CALIopolis

Put this blog post under thinking out loud.

I have been watching the rise of YouTube and Flickr and other media sharing and social software/networking sites and I always wonder what kind of educational angle there is (it's my job) and I think I see where it's headed.

I was reading about Yale's grant from the Hewlett Foundation to post seven courses to the web- materials, syllabus, video - essentially everything but the credit. The Hewlett Foundation is giving them $700,000 to do this and I my first thought was ... that won't scale.

What would scale?

What if the students did the recording themselves and posted them to YouTube? That would scale.

It may sound silly to ask students to do this, but if I believe that video recording equipment will be in every cell phone in about five years. This is jist an extension of Moore's Law applied to cell phones (many of which already have digital cameras).

Besides, cell phones already have a wireless network connection built-in and I can imagine that while the video is being recorded and stored locally, it is also being streamed directly to YouTube.

Now, let's build on that.

As the student types her notes into the course wiki (as are other students) they become part of the shared note-taking ecosystem just for that class. Maybe the progressive and far-thinking university has set-up a system like this for their students, but more likely, the students (who are digital natives) have already taken the initiative and done this for themselves. It would not cost much to setup a private wiki using JotSmart or Socialtext.

Flickr comes in as a photostream of what the instructor is writing on the whiteboard which is valuable for different reasons than the video stream on YouTube.

Of course, someone is making an old-fashioned sound-only recording that is streamed/saved to the course blog so that everyone else automatically gets it from the RSS feed they subscribed to at the beginning of the semester. There are plenty of free blog/podcasting services - many are free.

What is missing from this scenario?

The 'official' course website, of course. It is not irrelevant, but it is not the only aspect of the course that is on the web - it's probably just a starting point. The real, valuable information is what the students produce because it represents their efforts to learn.

Faculty may worry about staying ahead of their students, but I think they don't have to worry - they can never stay ahead of their students. Certainly, the IT departments at universities cannot and why should they when students have all these tools available to them.

Passwords and access-limited sites are not going to be the norm for these students. They are not competing with other students on the curve, they are all trying to learn. Once there is an ecosystem of this type of learning activity, there will be network effects emerging. Students having trouble will search other student's notes who took the same class (perhaps from the same instructor or others using the same book). It sounds like this would be a meta-tagging/findability nightmare, but not if you include del.icio.us-like tagging to create an ad-hoc taxonomy (or folksonomy) so that people can find each other's stuff in a very granular way.

All of these tools exist today (well, except for the cell-phone video cams that can stream to YouTube) and so we don't have to figure out how to design the software. There are intellectual property implications all over the place, but if Yale is giving away the video of the course, how can they object if someone else makes a video for themselves and gives it away?

In a few years, you won't be able to find a university or professor who can get away with not allowing the classroom to be video or audio recorded.

Isn't this a good thing?

Students would be smarter, education widely/universally available.

I think so.

CALI has posted its first Family Law lessons on the CALI website. There are four lessons posted so far and many more to come...

• Alimony by Professor Cynthia Starnes from Michigan State,
• Classifying Special Types of Marital Property,
• Marriage Regulations, and
• Visitation and Relocation by Professor Janet Richards from the University of Menphis.

In addition to Professors Starnes and Richards, the other Family Law Fellows working on lessons are...

• Professor Len Biernat from Hamline,
• Andrea Charlow from Drake, and,
  
• Ruthann Robson - CUNY

Although the lessons are individually authored by the faculty, they review each others work and coordinate on topic selection and share ideas and insights. The lessons are also internally reviewed by CALI staff and they are anonymously reviewed by law faculty on the CALI Editorial Board. This is how CALI Fellowships work. (BTW, we are always looking for faculty with all kinds of subject matter expertise to join the CEB. Contact Deb Quentel - dquentel@cali.org).

The Family Law Fellows have worked exceptionally hard to create high quality computer tutorials for students taking Family Law in law school. These are not flashcards.

I have watched Deb Quentel (CALI's Director of Curriculum Development and General Counsel) sweat blood over the materials in the CALI Lesson Library and I have been a lurker to some of the intense work that goes into authoring CALI lessons in the past. We at CALI are extremely proud of the work our authors do.

Look for more Family Law lessons to be posted in the coming months.

The Chronicle reports (subscription required) that Yale will be posting audio and video of select courses for free, for everyone on the Internet. From the Yale press release...

"...The project will create multidimensional packages—including full transcripts in several languages, syllabi, and other course materials—for seven courses and design a web interface for these materials, to be launched in the fall of 2007..."

Wow!

The Chronicle article also mentions Notre Dame's OpenCourseware initiative...

"...Notre Dame OCW is a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners throughout the world.

We hope you find Notre Dame OCW valuable, whether you're a student looking for some extra help, a faculty member trying to prepare a new course, or just interested in learning more about a topic that interests you...."

Emphasis mine.

I am delighted to see that they recognize the value of open courseware for other faculty, not just students, because I believe that opening up education will greatly benefit education itself. We had some evidence of this in the Legal Education Podcasting Project where faculty listened to other faculty's podcasts to improve their own teaching.

This is starting to look like a serious trend with some serious momentum. Here at CALI we are working on a similar project in the area of legal education and podcasting that we call the Legal Education Podcasting Commons. No further information available at this time as we are still in development.

One of our explcit goals, however, is to find ways to serve law faculty so that they can improve their own teaching. The tricky part is making small parts of a course or a lecture 'findable' so that you don't have to wade through dozens of hours of media to find something relevant.

On the student side, we have the same problem. Students want information that will help thme with specific learning objectives and with any text-based information, you can use search engines. Audio and video searching is more problematic and so the next best thing is good metadata with links into the material.

I don't know if MIT, Yale or Notre Dame is considering the granularity issue in their production. It's challenging to instructors to think that their material can be taken out of context, but that's the way students learn.

More on this later.

Matthew Small, BlackBoard's General Counsel is quoted today in a Chronicle for Higher Education article (subscription required)...

"..."We don't claim to have invented the course management system," said Matthew Small, senior vice president and general counsel for Blackboard. "This is about specific functionality."..."

That's correct, they don't and some of the hyperbole about their lawsuit has been over the top .... but I would claim not unjustified.

You see, patents are tricky and complex things and no one can really really tell you if something is infringing a patent without the full-on mess of a lawsuit. Everything else is a calculated risk.

This doesn't cause a complete meltdown of all commerce for several reasons.

1. The patent holder doesn't want to kill off everyone who wants to use the patented technology, they want people to use it and pay them a royalty. If they set the royalty price too high, no one buys and the patent holder gets bupkis. This is even true for patent trolls.
   
   
2. In the case where multiple patents are held by multiple companies, they will sometimes agree not to sue each other - either formally or informally. Patent portfolis are like nuclear weapons in that they provide mutually assured destruction to anyone who launches first.
   
   
3. Patent litigation is expensive and a calculated risk for both sides. A company could pay a lot of money just to get the patent and lose it all in the first infringement suit. You place your bets and roll the dice...

The educational technology area hasn't seen many patent lawsuits. There are patents out there for educational processes and related technologies, but so far, no seems to have pulled the trigger.

BlackBoard is the first to pull the trigger. They launched without warning, they did the equivalent of yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theatre and everyone is wondering if they have to scramble for the exits or not.

Mr. Small's comments seem to indicate that there is a fire, but it's a small one and it's only going to burn down one company's house, but the problem with yelling 'Fire' is that everyone else is afraid of it spreading. We panic. This is why it is against the law to yell 'Fire' when there isn't one.

BlackBoard has done the social equivalent. They have created fear and panic in the educational technology community and brought down untold vitriol on their good name. They are still acting surprised by this and I am wondering if this is calculated or plain cluelessness. Either one is not good for BlackBoard.

If they have a real beef with Desire2Learn, they should have worked it out quietly amongst themselves. Companies do this all the time. By making a federal case out it (literally), they invite the court of public opinion to the party.

Desire2Learn is not safe either. If they decide to settle because BlackBoard makes a reasonable offer of settlement (happens all the time), then the whole ed tech community will think we have been shafted by the greedy for-profit companies. It will looked on as a slimy, deal cut in a smoke-filled backroom amongst cigar-chomping corporate barons. It will look like us against them. BlackBoard and Desire2Learn are part of our community, but these activities make us question their allegiances. That's real bad for everyone. We get nowhere when we can't trust our community members.

BlackBoard should have seen this coming. There are numerous examples in other parts of the technology world (Microsoft, Rambus, SCO, etc.) and it's not like them to be so clueless.

When the media is reporting on a new story that involves a court case or a legal issue, they naturally turn to legal experts to provide commentary. Many of those experts are law professors and I know of many law schools that provide lists of law professors with expertise who are willing to speak on to reporters. It's a common way to get the law school's name into the media and out to future applicant pools.

Schools with good media contacts might take this a step further and contact their media sources offering law professors when a new story breaks.California Western School of Law takes this a step further and adds a public service twist.

They are posting 10 minute podcasts from their faculty on current legal issues.

"... Law in 10 is a weekly podcast produced by California Western School of Law, which brings you an expert analysis of the latest legal news, all in 10 minutes..."

CWSL is posting one of these podcasts per week and so far have covered such topics as the legality of Presidentt Bush's military tribunals, a local (San Diego) police shooting incident and changes to the legal workplace due to generational gaps (and others).

Ten minutes is more than you would get on CNN or Fox when they turn to an expert and these podcasts not only benefit the listeners, they benefit the law school and the faculty who are speaking.

It's a brilliant idea.

Professor Mike Madison at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law has decided to podcast one of his courses - well, sort of.

"...Classes began yesterday, and right off the bat, a first-year student approached me and asked me if I minded his recording the class...."

He has allowed the student to do the podcasting for his class (and the rest of the students), but he asks some excellent questions about this new trend and there some excellent discussion ensues in the comments to this post on his excellent blog Madisonian.

Ever wondered what Deans do?

Dean Frank H. Wu of Wayne State University Law School provides some insight. In what I believe to be the first ever law school Dean blog, he has been regularly posting articles here.

When I first saw the blog created on Classcaster, I was afraid it would see very infrequent posts or posts of little substance. Instead, Dean Wu has been righting insightful and useful articles - ostensibly aimed at his own students and law school community at Wayne State, but interesting to everyone else in legal education as well.

He has been posting about once a week since the beginning of the school year and has embarked on a "series" ...

" .... In a series of posts to this blog, I’ll describe “what a dean does.” It is important to ensure all stakeholders are aware of the responsibilities of anyone who is entrusted with a leadership role...."

I know its tough to blog and wonder if anyone is reading. The key is compelling content and honesty and I think Dean Wu has made a great start.

An excellent article in the TimesOnline compares the podcasting of university lectures to time-shifting television shows like you can do with Tivo or other digital recorders or like you can do when you download televisions shows from iTunes or watch videso on YouTube.

I think this is an apt comparison. Podcasting gives students more options to integrate their learning into their busy schedules. Podcasts lets the student attend the class and re-attend the class again and again. Some of the students who responded to our survey about the Legal Education Podcasting Project admitted to listening to some podcasts several times.

Isn't that a good thing?

The article mentions the sticking point with some faculty and universties...

"... The primary reason for not wiring up the lecture hall is the fear it will upset the traditional classroom dynamic. Podcasts will become a study aid for the truant student, goes the thinking, and if the podcasts catch on, students will skip class en masse and the entire learning experience will be thrown into turmoil..."

Our student survey also revealed that very few students admitted to skipping class because of the availability of the podcast. The instructors (who we also interviewed) reported no noticable change in attendance patterns, but it may be too early to tell.

TechnicianOnline reports that Professor Robert Schrag at North Carolina State University offered his students podcasts for $2.50 per download. One day later, the Chronicle reports that he was asked to stop this service almost as soon as it was reported and discussed on Slashdot.

The students seemed happy to have the service available. I am not certain that having to pay for the service above and beyond the cost of tuition is a great idea, however.

We had a student (link to interview with the law student) volunteer to record and post all of his instructor's lectures and we provided him with a digital recorder to do so (after he got permission from the instructors, of course) and I have blogged on the idea that students would probably be more than willing to handle the small amount of work necessary to create and post the podcasts. With CALI providing the blog, disk space and bandwidth via Classcaster, there is almost no cost to law faculty who want to make their classroom lectures available to their students and others.

I was most gratified to read this quote from the TimesOnline article quoting Sally Feldman, the Dean of Westminster University’s School for Media, Arts and Design and chair of the university’s web group...

"... One of the reasons the podcast will become as essential as the pen and paper is because of the growing need for accountability in the classroom, she adds: "It is about time that we started being more concerned about performance in education."..."

I see accountability as the "stick" in this discussion, but it can also be a "carrot" where faculty can learn from each other's lectures or even from listening to their own podcasts. We don't talk much about professional development of law faculty as educators and podcasting may be a way to back into that conversation.