CALIopolis

I ran across Lee Arnold's video explaining the Bush Tax Cut some months ago and felt that it conveyed a complex topic with extreme clarity in a very short amount of time. I was gratified to see that Arnold has a series of videos on YouTube that you can access from here.

What is particularly interesting is his use of symbols that are apparently derived from the work of Howard Odum. Arnold calls it ecolanguage. Wikipedia tells me...

...Howard Thomas Odum (1924–2002), known as H.T. Odum or Tom Odum, was an American ecosystem ecologist and a professor at the University of Florida. He was collectively known as one of the "Fathers of Ecology" together with his brother Eugene...

I am fascinated by Arnold's multimedia creations that short, powerful and enlightening in so little space and time.

I am convinced that there is an interesting project to develop a similar set of symbols - and also multimedia presentations - that could bring clarity to teaching the law. This is an idea I have been working on for a while that I call "Talking Flowcharts".

The first examples I saw of them in law were done by William Andersen from the University of Washington School of Law and they are embodied in his CALI lessons on Administrative Law.

In the original CALI lessons, Andersen included video and audio of him talking and explaining the charts as he walked students through the Administrative Procedure Act. Unfortunately, this was 1993 and the size of the media files was too large to be able to effectively distribute and we have never gone back to re-integrate them now that video and audio flies around the web with such ease.

James Maule, author of many, many CALI Tax lessons likes to point to the work of Arnold Mitchel, an International Tax Attorney who has created hundreds of charts explaining short concepts on his area of practice.

Finally, there is the excellent work of Professor Karl Manheim on his Constitutional Law charts.

All of these charts can be produced using Visio or SmartDraw or other tools and it's would be somewhat straightforward to use Camtasia to create screencasts where narration could be added, but I my goal is larger. I want to create a consistent system or software that lets any law faculty easily create their own talking flowchart. Lee Arnold's symbology makes me think that we could create something that would resonate with a large number of faculty and would generate multimedia presentations that are powerful and instructive.

I may be wrong however.

Law can be viciously complex and difficult to reduce to such symbols and the whole project would be open to the criticism of oversimplification. I would counter, however, that the talking flowcharts should not replace, but supplement - the usual argument for new teaching materials.

I would also contend that a talking flowchart is closer to what faculty do in the classroom with the chalk ... er ... whiteboard. They talk and draw circles and arrows and stab and gesture to emphasize key points. Talking flowcharts would have to imbue those same "gestures".

More exploration on this topic to come.

I have compiled the results from the 2007 Survey of Law Students who were in podcasted courses.

First, the number of students responding was a less than half from last year (120 in 2007 vs. 300 in 2006).

A couple of interesting trends are noticable. More students knew about podcasting this time around.

More students used portable MP3 players to listen to podcasts than before (24% vs. 17%), but the PC was the primary listening device.

More students listened to podcasts from other professors (15% vs. 8%), so awareness of podcasting professors is growing.

Podcasts as attendance-supressors seemed to decline with this survey. 2% said they attended less classes vs. 7% last year. 11% said they skipped classes vs. 12% last year.

Students rated podcasts value as EXCELLENT or ABOVE AVERAGE at about the same rate - 75% in 2007 vs. 74%.

The summary report is available here - 2007Survey.pdf - in PDF format.

The summary of comments is here - 2007SurveyComments.pdf

I visit law school websites all the time and I have come to the conclusion that they fall into the following categories...

• The "Where in the World" website where you cannot find a mailing address to save your life and thus cannot google-map or ship anything to anyone at the school. At best they have a PO box (which Fedex and UPS disdain) and makes me think that the entire school is just a PO drop box.
  
• The "I guess our university has a law school" website where all of the searches lead to the university library, the university faculty list and the university visitor information.
  
• The "Law Library Ascendant" website where the school has a home page and all the links lead to law library-branded pages.
  
• The "CNN Law School" website where there are dozens of press releases, faculty publication, event calendars and weather in <our fair city>. Must be run by the public affairs department.
  
• The "Jackson Pollock is our Webmaster" where I can't tell where anything is going.

Almost all law school websites have at least the following on the home page...

• a picture of a brick building,
  
• Happy, happy, fun time, multi-cultural, not-stressed-out students fromwearing LL Bean clothes. You never see a picture of a real law students (gangsta jeans, nine-inch nails t-shirt, NPR baseball cap topsiders/no socks and starbucks cup firmly in hand).
  
• Menus...lots of menus

Which one is your website?

The Internet Bar Organization is sponsoring a contest for law students (and other qualified grads) where the prize if all expenses paid to Hong Kong to attend the International Online Dispute Resolution Group
Forum in Hong Kong.

Dan Rainey, Director of the Office of Alternative Dispute Resolution Services at the National Mediation Board says...

...The InternetBar.org competition is designed to encourage ideas and interaction around the problem of creating a trusted online environment, which is one of the biggest issues in creating a useful online dispute resolution community. The contest is open to a wide range of students and recent graduates from a number of disciplines (this is NOT a law school-limited competition) and will run from now through July of this year...

... and he adds ...

The contest will run in three phases. The first is an online discussion open to all, wherein the contestants will engage in an online dialogue regarding trusted online communities. After the first round of discussions, the judges will select a smaller number of contestants to continue the discussion in a more focused manner, and then in early July the judges will pick up to 15 contestants to write a paper about the discussion and their notions of how to create a trusted online community. From the submitted papers, the judges will pick one as the grand prize winner, and that person will become the recorder for the

December meeting of the International Online Dispute Resolution Group Forum in Hong Kong. All expenses to the conference will be paid for the
grand prize winner.

It looks like an interesting competition and I will be watching the developments of the Internet Bar in the future.

The Free Software Foundation is doing research (look under April 12, 2007 New Flash) on when the term "Intellectual Property" first started to be used and as part of that research they are asking folks to send them copies of the pages in old (1970's-80's) course catalogs where the term was first used in a course name or description.

Help them out.

Gene Koo of the Harvard Berkman Center has published a white paper titled "New Skills, New Learning: Legal Education and the Promise of Technology". The research was sponsored by LexisNexis and the results are both insightful and cogent.

I had several conversations with Gene about the project and he did a marvelous job pulling together the survey results and culling the information into a very useful report.

The paper is available as here as a wiki where you can contribute your own ideas and reactions (you can also get the PDF version from there as well).

Gene will also be giving a presentation on the paper at Berkman...

Tuesday, May 22
12:30pm - 1:30pm
23 Everett Street, Cambridge MA

The presentation will also be streamed live over the Web and in Second Life. More info here ...

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/webcast