CALIopolis

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