CALIopolis

I remixed the audio with a screencast of my keynote presentation at the 2006 CALI Conference to create a screencast that introduces a new project that CALI is launching this summer called eLangdell. There isn't a website just yet (we do have the domain registered, but it's merely parked for now), but there will be more news about this trickling out over the coming weeks.

Here's the link to the screencast (45 minutes).

This screencast, lays out the foundational thinking that goes into why we are launching this project. It's 45 minutes long and should be playable in any browser or OS.

Feel free to leave comments with your reactions. We are just getting started and we are anxious to involve the entire community of legal education in this project.

I am off to Oslo, Norway next week to attend Subtech and one of the things I offered to do was to explain the rise of new 3D virtual worlds like Second Life to Norwegian law professors. I don't have much time and I was fortunate to find a couple of excellent and professionally produced videos that will do the trick.

The first is from the New Media Consortium and its a promotional video for the NMC's virtual campus inside Second Life, but in five minutes it does decent justice to the things that are possible (at this time) using Second Life as an educational platform. I highly recommend it.

Here's the link.

The second is a music video that was produced using Second Life as the production location. This is an amazing and emotional piece of work that you have to watch to appreciate. It is called Better Life.

Click to play the video via YouTube.com.

Fascinating video of a prototype the BumpTop 3D desktop PC interface. I really like the feel that this implies and after watching it several times, it really starts to dissolve the line between real and virtual. I want these capabilities on my REAL desk now.

The Plain Dealer in Cleveland reports that Judge James Kimbler is posting videos of sentencing hearings on YouTube.com.

Most people and probably a lot of law students have very little experience with what happens inside of courtrooms. Their experience is mostly taken from Law & Order episodes and these don't really reflect the reality of law practice.

I have always thought that it makes good sense for law students to spend some time in a courtroom watching a case and pulling the documents from PACER to understand how cases are prosecuted, defended and litigated.

I also think that videos like these might be valuable to the millions of people who represent themselves pro se. The problem is that every case is different and it is difficult (though not impossible) to draw conclusions that are specific to your case. Most lawyers will tell you that it is downright dangerous and that you should get a lawyer to represent you if you are in legal trouble. Despite this, many folks cannot or do not obtain legal representation.

The internet is the great leveler and knowledge, experience and advice about everything is available - even legal advice (though it is illegal or improper to give legal advice unless you are the lawyer reprsenting the client). This does not stop people from telling stories or providing their own experiences.

What these videos need is more context. What was the crime? What was the evidence?

Supposedly, much of this information is public record, but so much of law practice is not in the coutroom or on the record. It's much more subtle and complex than that.

This is legal education of a sort and the fact that bandwidth and diskspace are practically free means that the next hurdle is to provide relevant context so that the right education happens and so that the problem of 'a little knowledge is dangerous' is mitigated for the viewing, pro se public.

Orin Kerr points to a recent article from Professor Erica Hashimota at the University of Georgia available at SSRN from which I offer this intriquing quote...

"...In the study, which is scheduled to be published in the North Carolina Law Review, Hashimoto found that pro se felony defendants in state courts were as likely as defendants with counsel to win complete acquittal. In addition, they were more likely to be convicted of lesser offenses - misdemeanors rather than felonies, according to Hashimoto’s review of data, a sample from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data that covers the country’s 75 largest counties in the even years between 1990 and 1998...."

What does this say for lawyer representation?

I have said in several presentations that "Everyone is a Lawyer" because our system permits us all to represent ourselves, but it is very difficult to do so because the nature of law and our system make it difficult to do so. Despite this, it appears that many people are succeeding at least as well as lawyers in their own representation.

More to say on this in the future and how it involves CALI.

What are the career prospects for an IT Professional in education?

Maybe this book will answer that question and many others. From the blurb...

"...provides an overview of current principles and practices for mentoring and developing the next generation of IT leaders in higher education. Edited by EDUCAUSE Vice President Cynthia Golden and written by top leaders in the industry who have distinguished themselves and their organizations for sharpening others' skills, institutional savvy, and ability to lead, the book's chapters are organized into two sections: the organizational perspective and the individual perspective. ...."

The entire book is available online in PDF or HTML format here.

There are also audio interviews (we call them podcasts in these parts) with various CIOs from over half-a-dozen universities and community colleges (none from law schools) here.

I have some extensive travel to be doing and will report back as I read.

Read along with me.

I gave the opening keynote at the 2006 Conference for Law School Computing yesterday. Here is the powerpoint deck from the presentation.

1759-JohnMayerThursdayPlenaryFINAL.ppt (17 MB)

Here is a link to a WMV video of the presentation.

Here is a link to an MP3 of the presentation.

Update: Tom Boone at UNLV Boyd School of Law provides an excellent precis here.

This is an podcast interview in our continuing series of podcast interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project this past semester (Spring or Winter) of 2006.

Professor Robin Craig of the University of Indiana-Indianapolis School of Law recorded the classroom for her Property II course.

The podcast can be found here - click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - robincraig2.mp3

This is the next interview in our series of interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project this past semester (Spring or Winter) of 2006.

Professor Thaddeus Pope of the University of Memphis School of Law recorded the classroom for his Health Law course.

This podcast is 38 minutes and 46 seconds long.

Here is the link to the podcast. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - ThadPope.mp3

This is the next in our series of interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project this past semester (Spring or Winter) of 2006.

Professor Steve Bradford of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Law recorded weekly summary podcasts for his Securities Regulations course.

This podcast is 22 minutes and 36 seconds long.

Here is the link to the podcast. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - SteveBradaford.mp3

Here is the next in a series of podcast interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project this past semester (Spring or Winter) of 2006.

This interview is with Professor Peter Henning of Wayne State University School of Law. Professor Henning created weekly summaries for his Professional Responsibility course.

This podcast is 30 minutes and 50 seconds long.

Here is the link to the podcast - click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - PeterHenning.mp3

Elmer points to an article from the Wall Street Journal website with the snarky title ... "Why Getting the User To Create Web Content Isn't Always Progress".

The author, Lee Gomes, complains that user-created content on the web...

"...You can spend 10 minutes and take in all of it. Spend much more, and you start feeling guilty about the time you're wasting...."

...which is how I feel watching television all the time and about 75% of time when I am at the movies. Popular media is full of dreck.

Gomes also states...

"...It is an odd state of affairs when books or movies need defending, especially when the replacement proffered by certain Web-oriented companies and their apologists is so dismally inferior: chunks and links and other bits of evidence of epidemic ADD. ...."

You bet that books and movies need defending. What Gomes does not admit is that the vast majority of books and movies are just as bad as the "dismally inferior chunks" offered up by the pastiche of the Web.

I can't count the number of times I wish I had my money and 90 minutes back after a particularly bad movie. Even with millions of dollars and marketing focus groups out the wazoo, the popular culture industry serves up a fast-foot buffet of unmitigated crap - for the most part. I would rather surf for my own entertainment because what is slickly shoved at me in advertising-laden glitziness is so chokingly bad that I can't breath.

Our expectations are lower for Web-produced content because we know that it is amateur-produced. When we find something genuinely good - it's double-good because its genuine - produced for the love of it and not for the product placement. Perhaps I ascribe too-noble motives to UGC, but at least I didn't waste 9 bucks.

I would rather that people spend their time mashing up UGC (user-generated content) than wasting their time with most popular culture. Creation of your own content, self-expression, experimentation with ideas and presentation is infinitely better than being a couch-yam.

Rant mode off.

This is an interview with Don Zhou who is a 1L at William Mitchell College of Law and the Head of Technical Services in the Law Library. He heard about the podcasting project and approached several professors in courses that he was taking and gained their permission to post recordings of the classes on the law school's internal BlackBoard course websites.

This was an especially interesting podcast because Don provides insights from the student perspective and he repesents an interesting model for introducing podcasting into legal education that I had not considered before. Because Don did all the work of setting up the digital recorder, converting the files and uploading them to a website, he lowered the barriers to podcasting for the faculty in the courses he took. Whatever his motivations, he personally benefited and also shared that benefit with the other students in his classes.

This podcast is 20 minutes and 40 seconds long.

The link to the podcast is here - click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - DonZhou.mp3

Ben Verbshow writes compelllingly in a recent article titled "The Book Is Reading You: Why publishers need to stop worrying and love the network" in PublishersWeekly.com...

"...Imagine an online Harry Potter in which readers can keep personal blogs, engage in live chats in the margins, annotate the text collectively, compose alternate endings and contribute to communal glossaries and repositories of lore. Or an electronic Moby-Dick that allows teachers to create a virtual seminar around the text while connecting students to a vast library of scholarly resources. Or a new kind of book, native to the network, that we have not yet conceived—one that employs multiple media forms, and grows and changes over time..."

Emphasis mine.

In education, the multiple media forms are the classroom lectures, the discussion, the course website, etc. that center around the material being covered in the book.

What grows and changes over time is the students comprehension and understanding of the material. Physically, the students construct notes that grow and change over time.

As the instructor teaches the courses over and over again, they refine their teaching materails - updating them with new materials, making changes to adjust to the students, clarifying, polishing and improving their educational technique, so the instructor's delivery grows and changes over time.

I think Mr. Verbshow's thinking applies more immediately and transparently to educational books - textbooks and casebooks - than they do to works of fiction. In education, there is a strong connection between the book and the course and this is especially true in legal education. To mix some metaphors, the teacher is the conductor, the book is the music, the syllabus is a metronome pacing the class through the music of the book and the classroom discussion is jazz (the final exam is, well ... use your imagination)..

With the networked book, the question is whether listening to other musicians interpret the music is a good thing. If the music is other renowned artists, then it is. If the students listen to other students or pop versions or condensed versions (like when students obtain class notes on the Internet or use Cliff Notes or their legal education equivalent), then the instructor may not be so happy about that and I can see why. Besides teaching the material (the music), the teacher is also trying to teach technique (i.e. how to learn for yourself).

If the book begins life as a digital artifact where the connection to additional sources of authority, example and discussion is effortless (not that finding these materials is effortless, but once found, the connecting is simple), then the networked book can grow and change over time with each and every instructor and students benefit all the more.

Educational books are already networked books, but they are not - at present - born digital. Through the course website and the online syllabus they are manually bolted into the network in a clunky and imprecise manner. This will come to seem quaint in the coming years - more starkly to our digitally native students.

The book IS a network and it must be born there.

This is the next in our series of interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project this past semester (Spring or Winter) of 2006.

Lee Peoples is the Associate Director for Faculty, Research and Instructional Services and teaches at the Oklahoma City University School of Law and created weekly summaries for his class Advanced Legal Research, Foreign, Comparative and International Law.

This podcast is 18 minutes and 15 seconds long.

Here is the link to the podcast. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - LeePeoples.mp3

Here is the next podcast interview in our continuing series of interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project.

Professor Norm Garland of the Southwestern University School of Law used podcasting in his Constitutional Criminal Procedure course. Professor Garland also makes extensive use of Powerpoints and is experimenting with posting videocasts of his classes (audio + Powerpoints) as well.

Here is the podcast. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - NormGarland.mp3

This is the latest interview with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcastaing Project this past spring semester.

Professor Carole Buckner of Western State University School of Law used podcasting in her Civil Procedure II course.

The podcast can be found here - click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - CaroleBuckner.mp3

Here is the next in our series of interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project.

Professor Karin Mika of Cleveland State University - Cleveland Marshall College of Law used podcasts in her Advanced Legal Research course.

This podcast is 31 minutes and 48 seconds long.

Here is the link to the podcast. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - KarinMika.mp3

This is the next in a series of podcast interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project.

Professor Aaron Fellmeth of Arizona State University School of Law recorded the classroom of his Patent Law class. He is a self-proclaimed "fast talker" and believes that the podcast helped his students because they could go over the material a second or third time.

This podcast is 20 minutes and 32 seconds long.

Here is the link to the podcast: Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - AaronFellmeth.mp3

One of the obstacles to distance learning adoption is the final exam. How can you be sure that the student who hands in the exam is the one who wrote it or that they didn't access all kinds of information while writing it.

Even in the classroom, it's hard to proctor students who can use ubiquitous wireless technologies to IM or text message questions from compatriots stationed near a computer. Just today, CNN reports of extensive measures being taken in China...

"...China will scramble mobile phone signals in some exam halls and have police stand guard in a bid to stop cheating,.."

Now, the law school world has had an embarrassment of riches with three prominent companies in the secure exam software space: Examsoft, Extegrity and Software Secure.

All of the software that these companies make have been around for quite a while and work as advertised for locking down the student's computer when they are taking an exam, but none of them can prevent the "analog hole" of exam-taking where the exam taker cheats by communicating with someone during the test.

This is about to change.

Software Secure has been beta-testing a new hardware device at Troy University in Alabama that is a 360 degree webcam that the student plugs into their computer while taking the exam at home. The video is streamed to a server where the faculty member or a remote proctor can view real time or after the fact to make sure that no one else is in the room or that the student didn't pick up a phone can call a friend for help or use another computer to research the answers.

"...Securexam Remote Proctor™ will authenticate the identity of the student taking a test, ensure that student is unable to use the computer to cheat during an exam and provide real-time audio and video of the room where the test is taken...."

I emphasised on "authenticate the identity" because the hardware includes a fingerprint scanner for the student and the instructor can determine how often the student must re-scan his finger during the exam.

So the combination of locking down the computer with Software Secure's SecureExam, plus the fingerprint scanner to make sure that the student who is in the class is the one taking the exam and the 360 degree webcam is designed to make it much harder for distance learning students to cheat.

InsideHigherEd has more details...

"...The product, called Securexam Remote Proctor, would likely cost students about $200 ....

A fingerprint sensor is built into the base of the remote proctor, and professors can choose when and how often they want students to identify themselves during the test

... a small camera with 360-degree-view capabilities is attached to the base of the unit. Real-time audio and video is taken from the test taker’s room, and any unusual activity — another person walking into the room, an unfamiliar voice speaking — leads to a red-flag message that something might be awry.

Professors need not watch students taking the test live; they can view the streaming audio or video at any time...."

Wow!

Here's a blowup of the picture from the article...

The first time I saw the Ipix camera, several years ago, I had the notion that it could be used to do remote proctoring, but I suppose that there could be elaborate ways to get around this system like someone hiding under the desk or something, but it starts to get rather silly. Many law faculty give take-home exams and rely on the honor code.

I don't know if faculty will come to trust such a system, but it is interesting to see developments in this area.

Maybe Software Secure will bring one of these to the CALI Conference?

During my podcast interview with Professor Scott Burnham, we were joined by James Cramer, Director of IT at Montana who discusses a survey he conducted of students who were in Professor Burnham's Contracts courses in relation to their use of the podcasts. We also talk about technical issues, equipment setup, staffing and the future of podcasting at the University of Montana School of Law.

This podcast lasts 25 minutes and 10 seconds.

Here is the link. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - jamescramer.mp3

Very interesting stuff in this podcast. Montana is going to pre-subscribe their incoming students to the RSS feeds of podcasted classes next fall. I believe they are also starting a new laptop requirement in the fall which makes this possible. All student machines will also come pre-installed with Audacity and iTunes.

This is is our third interview with a law faculty podcaster who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project this past Spring 2006 semester.

Professor Scott Burnham recorded weekly summaries and recorded the classroom for this students. (Full disclosure, Professor Burnham is on the CALI Board of Directors).

This podcast is 17 minutes and 15 seconds long.

Here is the link. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - scottburnham.mp3

Immediately after talking to Scott, James Cramer, the IT Director at Montana joined the conversation to discuss surveys that were conducted of the students who were in Scott's class and on some of the technical issues surrounding the setup of recording the classroom (both students and instructor).