 2006 with Professor Willliam Gregory from Georgia State University School of Law.

Professor Gregory recorded the classroom for his students (including extensive presentations by his students) while teaching Securities Regulations. You can listen to his podcasts here.

This podcast is 26 minutes long.

Listen or download - WilliamGregory.mp3

I recently finished reading Michael Madison's pre-print article Legal Scholarship and the Economy of Prestige and it was very enlightening, but I had the thought that I have never seen a ranking of law faculty whereas I have seen law school rankings and read discussions, papers and diatribes in the hundreds.

In all of the conversations I have had with faculty about prestige and identifying prestigiious faculty, there is a certain amount of "everybody knows" and not much empirical fact, so I wondered what sample survey questions would look like to get at how to measure individual faculty prestige.

The first step, though, was to look up the word 'prestige' and I learned that it has a French root for the word illusion. How ironic!

I am not sure how truly valuable the results of such a survey would be and I would rather not step into the tar pit of law school rankings AND have half the law faculty population screaming for my head, but sometimes us amateur ethnologists have to go where others fear to tread.

To find out who is prestigious and how much, we could survey law faculty and ask them who they think is prestigious. This is a little like picking the top ten movies of the year, so maybe that's the way to do this...

Who do YOU think are the top ten most prestigious living law faculty?

Perhaps it would be informative to also ask why.

This survey might yield a somewhat predictable collection of names that would doubltless have a relationship to the amount of publicity that some faculty get via their books, government service, political leanings, blogs, etc. This would especially be true as survey respondents get to the second half of the list. I tried to mentally create a similar list for law librarians (of whom many I know) or technology leaders (of whom I read about every day) and it gets darn hard when you get to 7, 8, 9 and 10.

A better survey might be to break this down by legal subject area.

Who do YOU think are the top three most prestigious living law faculty in <subject area>?

This seems pretty straightforward and in fact, I can parse this a little bit because the number of ways to be prestigious in a particular legal subject area is limited.

• Writes the best articles and gets them published in the most prestigious law journals (yes, I realize that this is a little circular here, but go read Madison's article)
• Authored a popular casebook on the topic
• Wrote a treatise on the topic
• Co-authored the law on the subject (thinking here of legislative drafting and participation in the Uniform Code process)
• Has authored well-received books (think Lessig here)
• Personal knowledge
• and lately, perhaps, has a popular or well-regarded (much visited) blog on the subject (think LawProfessorBlogs here)

So the survey question might look like this instead...

Who do YOU think are the top ten most prestigious living law faculty due to<fill in the blank here like journal articles, casebook authorship, blog, government service, etc. etc. ?

There are other prestigious things like being a judge or running for office, but I have to discount these because they are prestige economics in a different economy and I want to stay focused on the legal education academy.

There is also a second order prestige for some of the items mentioned above. Law faculty get prestige by being at the top tier schools vs. lower-tiered law schools. Casebook publishers have some kind of prestige ranking I am sure, but in saying that I realize that I really don't know more than that other than how long they have been publishing, so I guess the number of years of being in business has a prestige of sorts. This obviously explains the lack of creditbility that many startups have or new players in a market - will they last?

Where you get your articles published affects their prestige more than what the article is about (at least at first). High prestige law journals are more widely read and so there is a simple prestige of exposure of your ideas.

The whole "Is Blogging = Scholarship" question seems to me to be an attempt to create new micro-prestige beta products where people are trying to say something interesting, citable, valuable, noticable and prestigious. You can't say something prestigious. Prestige comes from others saying that what you said is important or interesting.

Can something be known to be prestigious before it is widely regarded as prestigious absent such signals as the school the person teaches at or the journal it is published in? I think not. It's a competitive marketplace of ideas - almost Darwinian.

Some of the above are somewhat objectively measurable. It is possible to know who has written a book or an article and to use SSRN's or other surveys to see whose articles are most-cited or downloaded. Popularity of books can be measured by survey or book sales, though accurate sales numbers are difficult to obtain for niche markets like this.

So, why would I be interested in this? I am not a law professor, but I deal with them every day and law faculty prestige comes up in all kinds of discussions about CALI, choosing authors for Fellowships, getting support for new projects, etc. I want to use prestige as a proxy for wide exposure. Prestigious faculty command more attention.

But, prestige seems very subjective and very contextual except when it is used in the grossest (or least granular) sense like when deciding to extend tenure or a promotion, picking a speaker for a conference, etc. You don't just pick the most popular, you judge that person's impact on the situation (the law school's prestige as a sum of its faculty prestige) or the audience they will attract (like for a conference).

I am very tempted to try to run this survey just to see what happens, but to provide cover, I should probably find a prestigious faculty member to get the word out.

Ironic, isn't it?

Well, maybe the French are right and prestige is just an illusion.

I have been interviewing faculty for the past couple of days who were involved in the Legal Education Podcasting Project and one of the questions that I put to each of them is ....

As technology improves to deliver even more high fidelity digital lectures - audio and video, do you think that this medium will come to replace the instructor in the classroom?

So far, no one has answered in the affirmative, but the answer was not always an unqualified 'YES'.

Most of the faculty I have interviewed abjured that there are certain portions of teaching that can be replaced with a recording and that this can free up time for more substantive discussion or interaction inside the classroom. So, one side effect of podcasting is that law faculty are manipulating the medium of teaching depending on the message. This is not a universal finding by any means, just an observational anecdote at this point, but it makes some sense.

Today, I ran across this article with this sub-title...

"...A lecturer at a West Yorkshire university has abolished traditional lectures in favour of podcasts..."

This instructor teaches biochemistry to English undergraduates, but the point is that other educational podcasters are seeing similar things. The money quote from the article is....

"...Some lecture classes have 250 students, so I question the effectiveness of a didactic lecture for an hour..".

Emphasis mine.

Currently, I am also thick in the final planning for the 2006 CALI Conference and I had recently been reading about un-conferences. Wikipedia says that un-conferences are...

"....An unconference is a term that arose in the geek community to describe a conference where the content of the meeting is driven and created by the participants rather than by a single organizer..."

The inestimable Dave Winer (inventor of blogging and RSS) gets some credit for this ... uhmmmm ... innovation.

"...Winer's unconference is a discussion leader with a topic moving a microphone amongst a large audience of 50 to 200 people...."

... which to me sounds like the classroom discussion that podcasting makes more possible. Once there is a history of widely available podcasts from a critical mass of instructors, students may have already heard all the lectures (including all the jokes) that an instructor has to give. They may come to class more prepared than any past students ever have.

NIRVANA!

Imagine having your students over-prepared for class. I may be dreaming, but bear with me on this for a moment.

This dream classroom would also be a big challenge to the instructor. The solution is the Un-Classroom where the instructor is the discussion leader and the students "teach" the class. The instructor is part Guide and part Sage since she both guides the discussion and corrects student misunderstandings and provides clarifications or injects further chaos to challenge. Perhaps more importantly, the instructor teaches the students how to evaluate information and how to think critically. Isn't this the point of legal education?

I think this is what Mark Prensky was talking about in his writing when he opined that today's teachers cannot possibly keep up with today's Digital Natives.

"...the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language...."

(Note: I have previously linked to a podcast by Marc Prensky here)

I agree (so far) with the podcasting faculty that live instructors are not in near-term danger of obsolescence. I do think that podcasting will have second-order effects that we are just beginning glimpse in this first experiment. I will be posting interviews with about a dozen faculty over the next couple of weeks from law schools all over the US who have taught all kinds of courses. It will be interesting to hear what they have to say.

Update: I re-worked the recording in Audacity to remove as much of the static that crept into the recording. The podcast link below links to the new recording.

This past spring semester, CALI conducted the Legal Education Podcasting Project where over 30 law faculty used podcasting in their courses. We conducted surveys of the students mid-semester and are in the process of conducting an end-of-semester survey as well.

We also are interviewing the faculty about their experiences and their thoughts on how podcasting affected their students and their own teaching.

This is the first of a series of interviews to be posted and it is with Professor Jennifer Martin of Western New England College of Law.

Professor Martin's class podcasts can be found here.

This podcast is 33 minutes long.

Here is the podcast link. Listen or download. JenniferMartin2.mp3

The title of this post is taken from Jeff Jarvis’ post on Buzzmachine. It’s a great article and I wanted to do my characteristic read in relation to legal education. Let’s start with a clip...

“...The problems with books are many: They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources. They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader. They try to teach readers but don’t teach authors. They tend to be too damned long because they have to be long enough to be books. As David Weinberger taught me, they limit how knowledge can be found because they have to sit on a shelf under one address; there’s only way way to get to it. They are expensive to produce. They depend on scarce shelf space. They depend on blockbuster economics. They can’t afford to serve the real mass of niches. They are subject to gatekeepers’ whims. They aren’t searchable. They aren’t linkable. They have no metadata. They carry no conversation. They are thrown out when there’s no space for them anymore...”

“...They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. ...“

This is certainly true of casebooks. They are updated every 3 to 6 years and in between are supplemented manually by conscientious instructors who obtain and photocopy additional readings. Electronic casebooks could be updated immediately and downloaded quickly. Editions would be more gradual and granular as new cases are added and commentary is updated. A change log could be maintained and instructors could subscribe to the casebook like you can subscribe to a Wikipedia page to watch if it changes.


“...They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources. ... ...They aren’t linkable. ...“

Casebooks use parts of cases and with universal access for law students to Lexis or Westlaw, it is relatively simple to find the full case online. The casebook is at the center of the course, but it is an island that is linked only manually to the online discussion (if there is one) and to other supplemental materials that could assist the student in their learning (like CALI lessons, law review articles, blog posts, etc.). An electronic casebook could link to all sorts of things including the course website, podcasts and even a directory of all course websites for all of the courses using the same book. Dialogue and study groups formation could occur between students at different schools studying from the same material.


“...They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader. They try to teach readers but don’t teach authors. ... ...They carry no conversation...." “

The relationship of importance regarding casebooks is between the student and the instructor. The author is an an invited, but silent guest in the classroom and would probably have a lot more to say if given the opportunity. Each casebook could have its own blog with comments or questions posted by anyone and filtered by the author much like an open source software project where the lead developer decides what gets into the shipping version including reasons why or why not a particular change is accepted.


“...They tend to be too damned long because they have to be long enough to be books. ...“

Most casebooks have more material than is necessary for an entire course. This is to allow them to be used in a broad range of courses depending on the instructor’s desires or time constraints. Still, the students carry around the whole thing. Electronic casebooks need only be as long as the instructor wants with no additional material (or additional material linked via the web). Curriculum reform that causes changes in the teaching material need not force the instructor to jettison the entire book. Different length and interdisciplinary courses could be assembled from several books digitally if the materials were available in a recombinant format.


“...they limit how knowledge can be found because they have to sit on a shelf under one address; there’s only way way to get to it. ...“

A lost casebook is lost. Buy another. A lost electronic casebook is never lost, get another copy from the web. Access it from any internet browser and make backup copies. Keep a copy forever on into practice. Build a library of casesbooks, cases and notes.


“...They are expensive to produce. ..“.

These are guesses. 20% goes to the bookstore. 50% pays for the paper, binding and amortizing the printing press. 20% is the publisher’s profit and the remaining 10% finds it way to the author. Electronic casebooks that are downloaded eliminates the first 70% mentions and cuts out one middleman. A collaborative open content casebook publishing enterprise cuts out the other middleman (the publisher). That leaves a lot of room for the author and also leaves room for more authors to participate.


“...They depend on scarce shelf space. They depend on blockbuster economics. ...“

This is more relevant to mass-market books, but shelf space is a problem in law school libraries.


“...They can’t afford to serve the real mass of niches. ...“

As mentioned before, new courses that cover multiple disciplines could have their own electronic casebook - assembled from parts and multiple authors and sources. Each course taught is its own niche with the course materials coming to represent a form of instructor-assembled vanity press from parts. It takes a village to each some courses.


“...They are subject to gatekeepers’ whims. ...“

Casebooks go out of print all the time. Authors retire, die or quit updating. Publishers crunch the numbers and drop the non-sellers. Electronic casebooks would never go out of print and could be supported by the fan base. Three instructors at three different law schools could share the load of updating their niche of niche of a niche course materials.


“...They aren’t searchable. ...“

Casebooks have TOCs and indices, but, well. Not only are electronic casebooks searchable - ALL electronic casebooks are searchable. Students could have access to a smorgasbord of learning opportunities. If the instructor assigned material is confusing or ill-constructed, other alternatives are a click away and searchable and findable.


“...They have no metadata ....“

Authors of casebooks often write teacher’s manuals for instructors. These are often as long and dense as the casebook itself and being physical books themselves suffer from all of the above maladies of books. This meta-data is not actually about the book, but about teaching and so in aggregate could be the basis for what is traditionally called a knowledge management system of best practices - but that’s waaaay too formal. At best, it’s an ongoing conversation between and among colleagues who teach the same subject and seek the best path for their students. Faculty do not share their best teaching practices in very many places (nor are they particularly encouraged to). The sharing of this knowledge should be a natural and light-weight bonus of an electronic casebook assembly and publishing system.


It’s time for electronic casebooks. Plain and simple.

The Program in Research in Information Technology of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation invites nominations for the 2006 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC). In support of the Program’s mission to encourage collaborative, open source software development within traditional Mellon constituencies, these awards—to be given for the first time in 2006—will recognize not-for-profit organizations that are making substantial contributions of their own resources toward the development of open source software and the fostering of collaborative communities to sustain open source development.

Call for Nominations — Research in Information Technology

Classcaster may fit in here:)

Tim O'Reilly reports on some usage statistics by programmers who have the option of purchasing PDF, paper or both versions of new books being published by his press. He reports ....

• 60% choose PDF only,
• 36% choose PDF and paper version
• 4% choose paper only

Mind you, this is after three months of their new Rough Cuts offering which provides access to new titles from O'Reilly.

So 96% at least want the PDF version of the book and the article quotes a user who gives these reasons...

• PDFs are searchable,
• PDFs are portable,
• PDFs can be obtained immediately by downloading (especially updates) and they are cheaper - at the very least due to the lack of shipping cost.

So, if electronic casebooks were available to law students, would these numbers and reasons hold?

Programming (especially learning to program in a new language) invovles a lot of looking up and some extended periods of reading from the book. There is a certain back-and-forth rhythm associated with the first 48-72 hours of learning a new programming language or system and this gradually changes to less book and more programming as time goes by.

This is not the same as reading a casebook. There are extended periods of reading and note-taking, followed by some discussion in class with classmates or in a study group. Notes get updated, some re-reading might occur and there is a last bit of note refinement in the week before the final exams. Not quite the same, but let's look at the reasons for preferring PDFs and see if they apply to law students.

• Searchable - this would certainly be useful to anyone studying a subject and wanting to find something that they had previsously read or find some phrase, term or concept that came up in class or discussion - check.
  
• Portable - portability is always a benefit. PDFs weigh a lot less than 1000 page casebooks. - check.
  
• Obtained immediately and cheaper due to no shipping cost - downloads certainly imply that there are no shipping costs - check

The question is whether the behavior of law students will be similar to programmers. Will law students prefer PDFs to the print versions?

I don't know.

Clicking around my Bloglines feeds today and the following set of articles from Slashdot were displayed...

The first is about streaming content from a home-grown media center running Linux to your cell phone. In other words, the cell phone as a delivery platform for all sorts of media.

The second is about Google releasing an Ajax framework for building net-centric applications - PC is needed, but not necessarily vital since these would all run in anything that can run a browser.

The third is about IBM supporting Open Document Format which wrenches customer lock-in of Microsoft Office users.

The juxtaposition is with the last entry with Bill Gates saying that PCs are dead yet.

Draw your own conclusions.

Kevin Kelly's New York Times Magazine article "Scan This Book" sure has stirred up a lot of comment in the blogosphere with worthy commentary at Teleread, Nick Carr (including excellent comments from Kevin Kelly himself) and a promise of future comment and the full text of the article at Sivacracy.net.

Whenever I read articles about ebooks or books in any form, I am a little dismayed at how all books are summarily lumped together as though the act of putting print to paper and binding makes the content all similar somehow. You can't talk about books like this as much as you can't talk about things with wheels being all the same or people with red hair being all the same. The idea of books needs a far more thorough unpacking than it has received.

Kelly does do a little bit of this in his article...

"...At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or "playlists," as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual "bookshelves" — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these "bookshelves" will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages. The ability to purchase, read and manipulate individual pages or sections is surely what will drive reference books (cookbooks, how-to manuals, travel guides) in the future..."

Whither textbooks? I emphasized the word "remixed" because this is a pet theme of mine (especially this year as the CALI Conference theme is Rip, Mix, Learn).

I think Kelly missed the MOST liquid of books - textbooks.

Almost no one reads a textbook from cover to cover. It is typically read chapter by chapter and in even smaller "snippets". The language of textbooks is such that it does not have as strong a voice as a novel, so if a textbook is assembled from parts written by different authors, there is less cognitive dissonance in the reader.

This is even more true, I believe, in casebooks - the textbooks of legal education. Collections of cases are written by many different writers - judges who author the opinions. These are interspersed with commentary and analysis by the casebook author (sometimes multiple authors). The very nature of the law is one of writing by committee and reading any recently passed or proposed statutes will show you what tangled prose comes out of that process sometimes. .

Textbooks and casebooks are already re-mixed by the crude (in a digital sense) instrument of the syllabus. A syllabus for a course is the playlist that Kelly talks about in education. In the digital book future, the syllabus and the table of contents become nearly indistinguishable. Why inefficiently give students 5 kg of dead trees - of which only portions will be read - when you can give them lightweight electroncs (and only the electrons) that they are required for the course. Hyperlinks can provide further information on the web. This makes even more sense if you instantiate the book into paper for the purposes of dealing with cultural transitions from pbooks to ebooks (print to electronic).

A textbook is a virtual artifact in space in time that is temporarily instantiated in paper and ink for the duration of a course.

A syllabus is a set of time-based assignments that acts as the metronome of the course to pace the students (and the instructor) through the marathon of the course.

Textbooks are frequently updated (every 3-6 years) and they would be updated more often if it was up to the publisher in order to suppress used-book sales. (See CALIPirg's "Rip-off 101: Second Edition
How the Publishing Industry's Practices Needlessly Drive Up Textbook Costs" for the full story).

Updating liquid books is trivial - just like updating web pages. Sure the textbook should remain reasonably static for the duration of the course - let's not drive ourselves too crazy, but certainly the textbook can be updated, refined, enhanced, tuned, polished and improved semester to semester if it starts life as a virtual entity and only arrives in the front of student in physical form a week before it is printed on demand from www.Lulu.com and shipped - bypassing the bookstore and their 20% markup.

This inefficiency is exactly what mass digitization can improve. We didn't and couldn't know that we were being so inefficient because print and ink was what we had. Digital texts are what we have now and they will inevitably change the way we use the texts.

Change is coming.

Change is here.

Reading an interesting article in the New York Times today titled "Scan This Book" by Kevin Kelly that had some numbers that I thought I would have some fun playing with...

"... From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages..."

Emphasis mine.

How much disk space does this represent?

32 million books at 1 MB per book = 32 million million bytes or trillion bytes or 32 terabytes.

750 million articles at 1/10 MB per article = 75 million million bytes or 75 terabytes.

25 million songs at 10 MB per song (high resolution) = 250 million million bytes or 250 terabytes.

500 million images at 50 MB per image = 25,000 million million bytes or 25,000 terabytes.

500,000 movies or to keep the scales consistent 1/2 million movies at 2000 MB per movie = 1000 million million bytes or 1,000 terabytes.

3 million videos, TV shows, short films at 1000 MB per = 3000 million million bytes or 3,000 terabytes.

100 billion webpages or 100,000 million webpages at 1/10 MB per webpage = 10,000 million million bytes or 10,000 terabytes.

32 (books)
75 (articles)
250 (songs)
25,000 (images)
1,000 (movies)
3,000 (tv, video, short films)
10,000 (webpages) +
-------
39,357 terabytes or about 40 petabytes (the NYTimes article puts it at 50 petabytes, so my calculations aren't too far off).

Checking Froogle for hard drive costs and things round out to around $1 per GB or $1000 per terabyte, so the cost of storing a digital copy of the entire world's movies, literature, songs, articles and webpages is...

$39,357,000

Huh!

Pocket change for any of the big players in data storage like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM and others. Well within reach for most governments wanting to give access to the world's knowledge to their citizens - heck, it's within reach for most large cities and most state university systems and even some larger libraries.

Kryder's Law is similar to the more familiar Moore's Law applied to hard disk density (and perhaps to cost) and the Wikipedia entry tells the tale for the future...

"...If current rates of growth are maintained then within two decades, a consumer will be able to store all of the creative works produced by every member of the human species in a $100 storage device, including realtime video capture of ones entire lifetime..."

Emphasis mine.

The NYTimes article is a bit more precise, but never-the-less compelling...

"...Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet..."

But this is not the best point. Having everything digital makes it potentially accessible, re-usable, re-mix-able and makes us all potentially smarter and more dangerous.

The inimitable Doug Kaye, CEO of the Conversations Network and a thoroughly enjoyable person to listen to has a podcast on recording phone calls and live events for podcasting. This is a geeky talk, but there is are few people with more on the ground experience in recording for podcasting.

He has advice on devices, microphones, Skype, ISDN and even live-casting.

More great podcasts on the geeky side of podcasting at the Podcast Academy event here.

Having recently posted about the Legal Guide to Podcasting from Creative Commons, I was delighted to learn that there is a Legal Guide for Bloggers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Now I must go off and read it!

Here is another podcast that is fascinating, entertaining, educational and thought-provoking. Bruce Sterling is a write of science fiction and a futurist as well as a non-fiction author. The image above is clickable to his latest work on "space and time objects" or "spimes".

The podcast is from 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference via the ITConversations folks. It's worth a listen.

Image from the movie "12 Angry Men".

I ran across a post today on one of the Educause blogs by Phillip D. Long of MIT about some open source software that lets you create a set of links into a commercial DVD so that you could jump to parts of a movie. The point of the post and the software is to legally use movie clips in the classroom. The software does not copy an portion of the movie or do any de-encryption or DeCSSing or anything that would alert the DMCA police. Instead it lets the instructor create pointers into the DVD and save them so that when the DVD is inserted into the computer's player, the pointer can be clicked and the clip can be played.

I have seen discussions of the use movies in legal education (if interested, follow the link and search for 'movies') for many years and I know that at least one faculty member has a VHS tape of clips that they use year after year. (Of course, VHS players are getting harder to come by these days).

Besides the 12 Angry Men depicted in the image above, there are all sorts of law-related movies.

• My Cousin Vinnie
• And Justice for All
• The Firm
• The Pelican Brief
• Runaway Jury
• A Few Good Men
• A Civil Action

I know I am just scratching the surface here. There are also plenty of situations in movies that could analyzed for their legal content. The list of movies could be quite long.

I had the inane thought that CALI could create a website where faculty would post the names of movies and descriptions of the clips that they have used (or would use) and a description of the legal education concept being illustrated. This alone might be rather useful since not everyone has seen every movie and if all the faculty pooled their ideas, everyone would benefit from this collective knowledge.

But, what if we took this another step?

DVDs of movies can be gotten rather cheaply these days - say $10 a copy. CALI could purchase a couple of copies of all of the movies and lend them out to faculty for use in their classrooms along with the software that points to the relevant clip. When the class is over, the faculty could return the DVD to CALI. Kind of a CALI as Netflix or CALIFlix or something.

Even with lots of participants, there won't be too many times when multiple faculty want to use the same movies at the same time and for the most popular movies, we could purchase multiple copies. A couple hundred movies would only cost a couple of thousand dollars and the shipping costs are relatively insignificant.

Ideas like these often have all sorts of unintended consequences, so perhaps it would best to start with the database of movies and clip descriptions - survey law faculty - and go from there. Since this is exam time for many law schools, it's the perfect time to bug law faculty since they will do almost anything to procrastinate from grading exams.

;-)