CALIopolis

Well, the clock is ticking for BlackBoard and whether they are going to come out with cease and desist letters blazing or do something intelligent that will endear them to the edu-blogosphere.

By the way, here is the link to the actual patent on the USPTO website.

Evidence of searches for prior art are starting to popup. Here's a quote from the comments to a FortnightlyMailing post...

"...There is certainly clear prior art from the very early 1990s. Details follow.

From the historical perspective I date the development of "modern" bulletin board systems in e-learning from 1991. When we started to use FirstClass at the Open University on the JANUS project, within a few months many of the so-called "standard" features had been developed - quasi-geographical virtual campus representation, assignment submission, student-only areas, chat, etc..."

The patent seems to have been applied for in 1999 which would make anything in 1998 fair game for prior art. I am not a lawyer, but I recall doing some work with a couple of companies doing similar things around that time.

A very little digging around in the Internet WayBack Machine finds this website from MadDuck Software - makers of Web Course In A Box...

It's dated June 12, 1998 and MadDuck was certainly doing a lot of the same things mentioned in the patent. Here's the link.

A little closer to my legal education home, I could swear that West, Inc. had launched TWEN (The West Education Network) that far back and sure enough...

This is dated January 10, 1998. Here's the link.

If I recall, West launched TWEN as a competitor to MadDuck which had a deal to distribute their software to law schools via Lexis. That means MadDuck goes back to 1997 and maybe even 1996.

I would guess that the evidence will mount quickly since things like this move in Internet time and so if BlackBoard is going to salvage any goodwill out of this, they better say something soon.

From Wikipedia, we learn...

"...Goodwill is ... an important accounting concept that describes the value of a business entity not directly attributable to its tangible assets and liabilities..."

So Goodwill is something that a company wants to nurture, grow and be able to claim on its bottom line.

When goodwill is negative, it's a liability - literally and it looks like BlackBoard has not handled it's recent patent acquisition in a very value-generating way.

Some quotes from around the edu-blogosphere...

David Carter-Tod writes...

"...Frankly, they should be ashamed. It’s a tissue of fabrication..."

Stephen Downes writes...

"... This would be funny if it weren't so ridiculous:..."

Rick's Cafe Canadien writes...

"...BlackBoard or Dr. Evil?..."

Peter Schilling writes...

"...Blackboard seems to have a long-term strategy of ... trying to keep others out of the field by getting an absurdly broad patent for common uses of technology..."

Now, it may be that BlackBoard will soon come out with a press release saying that they are not going to enforce this patent or not going to go after Moodle, Sakai, Drupal, TWEN or any of the other open-source or commercial Learning Management/Course Management Systems (LMS/CMS) out there.

If so, they should have done that first. Many of the comments around the blogosphere are especially upset with the USPTO and they are couching their reaction to BlackBoard with careful terms to see if they do the right thing. There is a possibility for a big payoff in goodwill yet.

But time is running out. The mere announcement of this patent has drawn considerable vituperation on BlackBoard and as the meme spreads, it gets harder to reverse. Badwill is kind of sticky.

I surely see the need for a large corporation to patent its intellectual property. Heck, BlackBoard may have gotten this patent to defend against patent trolls who would pull the same thing against them that the educational community fears BlackBoard is going to pull now.

So the question for stockholders is whether the value of the patent is greater than the lost goodwill demonstrated by the comments above?

I doubt it.

The patent may not even withstand prior art and validity challenges and you can bet it will be challenged if BlackBoard gets all aggressive in this space. If they lose the patent, they lose twice - no patent and no goodwill.

Will Bb be heros or chumps? Stay tuned.

Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center and also Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, Oxford University struck it rich recently. Rich in the sense that he got his latest article, "The Generative Internet" published on Groklaw where that large, voracious and didactic community tore into it in all sorts of interesting ways.

I confess to being a Groklaw addict and avid follower of the writings of Pamela, "PJ" Jones since she started Groklaw some years ago (gosh is it that long?). The main focus of the blog has been the SCO v. IBM litigation where you can find every single filing posted (in text and PDF) and long, circuitous and almost always insightful discussion of every single point of law that crazy case has taken.

PJ single-handedly created the notion of "open source litigation" where everything is visible, questioned, verified, researched and discussed. Regular followers of Groklaw have received a graduate level education in all sorts of legal issues, complex litigation tactics, intellectual property and beyond.

There are plenty of lawyers present daily as well as geeks and greybeards (the SCO case careened right into the old UNIX/ATT/BSD litigation long ago) and they provide expert commentary, war stories, personal recollection and hilarious commentary on the train wreck that is the SCO case.

Now take that gang and toss in a scholarly law review-type article and the results are fascinating.

If Professor's Zittrain's skin is thick enough (and having met the chap, I believe he will see this for the jackpot of riches it is), he will be able to reap a whirlwind of insight and market-testing for a paper that looks like it wants to be a full-length book someday.

I can't comment on the paper itself - I'm still slogging through it and from the reactions of the non-lawyers and non-law professors (see the graphic above), I am not the only one slogging.

Still, as an invited guest of PJ's, many of the responses are reasoned, intelligent and innovative. PJ's community is rich in intelligence and intellectual diversity and pretty polite. (PJ has ruthlessly enforced a no-profanity policy in the comments which makes her site one of the purest pleasures to read).

Politeness aside, this gang is a tough audience and they make for a rich learning experience for Zittrain or any other law professor who wants to write to a wider audience.

Back in the day when I was running a computer center at a law school, the months of July and August were some of the busiest months getting things ready for the new batch of students.

One of the things that I loaded onto our local area network was any tutorial or help document I could find that would answer students questions before they came knocking on my door.

Publisher Visibooks offers "screen quality" versions of its picture books for free download here.

Here's a screenshot ...

These aren't super-comprehensive "bibles" for power users, but they might be plenty handy for the newbie law students struggling with their software and those are the ones that need the most and simplest help - which these books provide.

These are PDF versions of their "print quality" or printed books that are licened under Creative Commons, but if law students come knocking for help on any of these topics...

• computer basics
• Windows XP
• Mac OS X Tiger
• Linspire Five-O
• Palm Devices
• microsoft office
• Access 2003
• Excel 2003
• PowerPoint 2003
• Word 2003
• Publisher 2003
• openoffice.org
• Base 2.0
• Calc 2.0
• Impress 2.0
• Writer 2.0
• web layout
• Dreamweaver 8
• FrontPage 2003
• HTML & CSS
• web graphics
• Photoshop CS2
• Fireworks 8
• Photoshop Elements 4.0
• web programming
• MySQL Basics
• PHP Basics
• PERL Basics

...you can point them to http://inpics.net/ to get some help.

The front page of the CALI website has a place that randomly displays comments we get from law students. There is a place for students to submit new comments (link here) and there is also a link on every single CALI lessons that sends us an email right from within the lesson itself.

Many of the comments we receive are amazingly positive and tell us that the work we do with faculty authors is having a positive impact on student learning.

Here is a sample of comments we received in the past couple of weeks.

"...CALI is an excellent resource for the law student, or even, like me, the recent graduate studying for the Bar Exam. In conjunction with my regular bar study courses, which track mock-exam results by subject and topic, CALI's topic-specific learning modules help me to focus on exactly what areas I need to in order to increase my performance stats - and to succeed on the Bar Exam. ..."

We don't design CALI lessons to be specifically useful for passing the bar exam, but obviously any good legal education tool will serve that purpose. Some years back, we changed the way that CALI lessons are produced so that they are shorter and smaller for exactly the reasons that the student mentions.

"...CALI Lessons, have a way of fine tuning my skills while I am preparing for finals!! . ..."

This is an especially gratifying comment. You don't often hear students speak of "fine-tuning" their skills.

"...Finally, after sifting through hundreds of pages in text books, I get to the pod cast on Parol Evidence Rule, and walah, the "intent" of the "rule" crystallizes. A breath of fresh air. Thanks! Podcast most helpful. . ..."

This student is referring to a podcast we produced at a blog we call CALI Radio. We will be adding more interviews with law faculty that cover particularly knotty legal concepts.

"...Last semester I used CALI often. It's a great way to keep studying when you just can't seem to look at books anymore. The Civ Pro lesson on Party Joinder was excellent. I did it multiple times and felt very prepared for my Professor's notoriously difficult multiple choice questions. When grades came out I got an A -- Yea CALI! . ..."

Emphasis mine.

Here we have a student who used a single lesson multiple times. Many students don't realize that the lessons are built with branches so that if you run the lesson multiple times, you may see different questions based on your answers.

"...CALI lessons are a great trouble-shooting device. They help me work out any remaining kinks in my understanding of a certain area before taking exams. . ..."

Legal education is difficult and complex sometimes. This student uses CALI lessons to "troubleshoot" areas to flesh out their understanding. Exactly what they are designed to do.

"...When I walk out of an exam, the first thing I say to my peers is "total CALI" because I know I got the highest grade in the class thanks to this website. . ..."

In this comment, the student is talking about "CALI-ing" a class which refers to the CALI Excellence for the Future Award that is given to students who receive the highest grade in the class. Over 90 law schools participate in this free program. Interested schools should contact me, John Mayer (jmayer@cali.org) to get signed up.

The award program has resulted in CALI becoming a verb in the legal education lexicon.

The 2006-2007 CALI CD is shipping this week to law schools that pre-ordered it for their incoming students.

The CALI CD contains a snapshot of all of the lessons that we publish and is available to CALI-member law schools that want to give it out to their 1Ls FOR FREE (Yes, it's free to 1Ls, but ONLY via your law school NOT directly from CALI).

If your law school wants to order additional CDs for your 2Ls and 3Ls, they are only $1 each. Contact LaVonne Molde at 612-627-4908 or lvmolde@cali.org.

If you are a current law student at a CALI-member law school, you can order your own copy of the CD for $39.95 from here.

A month back, I pointed to videos of sentencing hearings posted on YouTube by the judge in the case. Most of the cases seemed to be drug-related. These videos were a little thin on content, but I asked the question "Is this legal education"?

Lawyer, Allison Margolin has posted a video that is part marketing, part public information and part social commentary. This IS legal education of a sort.

Here's the YouTube link so that you can view it yourself...

She also includes contact information at the end of the video...

But she goes much further than just describing her practice and her firm work. There is a short interview with a client and also commentary about drug-related criminal defense work that she does.

It's a very well-produced video with lots of cuts, shaky "NYPD Blue" like camera work and Allilson dressed in clothes that are not button-down, suited lawyer - more accessible and friendly to the clients she wishes to attract.

Except for the phone and email contact information, I would not have been too surprised to find this on a legal aid website. This is markets as conversations a la Cluetrain. YouTube may just become a big educational website where microniches of professionals education and advertise at the same time.

John Dale's blog, Autology (curious name there) points me to an SSRN article that I missed somehow.

Professor Benjamin Barton at the University of Tennessee College of Law.has uploaded a draft of his article "Is There a Correlation Between Scholarly Productivity, Scholarly Influence and Teaching Effectiveness in American Law Schools? An Empirical Study".

The spoiler is that he finds that there is NOT a correlation, but I was especially struck by the way he explains going about measuring teaching effectiveness...

"...For better or worse, teacher evaluations are the only viable way to measure teaching effectiveness for a study of this breadth. My other choices were exceedingly unpalatable: 1) attempt to gather peer evaluation data, which is rarely if ever expressed numerically, and would also almost certainly not be provided by the host institutions; or 2) use some type of personal subjective measure of teaching effectiveness, potentially requiring me to personally visit classes and make my own determination on teaching effectiveness..."

First of all, I am struck that there is so little out there in the way of measuring teaching effectiveness. You would think that for a service that costs upwards of $30k per year at some law schools, there would be a rather detailed or sophisticated system of measuring quality outputs.

I will grant that bar passage rates, grade point averages and other such things act as a kind of measure. Furthermore, the difficulty of obtaining a law degree and procuring a tenured position in a law school force a measure (though apparently unmeasurable) of quality control on the teaching process.

But this is not the point of this post.

Rather, I see a possible solution to Barton's two alternative methods of measuring teaching effectiveness.

1) attempt to gather peer evaluation data

2) use some type of personal subjective measure of teaching effectiveness

I refer the reader to a recent post of mine where I posited that law students could be used to overcome technical and man-power barriers for recording law school podcasts. If that idea has merit and many, many students step forward to record their classroom lectures - and faculty allow it - there could quickly be a large collection of podcasts from a large number of faculty available for Barton and his peers to listen to and evaluate for teaching effectiveness.

The podcasts would have to be freely available for Barton to organize peers in a kind of Legal Education Podcasting Commons (hereafter LEPC). At the worst, such a commons could have rating systems like YouTube that capture listener ratings by popularity, most commented on, most downloaded, etc. SSRN makes use of the number of downloads as a kind of proxy for quality (or at least popularity, I suppose).

With a large enough corpus of materials, the podcasts could be tagged and rated different ways or for appropriateness to different educational tasks like...

• great for exam review
• best explanation of this topic
• good for students new to <topic>

etc, etc.

If students making the podcasts provide some decent metadata - like the specific topic being covered - then other second order effects become likely. Students who are having trouble with a particular topic could search the LEPC for other instructors lecturing on the same topic. I don't think this will result in everyone listening to Arthur Miller/ LEPC will develop it's own long tail.

Once the podcasts are out there, all sorts of layers of evaluation and metadata can be applied and this includes the faculty themselves on themselves. During my interviews with faculty podcasters, several mentioned listening to their own podcasts as a way of improving their teaching - a nice second order effect of professional self-devvelopment.

Students, of course, could rate the podcasts as well. I am not sure that the sample sizes will be large enough or that we would see a "wisdom of crowds" effect, but that's part of the unpredictable and emergent behavior of the Internet. We get rather useful, though fairly rare feedback from students about CALI lessons. Every lesson has a button that can send an email to us and we forward useful comments on to the authors if it will help to improve the lesson.

I made a prediction in my talk at AALL (podcast or screencast) that in five years, pre-law students would be listening to law faculty podcasts (and demanding to listen to them) as a part of their decision making in choosing a law school. That is certainly a qualitative measurement.

Faculty hiring decisions could be based - in part - on the quality of the classroom lectures as podcasts. Faculty who are teaching a class for the first time could listen to more experienced faculty teach. The authors of casebooks would be incented to provide access to their classroom lectures so that adopters of their casebook could "teach like the author intended". There are all sorts of uses for LEPC.

Measuring teaching effectiveness would be just one, but improving teaching effectiveness would be the real hoped-for benefit.

At this year's CALI Conference for Law School Computing® and as a result of John Mayer's talks at SubTech 2006 and AALS I've been fielding a lot of questions about Classcaster. Most take the form of something like "I've tried Classcaster and it really seems to work great but what about..." and then I'm asked about things like "is it really free", "will it keep running", "does the telephone interface always work", "is this something CALI will continue to support", "is there a limit on disk space" and so forth. I'm going to answer these questions and more in this post and then spread it around so folks have something to reference.

The format will be a sort of mini FAQ. There is a support FAQ for Classcaster here, but it doesn't clearly address some of these basic questions. Here goes.

• Is Classcaster really free? Will it stay that way?
  
• Yes, Classcaster is available as a free service to the faculty, librarians, and staff of over 200 CALI member schools. Classcaster has quickly become a core service of CALI and as such will remain free of charge to members for the foreseeable future.
• Will Classcaster continue to be supported by CALI?
• Yes. As I mentioned above Classcaster is key part of our plans for the future and is a central service provided by CALI to our members. As such we will continue to support Classcaster into the future.
• Is there a limit on disk space a person or school can use on Classcaster?
• No, at this time we are not limiting disk an author or school can use on Classcaster. We monitor disk space closely and the system is expandable enough that we can easily add disk space as it is needed. Podcasts, posts, and other documents stored on Classcaster will be available there into the future.
• Does the telephone recording to podcasting feature really work consistently?
  
• Yes. Most of John Mayer's interviews with the faculty podcasters of the Legal Education Podcasting Project were recorded using the telephone recording and auto-podcasting features of Classcaster. For the most part the system performed well. Of course there is only one phone line at the moment, so you may get a busy signal, but you can just try again later. We are looking into expanding the number of available phone lines on the system.
• I would really like all of the faculty at my school to use Classcaster. Will the system support all X faculty (where X is some number)?
• Sure. The Classcaster blogging system should easily support several hundred bloggers and podcasters. As the system grows we will expand its storage and processing capabilities to make sure that it will provide your communities with access. The telephone to podcast part of the system has only one phone line at the moment, so you may get a busy signal, but you can just try again later. We are looking into expanding the number of available phone lines on the system.
  
• Can I customize Classcaster's look and feel, invite colleagues to contribute to the blog, and have more than one blog?
• Yes, yes, and yes. All of these features are available. Please review the Classcaster FAQ for details.
• Can I create a blog for our Library? Admissions Office? Career Services?
• Yes. Folks from member schools are free to create blogs so long as the blogs are related to the function of the law school. Blogs of a personal nature are beyond the scope of Classcaster.
• I'm not really interested in podcasting, but would like to have blog, may I use Classcaster?
• Yes. We know not everyone is interested in podcasting, but may like to try blogging. By all means, try Classcaster.
  

The good folks at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) have posted some of their TED Talks and the talk by Hans Rosling (Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden) is a real corker.

Here's his blog.

Watch this video and in 10 minutes, you will be smarter.

This gives me all sorts of ideas about using data to teach. I have read Tufte and long been a student of graphical approaches to making complex topics more clear, but Professor Rosling's demonstration and enthusiasm really shows how data, statistics and animated graphics of simple charts can make the information come alive.

I've been having some fascinating discussions with Elmer Masters, CALI's Internet Guy(tm). We have been hashing out the next phase of the Legal Education Podcasting Project (or LEPP II for short). The success of LEPP I and the amount of press that podcasting and education is getting that podcasting education content is going thermonuclear.

In LEPP I, 30 faculty recorded their own classroom lectures or created weekly summaries. I have not doubt that we could double or triple that number in the Fall of 2006, but how can we 10x or 100x it?

The solution, I believe, is at the edges of the network - the students.

What if we could design the system so that students who get faculty permissions do the work of recording the class and creating the podcast for the rest of their students in the class? This would remove the barrier of time and unfamiliarity from the the faculty. It also places the tech part of podcasting into the hands of digital natives (vs. faculty who are digital immigrants).

This ideas is inspired by Don Zhou (here's a link is to a podcast interview I did with Don) who is a a law librarian at William Mitchell College of Law and a law student. Don went to his instructors and asked them if he could record the classes and post them for the rest of the students as podcastas. Two agreed and he provided this service to much rejoicing from his fellow students. Why not expand on this idea?

In short, the system would operate like this...

1. CALI announces the availability of blog space for LEPP II and encourages faculty to find student volunteers, students to approach faculty or whoever makes the first move.
2. Students would get explicit permission from their instructors and explain the issues involved in podcasting
3. Podcasting happens...

We (as in CALI) need to work out the logistics of how students get faculty to communicate their permission to us. We would also create FAQs, screencasts and other support materials to explain how everything works to the faculty, student podcaster and other students. We would need to work out what happens if a student podcaster drops the ball (and we start getting nasty-grams from the other students in the class).

It would be great to find some tangible way to incentivize or reward student podasting volunteers, but maybe the appreciation of their peers is sufficient. We could include some kind of PayPal link and softly ask the other students who are using the podcasts to give a couple of bucks that we would route back to the student podcast volunteer if they maintain a good record of keeping the podcasts coming. That would provide an incentive, but it might blunt the impulse to "volunteer" and turn in more into a work-for-hire type situation. This is always a difficult balance.

A student who volunteers to record all of his classes (and secures permission from all his instructors) could rake in a couple of hundred dollars or could get stiffed. If we create a marketplace, will an invisible hand insure quality and timeliness?

You might ask, why doesn't CALI just pay students to do this? Well, do the math. There are 200 law schools offering 100+ courses each semester. That's 20,000 courses. The numbers won't scale for CALI as a non-profit. We have to rely on the faculty or students to make the recordings and hope that they see the benefit that it accrues to them.

More to come on this.

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

Professor Charles Shafer of the University of Baltimore School of Law created weekly summaries for his evening division Torts class.

This podcast is 29 minutes long.

Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - CharlesShafer.mp3

Two articles crossed my path today and I would like to juxtapose two clips. The first is from the New York Times titled "Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in Originality" by Diana Jean Schemo. Here's the quote...

"...William Cronon, a historian at the University of Wisconsin who wrote the American Historical Association’s statement on ethics, said textbooks were usually corporate-driven collaborative efforts, in which the publisher had extensive rights to hire additional writers, researchers and editors and to make major revisions without the authors’ final approval. The books typically synthesize hundreds of works without using footnotes to credit sources..."

Contrast this with the following clip from a Washington Post article titled "Death by Wikipedia: The Kenneth Lay Chronicles" by Frank Ahrens...

"...Unlike, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia has no formal peer review for its articles. They may be written by experts or insane crazy people. Or worse, insane crazy people with an agenda. And Internet access..."

The Times article bashes textbook publishers for being a little fast and loose with attribution and using a little too much market-think in their promotion of authors or scholars as "brands".

The Wapo article bashes Wikipedia for not being peer-reviewed, but he contradicts himself by giving evidence of peer-review that resulted in the construction of the Ken Lay Death article.

In short, both the textbook publishers and Wikipedia are accused of having an agenda that is not fully disclosed and so is unethical. In the case of textbook publishers, they have the intellectual property rights to do so which isn't an excuse, but reduces the Times piece to exposure of a "dirty little secret".

Wikipedia needs no defense. It's editorial system worked as advertised. A breaking story was created and updated dozens of times as new information and new editors came online to make contributions. That's how Wikipedia works. The Wapo columnist doesn't get it.

In my opinion Wikipedia comes out looking a lot better than the textbook publishers. They aren't hiding anything and they aren't marketing dead scholars as a "brand". The Wikipedians strove to get the story right. The textbook publishers strove to make more sales and perhaps secondarily, serve education. I am well along the path of thinking that commercial publishers cannot be trusted with the responsibility of serving education. It appears to be antithical to and unreconcilable with making a profit.

Tell me I am wrong.

In my presentation at the CALI Conference last month (screencast/podcast), one of my arguments for creating a digital repository of course materials was avian flu.

I took some jibes for that from some quarters, but I have been running across other articles on the web that support my position.

The blog Lanny on Learning says...

"...This type of thinking might very well encourage a lot of instructors who otherwise wouldn’t consider this sort of thing to start thinking about podcasting or vidcasting, or perhaps taking audio and video clips and embedding in Web site that might include text based materials or other type of content that instructors might display during class..."

That was my exact point. Crisis = Opportunity for selling digitization and distance learning ideas to otherwise reluctant faculty and institutions.

On the University of Louisville's website, there is an article called "Preparing you for emergencies: Preparing for Avian Flu" with this quote...

"...University students may have the opportunity to continue their classes through distance learning. Encourage college aged children to take advantage of any opportunity for distance learning..."

Yes, university students may have that opportunity, but only if university faculty get with the program in time.

Finally, even the State Department of the US Government seems to agrees with me. Chapter 14: Pandemic Threats (Avian Flu, etc.) is a preparedness checklist with this item on it...

"...Virtual School/Distance Learning plan in place..."

Yes indeed!

If you search Google for "avian flu" and "distance learning" together, you will find plenty more examples.

I really do not mean to belabor this point. In my keynote talk, I was using this idea to demonstrate that "nimble" organizations are more able to deal with crisis and although we shouldn't structure all of our planning around crisis, avian flu is just another reason to become nimble by having our course materials in an easily accessible digital repository where they can be remixed for many purposes. Crisis is just one of them.

As posted earlier, I gave a talk at AALL with Jim Milles. Here is a link to a screencast version of my portion of the talk (audio synced with the slides).

This screencast is 27 minutes long.

Jim Milles and I co-presented in a talk at the American Association of Law Libraries conference in St. Louis on Monday, July 10, 2006.

Here is a link to my powerpoint slides - InvasionofthePodcastPeoplet.ppt

Jim will be posting his slides and perhaps a recording of this presentation as a podcast at his podcast blog, Check This Out.

Later, I will be posting a link to a screencast version of my part of the talk.

Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - InvasionPodcastPeople.mp3

Thanks for Fred Barnhart at Loyola University -Chicago School of Law for inviting me to speak.

This is a podcast of a presentation given by Larry Farmer of BYU law school at Subtech 2006 in Oslo, Norway.

The title of this talk is "New Computer Tools to Facilitate Learning in a Legal Interviewing & Counseling Course", but Larry covers some very interesting ground that belies the title.

This podcast is 1 hour, 2 minutes and 45 seconds long.

Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - LarryFarmer.mp3

This is a podcast from Subtech 2006.

This talk is titled "Using a VLE to Support Reflective Learning and Personal Development Planning Within a 1st Year Law Module" given by Sefton Bloxham and Andrea Cerevkova of Edge Hill University.

This podcast is 47 minutes long.

Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - Bloxham_Cerevkova.mp3

In the Spring/Winter 2006 semester, CALI conducted the Legal Education Podcasting Project where about 30 faculty recorded their classroom lectures or created weekly summary podcasts for their students.

We did a mid-semester survey and the results were reported here. The PDF of that report is here.

I have also conducted about a dozen interviews with the participating faculty and posted these interviews as podcasts. This link will bring up all of those interviews.

I have compiled the results of our end-of-semester survey and the full report as a PDF can be found here - LEPPEndSemesterSurvey.pdf

The survey results are fairly consistent with the mid-semester survey, but there are some interesting things to porint out.

38.4% listened to most or all of the podcastst. Since some of the courses only used weekly summary podcasts, that number may be higher if you include the 6-10 survey respondents. For a brand new technology to get 50% of the students to use it so much is a pretty good indicator.

The majority of students listened to the podcasts on their PCs or laptops. This, I believe is indicative of the penetration of iPods and other MP3 players in the "older student" market. A year old Pew Research survey (PDF) tells us that 1 in 5 American between 18-28 own MP3 players and law students probably skew towards the higher end of that age group.

THIS is interesting and not too unexpected. We heard from several faculty that they had received emails from students who were NOT in their course THANKING them for their podcasts. In some cases, these were students who were not even in law school. It was for this reason that we asked faculty podcasters to NOT put passwords on their blogs to see if there would be any second-order effects and this is the proof.

It is important to note that we did not advertise in any explicit way and that it's a little difficult to find the course podcasts, so any indicators of extra-course use is significant. Most of the faculty I have talked to about this were happy that students outside of their course found their podcasts useful. At least one faculty was concerned that the podcasts may be used inappropriately or out of context.

We wanted to see if we could measure any significant skipping of classes due to the availabiilty of the podcasts. None of the faculty interviewed said they noticed drops in attendance, but we get a more mixed message from the survey results. Oddly, some students reported attending the podcasted classes more than other classes.

What might not be clear from our survey question is that students felt more comfortable skipping a class that they would've had to skip anyway due to family emergency, weather or other reasons. The faculty I interviewed definitely indicated that students were pleased to be able to listen to podcasts for classes that they had to miss.

73.8% indicated Excellent or Above Average value. I don't doubt that the survey instrument skews toward students who used and liked the podcasts, but that's a pretty good number anyway.

We are working on plans for LEPP II. We are looking at a three-pronged approach...

1. Support for individual faculty as in LEPP I,
2. Support for law school IT departments that want to provide podcasting services to all of their faculty and courses, and,
3. Support for students who are willing to get permission from their instructors and do the work of recording and posting podcasts for the benefit of everyone in the courses they are taking.

This last one really pushes podcasting to the edges of the network and is perhaps our most viral strategy. Stay tuned for more developments.

Here is a story from Diny Peters, a consultant to European law schools who I worked with on the Rechtenonline project in the Netherlands several years ago. Diny is a delightful and insightful person who talks about working on the Rechtononline project which was (and is) a very ambitious project for the Dutch.

The podcast is 4 minutes 44 seconds long.

Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - DinyPeters__Interview.mp3

Here is another short (1 minute) story from Subtech 2006 told by Jon Bing of the University of Oslo.

Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - JonBing_Interview.mp3

As part of a workshop during Subtech 2006, I had participants interview each other asking to share a story about a success or failure in using ICT in legal education.

This short podcast (4:30) is Claes Martinsson of the Göteborg University in Sweden. The interviewer is Diny Peters from The Netherlands.

Click to listen to the podcast or right-click to download the MP3 - ClaesMartinsson_Interview.mp3

I will be posting more Subtech 2006 podcasts soon. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to copy all of the files off of several digital recorders and they are in my luggage which is still in Copenhagen (hopefully) making its way to Chicago.

This is another podcast from Subtech 2006 which I attended in Oslo, Norway.

Professor Giovanni Sartor, Marie-Curie Professor of Legal Informatics and Legal Theory. European University Institute, Florence spoke on "Proprietary and Communal Knowledge: The Case of Open Source"

The podcast is 56 minutes long.

Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - GiovanniSartorSubtech2006.mp3

Here is another short podcast which is a discussion between Ralph Amissah and Stefan Bengtsson about Success (or Failure) Stories using IT in Education.

Ralph has worked on SiSU project (website here) for quite a while.

Stefan is a multimedia developer at Lunds University Faculty of Law in Sweden.

This podcast is 9 minutes and 2 seconds long.

Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - Amissah_Bengtsson_Interview.mp3

Here is another podcast of a presentation given at Subtech 2006 in Oslo, Norway on Friday, June 20, 2006.

The speakers were Paul Maharg, Pat McKellar, Sefton Bloxham and Karen Barton.

The title of the presentation was "Current E-learning Projects, and Also a 'state of play' Presentation: Overview of What's Happening in the UK Currently as Regards Legal Education, and Where the Possible Futures of the Discipline Lie".

The powerpoints for the presentation are here.

Paul Maharg blogs about it here.

From the viewpoint of this American, the Brits are doing amazing things with technology that is deeply relevant and intelligently driven by the pedagogy in legal education. There is almost too much information to absorb here.

I refer you to the following for more information...

• Ardcalloch Virtual Town for Legal Education
• Siberdam (Dutch Ardcalloch) project- slideshow here (in Dutch)
• Using e-portfolios in legal education
• LUVLE - Lancaster University's Virtual Learning Environment
• Zeugma - Paul Maharg's (and soon others) who blog on legal education and technology in the UK.

This podcast is 55 minutes and 19 seconds long.

Click the link to listen or right click to download the MP3 - MahargMcKellarBloxhmaBarton.mp3

Here is the first of several podcasts from Subtech 2006 conference that I attended in Oslo, Norway this past week.

Tom Bruce, Director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell gave a talk that was was insightful and probing and wickedly funny. At one point he played a Flash animation that must be experienced to be understood - link here.

This podcast is 31 minutes long.

To listen in your browser, click the link or right-click to download the MP3 - TomBruceSubtech2006.mp3

As part of a workshop I ran with Deb Quentel at Subtech2006 in Oslo, Norway, I had participants interview each other on the topic of "Lessons Learned using ICT in Legal Education". This admittedly broad subject lent itself to telling stories that could cover a wide swath of subjects and the podcasts I will be posted indicate this. These "interviews" were unscripted and off-the-cuff and the room was rather noisy with half-a-dozen interviews going on at the same time. First lesson about podcasting to learn - find a quiet space. I could not post some of the recordings do to the ambient noise making the subjects voices almost unintelligible.

This is first of several podcasts and is the interview between Professor Paul Maharg of the University of Strathclyde (Paul blogs here) and Professor Peter Martin of Cornell Law School. Peter is a co-founder of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell.

This discussion between Martin and Maharg is 12 minutes long.

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