CALIopolis

I am so excited to make this post.

Here's the press release.

What does the new website, Avvo, which rates lawyers and CALI Awards have to do with each other?

Read on...

A new website, Avvo (shortened "avvocato" which is italian for lawyer) purports to rank lawyers based on objective algorithmic evidence...

"...scores are calculated using a mathematical model, all lawyers are judged by the same standards. The Avvo Rating takes into account many factors, including experience, professional achievements, and disciplinary sanctions..."

I looked up some famous lawyers I know about and they did indeed have a lower score. For example, see "Fast Eddie" Vrdolyak's rating here. Mr. Vrdolyak was a longtime alderman in the Chicago City Council and was recently indicted on fraud charges. This wasn't the reason for his low score - rather he had been sanctioned by the ARDC in the past.

Of more personal interest, a commenter on Slashdot noted that they have a higher score due to the CALI Awards they received in law school. Law students receive a CALI for achieving the highest grade in a course. Looks like Avvo's been crawling the CALI website.

Only half the law schools in the U.S. participate in the CALI Excellence for the Future Awards program. Perhaps I will get a few more emails this week.

A few years back, someone started posting death rates for hospitals and doctors on the web. It was a simple statistic, but it's one of those statistics that is easy to misinterpret out of context. Some doctors just have sicker patients, right?

I was wondering why no one seems to have posted attorney ratings based on wins/losses in court cases. Wouldn't you like to know if your attorney was a "winner"?

Avvo doesn't do that...yet.

The reason for the Slashdot story is that an attorney is suing Avvo for his low rating. It looks like the data that Avvo is using is publicly available information, which would be an argument in their favor, I presume (IANAL).

More relevant, Avvo lets former clients post reviews of their experiences with attorneys. Sort of like an Angie's List for lawyers (though Angie doesn't have any listings or ratings for lawyers). Why shouldn't clients rate lawyers like they do plumbers, carpenters and dog-walkers?

It looks like someone has thought about suing Angie's List for a poor rating posted by a user, but ...

"... he'd like to sue Angie's List but that his attorney tells him it's protected..."

Angie's List doesn't rate vendors though - the users do. Angie just aggregates the information.

I can certainly see a downside to non-contextual rankings and sites like RateMyProfessor.com and the US News Rankings of law schools have both been villified for their lack of context (former) or opaque/unfair methodology (latter).

Still, more information is better and the web is certainly all about more information.

Right?

It will be interesting to see where this goes.

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.

Social Software or Web 2.0 are buzz phrases much overused and ill-defined these days, but I ran across an explanation by Gene Smith that helps to evaluate social software/web 2.0 websites.

Here are Gene's definitions...

• Identity - a way of uniquely identifying people in the system
• Presence - a way of knowing who is online, available or otherwise nearby
• Relationships - a way of describing how two users in the system are related (e.g. in Flickr, people can be contacts, friends of family)
• Conversations - a way of talking to other people through the system
• Groups - a way of forming communities of interest
• Reputation - a way of knowing the status of other people in the system (who's a good citizen? who can be trusted?)
• Sharing - a way of sharing things that are meaningful to participants (like photos or videos)

Gene created the honeycomb that is displayed at the top this post. I want to use this to explore this in relation to websites and services used by law faculty and projects that CALI is working on right now.

First, let's look at SSRN.

• Identity - the authors are known,
• Presence - there is no way to know who downloads your papers or who is currently online at any time,
  
• Relationships - no way to establish relationships between papers or individuals,
• Reputations - the download counts are an oft-discussed proxy for reputation,
• Groups - there is a sense of groups by the institutions that establish collections of papers, but this is not controllable or customizable by visitors to the website,
• Conversations - conversations about the papers are held elsewhere (i.e. blogs, watercoolers, etc.)
  
• Sharing - SSRN is all about sharing your scholarly papers.

Now let's look at Blogs and by this I mean blogs where law professors hang out like the Law Professor's Blog Network, Volokh Conspiracy, PrawfsBlog, etc.

• Identity - the authors are known,
  
• Presence - no way to know who is online in real time, though sometimes the comment stream can seem almost real time,
  
• Relationships - no way to capture the relationships made,
  
• Reputation - this is hard to measure. Some law faculty certainly have changed their reputation in the community via their blogs, but there is generally no software metric for this except perhaps visitor or hit counts, but this is true for any website, so I come down on blogs having no reputation support built-in,
  
• Groups - All of the blogs mentioned above are "group blogs", but there is no way for visitors to join the group,
  
• Conversations - blogs are all about conversations,
  
• Sharing - the sharing is in the conversation and not in file sharing really.

Now let's look at Classcaster which is a blog network where law faculty mostly post their course podcasts (though it can be used for any legal educationl purpose - and is).

• Identity - The podcasters are known,
  
• Presence - no presence,
  
• Relationships - no relationship management,
  
• Reputation - no reputation metrics,
  
• Groups - no groups except the course for which the podcasts are made,
  
• Conversation - Classcaster hosts blogs so conversation is possible, but this has only been lightly used. The conversations about the course take place elsewhere,
  
• Sharing - the podcasts are shared (sometimes with anyone on the web).

Finally, let's look at TWEN which is the The West Education Network and a service offered by Thomson/West for law faculty to create course websites.

• Identity - everyone is known,
  
• Presence - I don't believe that TWEN has the feature of displaying currently logged in users - I could be wrong,
  
• Relationships - no way to capture relationships,
• Reputation - no reputation system that I know of,
  
• Groups - instructors create groups that are their courses, but there is no way for users to create ad-hoc groups,
  
• Conversations - TWEN has extensive capabilities for conversation - threaded discussions, comments, etc.
• Sharing - TWEN sites allow faculty to share files, links, documents with their students. I am not sure that students can share things with each other though, so perhaps this should be light green.
  

This interesting. It's important to note that not every social website needs to hit every point in the honeycomb to be useful or successful, it's just a way to understand what social software/web 2.0 means.

It does make me think about what it would take to add features or services to make blogs more reputation-aware or for SSRN to capture the conversations about scholarship.

CALI is working on a series of projects that address almost all of these ideas - but not in a single website - rather, a constellation of websites. Here's the honeycomb with the names of the CALI projects filled in...

• Identity - with over 100,000 law students and law faculty registered at the CALI website, this is where our identity system is centered,
  
• Presence - so far, nothing we are planning has presence built-in, but we may consider adding this in the future,
  
• Relationships - In eLangdell, users will form "relationships" by virtue of their adoption of materials as course materials. There is a natural relationship between casebook authors and the faculty who adopt the casebook. This is true at every level of adoption of a teaching resource. It is less clear whether any of our projects make these relationships more explicit.
  
• Reputation - ScholarshipPulse, The Legal Education Commons and eLangdell have reputation elements designed into them. In ScholarshipPulse, the idea is to allow visitors to filter comments based on the status of the person who made the comment. In the Legal Education Commons, users will rate materials by their suitability to task (and perhaps other metrics) so that these "signals" can be seen by others.
  
• Groups - CALIGroups is intended to explicitly support "communites of practice" of law faculty.
• Conversations - ScholarshipPulse is all about conversations about scholarship. The Legal Education Commons and eLangdell will support conversations about teaching materials. CALIGroups will support conversations within a community.
  
• Sharing - Legal Education Commons is all about sharing. eLangdell will support sharing between law faculty using each others' teaching materials. CALISpaces is for students to share materials with their instructors and classemates and CALIGroups will support sharing within a community of teachers.

This little exercise illustrates the extent of the projects we are working on and how they map to the social software/web 2.0 space. They also give me insight into how they fit together and hopefully will make it easier for me to explain these projects to others as they come online.

An interesting article at the SocialText wiki blog got to me to thinking about the post-blog/wiki-web, when these blogs and wikis and tags and RSS feeds are not artifacts in themselves, but are embedded into .... everything else.

The two common themes I find to measure all applications of the read/write web ... by which I mean ...

• blogs
• wikis
• rss feeds
• IM
• email
• comments
• tags and taggregators like del.icio.us

... are TIME and PERMANENCE.

TIME

Blogs, RSS feeds, comments and some email are highly TIME dependent. They lose their relevance over time. This is not an absolute of course, but you get the drift.

Wikis can either be somewhat independent of time (like Wikipedia which is capturing knowledge for all the future) or highly relevant for a period of time (the life of a project).

Tags can be both transitory and permanent in aggregation.

IM is rightnow and email is less so (though some people feel it is 24-48 hours and then fades fast).

PERMANENCE

Everything on the list except email and IMs are permanent (IMs and email are only permanent depending on document retention policies and subpeonas), but that's not my point. I mean permanence in terms of intention. IMs and email are not intended to be permanent, except in the most archived for posterity sort of way.

Blogs posts are intended to be a permanent record of work or thinking and their comments less so.

Wikis are intended to create permanent, though malleable artifacts - captured knowledge.

RSS feeds are as permanent as the blogger is alive - a kind of heartbeat or measure of 'aliveness'.

I subscribe to a many blogs and RSS feeds, but if it's dishing up too many posts-per-day, it feels like a noisesome child who won't shut up and I throttle it back or remove it from my feed reader.

What does this all have to do with education?

Education is a kind of transitory thing that we do to ourselves with the intention of permanent change. We learn something and then we hope we don't have to learn it again. We add to our permanent experience. We also depend on the permanence of the web (and Google's good graces) to permanently store things so that we can learn about them (again and again) in the future. Google is the largeest just-in-time educational system out there.

Our lives used to be front-loaded with education - 12 or 16 years of it if you finished college. More for the Masters or PhD. Now it's life-long learning (but it always was in many ways). I have considered going back to school for my PhD or for another Masters degree many times, but I always decide that I don't want the degree, I want the knowledge and I can get that from books, blogs and Google. My job practically requires that I be in a constant state of learning and I suspect that is true for many of today's knowledge workers.

I think the crude tools we use today for collaboration and commentary like blogs and wikis, will become less like end-point artifacts and more like features in every website and the wider worlds. Every store, product, person, concept, candidate and company will have multiple places where transitory (blogs, comments) and permanent (wikis) information can be found and contributed to.

Time is not well represented on the web. Everything almost always looks new. It would be cool if the software made the web page look more grey or well-thumbed so that we could immediately tell if we were reading old information. This is problematic, because 'old' is relative to the context. The web page that tells me if my flight is delayed is old to the point of uselessness the next day - unless I am studying yearly trends in flight delays, then the permanence of that information is valuable.

I am not sure of context rules, however.

Time and Permanence seem like good meta-identifiers of information and may help in understanding the larger semiotics of the webs.

I recently ran across a new blog that discusses current copyright issues and the most recent post is a real head-banger.

As the Executive Director of CALI, I find myself dealing with copyright issues all of the time. We run a pretty tight ship and have spent a lot of effort and money to make sure that we aren't violating anyones' copyright. We have spent the last several years replacing all of the images in our CALI lessons with new and original images for which we have absolute certainly of their copyright provenance.

That said, this article really made me think about how the digital world is pressuring our old notions of copyright and how the current system is so inefficient and difficult to navigate.

Larry Lessig writes often and eloquently on these same issues in the vein of preserving our culture. His recent work on orphaned copyright works is quite compelling and I, for one, am delighted that so smart a warrior is on our side.

Georgia Harper talks about librarians who, in order to fulfill their misson as archivists, must become "Defiant Preservationists".

(c)ollectanea is in my feed reader and it should be in yours as well.

I spent a wonderful day last week at the Berkman Center and gave a fast-paced talk about past, current and future CALI projects. The Berkman folks are involved in all kinds of imaginative, challenging and exciting projects that overlap with my work at CALI in all kinds of ways. I had a great time.

The kind folks at Berkman have already posted a podcast and video of my talk.

I look forward to working more closely with them in the future.

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.

The Inquirer has the PDF (no story yet) of the law suit filed by BlackBoard on July 26, 2006 (same day they got their patent) for patent infringement. So much for goodwill, it's going to be war and Desire2Learn is the front line.

This lawsuite has huge ramifications for the educational community - NOT just he ed-tech crowd either. On the front page of BlackBoard's website is this blurb...

"...The Blackboard Academic Suite™ enables institutions to embrace the full power of the Internet with access to any learning resource at any time from any place..."

They should probably add a qualifier now. How can you access the "full power of the Internet" if you are dealing with litigation fears and limitations of choice as a result?

This is just plain bad for everyone including BlackBoard and they really should re-think their strategy.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an article called "How Big is the Biggest Library:" that was riffing off of the Kevin Kelly NYTimes article "Scan This Book". In it, I estimated that the total size of all data was about 39 petabytes which came close to Kelly's estimate of 50 petabytes.

From a recent post at BarronsOnline...

"...Responding to a question about reports that Google plans to offer a hosted data storage service for consumers, Gates acknowledged that Microsoft is planning to offer “petabytes in the sky” to store data...."

Emphasis mine.

What an extraordinary statement. We have two mega-companies vying for storing all of our personal and business data.

Of course, the reason is that ability to attract page views to turn into targeted ads or attract attention or some other monetization of our own data back at us.

Fair enough, I think.

Back in the '90's we used to say that Content is King in order to attract attention to your website. Now it seems to be true all over again, but it's not just any content it's ALL content. This is surely the longest of the long tails and it is enabled by cheap disk space.

Maybe there are diamonds in those petabytes ...

Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
With tangerine trees and petabytes in the skies... (actual lyrics here)

Apologies to John L.

Clicking around my Bloglines feeds today and the following set of articles from Slashdot were displayed...

The first is about streaming content from a home-grown media center running Linux to your cell phone. In other words, the cell phone as a delivery platform for all sorts of media.

The second is about Google releasing an Ajax framework for building net-centric applications - PC is needed, but not necessarily vital since these would all run in anything that can run a browser.

The third is about IBM supporting Open Document Format which wrenches customer lock-in of Microsoft Office users.

The juxtaposition is with the last entry with Bill Gates saying that PCs are dead yet.

Draw your own conclusions.

Kevin Kelly's New York Times Magazine article "Scan This Book" sure has stirred up a lot of comment in the blogosphere with worthy commentary at Teleread, Nick Carr (including excellent comments from Kevin Kelly himself) and a promise of future comment and the full text of the article at Sivacracy.net.

Whenever I read articles about ebooks or books in any form, I am a little dismayed at how all books are summarily lumped together as though the act of putting print to paper and binding makes the content all similar somehow. You can't talk about books like this as much as you can't talk about things with wheels being all the same or people with red hair being all the same. The idea of books needs a far more thorough unpacking than it has received.

Kelly does do a little bit of this in his article...

"...At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or "playlists," as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual "bookshelves" — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these "bookshelves" will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages. The ability to purchase, read and manipulate individual pages or sections is surely what will drive reference books (cookbooks, how-to manuals, travel guides) in the future..."

Whither textbooks? I emphasized the word "remixed" because this is a pet theme of mine (especially this year as the CALI Conference theme is Rip, Mix, Learn).

I think Kelly missed the MOST liquid of books - textbooks.

Almost no one reads a textbook from cover to cover. It is typically read chapter by chapter and in even smaller "snippets". The language of textbooks is such that it does not have as strong a voice as a novel, so if a textbook is assembled from parts written by different authors, there is less cognitive dissonance in the reader.

This is even more true, I believe, in casebooks - the textbooks of legal education. Collections of cases are written by many different writers - judges who author the opinions. These are interspersed with commentary and analysis by the casebook author (sometimes multiple authors). The very nature of the law is one of writing by committee and reading any recently passed or proposed statutes will show you what tangled prose comes out of that process sometimes. .

Textbooks and casebooks are already re-mixed by the crude (in a digital sense) instrument of the syllabus. A syllabus for a course is the playlist that Kelly talks about in education. In the digital book future, the syllabus and the table of contents become nearly indistinguishable. Why inefficiently give students 5 kg of dead trees - of which only portions will be read - when you can give them lightweight electroncs (and only the electrons) that they are required for the course. Hyperlinks can provide further information on the web. This makes even more sense if you instantiate the book into paper for the purposes of dealing with cultural transitions from pbooks to ebooks (print to electronic).

A textbook is a virtual artifact in space in time that is temporarily instantiated in paper and ink for the duration of a course.

A syllabus is a set of time-based assignments that acts as the metronome of the course to pace the students (and the instructor) through the marathon of the course.

Textbooks are frequently updated (every 3-6 years) and they would be updated more often if it was up to the publisher in order to suppress used-book sales. (See CALIPirg's "Rip-off 101: Second Edition
How the Publishing Industry's Practices Needlessly Drive Up Textbook Costs" for the full story).

Updating liquid books is trivial - just like updating web pages. Sure the textbook should remain reasonably static for the duration of the course - let's not drive ourselves too crazy, but certainly the textbook can be updated, refined, enhanced, tuned, polished and improved semester to semester if it starts life as a virtual entity and only arrives in the front of student in physical form a week before it is printed on demand from www.Lulu.com and shipped - bypassing the bookstore and their 20% markup.

This inefficiency is exactly what mass digitization can improve. We didn't and couldn't know that we were being so inefficient because print and ink was what we had. Digital texts are what we have now and they will inevitably change the way we use the texts.

Change is coming.

Change is here.

Reading an interesting article in the New York Times today titled "Scan This Book" by Kevin Kelly that had some numbers that I thought I would have some fun playing with...

"... From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages..."

Emphasis mine.

How much disk space does this represent?

32 million books at 1 MB per book = 32 million million bytes or trillion bytes or 32 terabytes.

750 million articles at 1/10 MB per article = 75 million million bytes or 75 terabytes.

25 million songs at 10 MB per song (high resolution) = 250 million million bytes or 250 terabytes.

500 million images at 50 MB per image = 25,000 million million bytes or 25,000 terabytes.

500,000 movies or to keep the scales consistent 1/2 million movies at 2000 MB per movie = 1000 million million bytes or 1,000 terabytes.

3 million videos, TV shows, short films at 1000 MB per = 3000 million million bytes or 3,000 terabytes.

100 billion webpages or 100,000 million webpages at 1/10 MB per webpage = 10,000 million million bytes or 10,000 terabytes.

32 (books)
75 (articles)
250 (songs)
25,000 (images)
1,000 (movies)
3,000 (tv, video, short films)
10,000 (webpages) +
-------
39,357 terabytes or about 40 petabytes (the NYTimes article puts it at 50 petabytes, so my calculations aren't too far off).

Checking Froogle for hard drive costs and things round out to around $1 per GB or $1000 per terabyte, so the cost of storing a digital copy of the entire world's movies, literature, songs, articles and webpages is...

$39,357,000

Huh!

Pocket change for any of the big players in data storage like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM and others. Well within reach for most governments wanting to give access to the world's knowledge to their citizens - heck, it's within reach for most large cities and most state university systems and even some larger libraries.

Kryder's Law is similar to the more familiar Moore's Law applied to hard disk density (and perhaps to cost) and the Wikipedia entry tells the tale for the future...

"...If current rates of growth are maintained then within two decades, a consumer will be able to store all of the creative works produced by every member of the human species in a $100 storage device, including realtime video capture of ones entire lifetime..."

Emphasis mine.

The NYTimes article is a bit more precise, but never-the-less compelling...

"...Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet..."

But this is not the best point. Having everything digital makes it potentially accessible, re-usable, re-mix-able and makes us all potentially smarter and more dangerous.

Having recently posted about the Legal Guide to Podcasting from Creative Commons, I was delighted to learn that there is a Legal Guide for Bloggers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Now I must go off and read it!

Here is another podcast that is fascinating, entertaining, educational and thought-provoking. Bruce Sterling is a write of science fiction and a futurist as well as a non-fiction author. The image above is clickable to his latest work on "space and time objects" or "spimes".

The podcast is from 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference via the ITConversations folks. It's worth a listen.

The good folks at Creative Commons have put together a Podcasting Legal Guide that is comprehensive and thorough as seen by these non-lawyerly eyes. I thought this quote from Larry Lessig's forward was particularly apt...

"...This Guide is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to figure out how best to follow the law. It is also an outstanding recommendation for the non-profit I run, Creative Commons, for as you will see as you work through the insanity that copyright law has become, Creative Commons is a simple alternative to this complex mess..."

My emphasis.

Reading through guide does give one a sense of looking for the white rabbit or more appropriately, the Mad Hatter. Lots to study here.

----

Update: Just realized that one of the authors of the Podcasting Legal Guide has also participated in HigherEdBlogCon with two Quicktime movies that you can watch. The presentation is titled Legal Issues in Podcasting the Traditional Classroom.

From page 120-121 of Benkler's Wealth of Networks ...

"... Goods, services, and resources that, in the industrial stage of the information economy required large-scale, concentrated capital investment to provision, are now subject to a changing technological environment that can make sharing a better way of achieving the same results than can states, markets, or their hybrid, regulated industries..."

emphasis mine.

This is one of the most succint expositions of the open source/open access movement that I have ever read. Besides the compelling point that he is making - that sharing can be be better because technology has reduce the transaction costs - there are other benefits as wel.

Good production that is ensconced in market-based firms is opaque. That is, the inputs go in, the outputs come out and the process is often hidden from view. As a result, the input providers cannot know what actions they could take to create a better output or make the process more efficient. This is exactly the point that John Seely Brown makes in a podcast that I recently listened to (link here).

Brown gives examples from the auto industry where Toyota has a close and reciprocal relationship with its suppliers where everyone involved in the production of the automobile can contribute ideas and improvements to the entire supply chain and assembly process. In contrast, Detroit manufacturers exercise top-down command and control over the suppliers and do not encourage transparency or cooperative input.

The sharing model encourages people to not just contribute what is requested or needed, but to examine the entire enterprise and suggest or offer ideas and resources that change the method of production to make it better or more efficient. This is especially valuable for knowledge products (and what isn't a knowledge product these days?) where the no single participant or even organization knows everything and everyone can learn from the experiences of others to the benefit of all.

Applying this to legal education (or education in general), faculty could share their home-grown course materials instead of using the commercial textbook publishers in a cooperative environment that would invite input frmo the adopters of the textbook. Because the good is digital (at least until it gets printed), it could be incrementally improved, updated more regularly than a commercial publisher could afford and the teacher's manual would be distributed and granularized meta-data that travels along with the content itself.

The meta-data would take the form of advice, bias, preference and approach that the author took in the creation of the course material. (i.e. "I am teaching this from the law and economics angle", or "I use tenets of feminist jurisprudence as my teaching approach in these materials...", etc.

Since digital storage is inexpensive, all instances of course materials from many instructors could be made available so that the user could choose from a a wider array of materials. The transparency in the sharing model makes it easier for new entrants (new teachers and instructors teaching a course for the first time) to enter the community and come up to speed faster.

When I got my undergraduate degree in computer science back in 1980's, I studied operating systems - but only as flow charts, block diagrams and theoretical constructs in a book. We did not have any operating system source code available to us. Today's CS students study (and contribute to) the inner workings of Linux or BSD. The transparency side-effect of commons sharing makes for great educational opportunities that were previously locked up in market-based commercial products.

Along with Dave Hambourger of Winston & Strawn, I gave a presentation at the 2006 ABA Techshow this morning. As promised this post contains the links to the Powerpoint slides and an MP3 recordings of the talk.

Slides - JohnMayerABATechShow3.ppt

MP3 (61 minutes/11 MB) - ABATechSHow.mp3

The talk was called Communications, Convergence and the Virtual Firm, but mostly we talked about blogs, wikis, RSS, extranets and podcasts and how they are changing (or can change) the practice of law.

This was during the last track of Techshow, but the attendance was still pretty strong - 40-50 folks by my count.

Hopefully the good folks at the ABA will post podcasts for all of the sessions in the future.

I listen to a lot of podcasts - 10 to 20 per week while I am walking my dog or driving to/from work. Mostly these are presentations given at conferences or talks/brown bag seminars at schools by scholars and the amount of knowledge available in these fora is fantastic.

In the past week, I listened to three mind-expanding talks about the future that really made my head spin with ideas and information.

The first is Peter Cochrane giving the keynote at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony conference given on January of 2006. Peter really brings it all together about RFID, telephones, telepresence and the use of sensor networks and telecommunications. I felt myself getting smarter listening to this.

The second is Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley speaking at the Web 2.0 conference in 2005 and she provides a succinct and rapid overview of the adoption of all kinds of technologies around the world including WiFi, broadband and mobile phones. This podcast is extremely dense and you will benefit from multiple listens.

The third podcast is a talk by John Smart called How to be Tech Futurist and is ostensibly about a new area of education on future planning. He starts out a little slow, but about 10 minutes in, he starts dropping amazing asides and insights about the future of computing, oil, complexity theory, physics and nanotechnology that I had never heard so well expressed. It's a fast, breath-taking and ultimately optimistic podcast.

If you are trying to make sense out of the chaos in the tech marketplace, these three podcasts will expand your thinking and give you perspectives that are difficult to find without extensive research.

Two snippets from Wealth of Networks ...

"...the networked information environment offers us a more attractive cultural production system in two distinct ways: (1) it makes culture more transparent, and (2) it makes culture more malleable..."

and,

"... culture is becoming more democratic: self-reflective and participatory..."

Both are from page 15.

My interests lie in how the Internet can legal literacy and legal education. Substitute "legal education" for "culture" in the previous two snippets and we have...

"...the networked information environment offers us a more attractive legal education production system in two distinct ways: (1) it makes legal education more transparent, and (2) it makes legal education more malleable..."

and,

"... legal education is becoming more democratic: self-reflective and participatory..."

This syncs perfectly with work that I have been working on for many years. How to bring to the surface what faculty do when they teach and how to get them to share best practices or even all practices and let the best float to the top.

One of the aspects of podcasting that we want to explore with the Legal Education Podcasting Project is the improvement of the lecture. We already have anecdotal evidence of this from faculty who have told us that they have listened to their own podcasts and used this to improve on the delivery of their classroom lectures.

It is not a far stretch to imagine that faculty can listen to each other's lectures and learn from them - especially if they are teaching the same class.

This thinking was not accidental. We have explicitly designed the CALI Fellowships so that the participants review each other's draft lessons and contribute ideas and suggestions as to how best teach a topic or explain a concept. On a related note, CALI Fellows have told us that the process of writing CALI lessons and interacting with the other Fellows improved their teaching. It made them more reflective of how they are communicating to students. Professor Stephen Bradford gave a talk about this at the 2004 CALI Conference in Seattle. His Powerpoint Slides for the talk are illuminating and hilarious.

What are the obstacles to creating a community of law faculty that share their teaching techniques in a sufficiently granular way that the participants benefit from the knowledge and experience of the group?

One obstacle is a shared vocabulary about teaching specific concepts, but we overcame that by designing the CALI Topic Grids by culling the language from faculty syllabi and chapter/section titles in casebooks. In Web 2.0 speak, we created our own folksonomy of tag phrases that roughly correspond to one hour of teaching. That's how they are listed in a syllabus and that's (roughly) how long it takes for a student to do a CALI lesson covering that topic.

What we have not done is create Topic Grids for all legal subject areas and we have not opened them up for the larger law faculty population to comment, amend, suggest or change.

Doing this might be a very good idea, and a way to start would be to create a sort of syllabus commons for legal education so that we can run a concordance to see what the most popular terms of art are for teaching any particular hour of class.

Will a critical mass of faculty participate?