CALIopolis

Here is the recording of my talk at the 2008 Annual Membership Meeting for CALI during AALS in New York, NY on January 5, 2008 ... AALS2008CALIBreakfast.mp3

Here are the slides ... 2008AALSBreakfast_final.ppt

I will be posting a screencast version soon and posting more information about ELangdell into the future.

The Family was over to the house to celebrate Christmas yesterday. One of our many annual traditions is to sing the 12 days of Christmas with different individuals/groups handling each "number". Others are tasked to try to confuse them with alternate lyrics ... hilarity ensues.

Here you go... MayerFamily12days2007.mp3

The Harvard Business Review list of breakthrough ideas for 2007 has so many intriguing and insightful ideas that I don't know where to begin ... and so I won't.

Instead, follow the link and read grow smarter.

Or listen to the podcast here.

I ran across this video on Youtube (thanks to PresentationZen) and I love the idea of apparently unrelated relationships it evokes.

This is BIG NEWS for CALI. In the Fall 2006 Semester, users of the CALI website downloaded or ran CALI lessons over 500,000 times. This is the highest single semester ever.

The totals for the calendar year (as opposed to academic year) for 2006 are over 880,000.

Many thanks to all the schools and students who support us - we will continue to serve your needs. If you have any comments, ideas, suggestions or complaints, feel free to drop me an email at jmayer@cali.org.

Every year, my sisters and their families gather for the holidays and one of our traditions is to jointly sing the 12 Days of Christmas.

This year, we tried something a little different. On the last verse (where all 12 days are sung), we tried to "sing" the "sound" of the item ... uhhh ... it leaves something to be desired.

Click to listen or right click to download the MP3 - Mayer200612Days.mp3

Scott Leslie, an educational technology researcher and emerging technology analyst has posted an excellent and insightful screencast of a talk he gave to the WCET conference last week.

He lays out in one place (and in a playful manner using a "magic eight ball") many of the issues and prognostications that I have heard seperately from Stepehen Downes, Michael Feldstein, Marc Prensky and many others.

I am excited to announce that the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University and the University of Maine School of Law are CALI's newest members.

CALI now has 203 US Law School Members. This is a new higheste-ever for CALI.

Welcome aboard!

Ran across a useful interview that Charlie White conducted with attorney Jeffrey Hermes in four parts. They talk about various legal issues that have to do with podcasting like First Amendment protections, defamation, fair use and being sued. Worth a read..

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

Part 3 here

...and...

Part 4 here.

You know, this would have worked better as a podcast.

I'm off to EDUCAUSE 2006 to give a presentation about the Legal Education Podcasting Project and CALI's future plans for Classcaster.

Here's the blurb with a link for our session which is on Wednesday morning at 8:10 am (ooof, I am not a morning person).

If you would like to meet up, drop a note in the comments or send me an email at jmayer@cali.org.

I ran across ProjectPosner.org today and it's gave me an idea. Judges posting their own opinions - hence the title of this post. - MyJudgeSpace.

The purpose of Project Posner is...

"...Why this site? While Posner's books and popular writings are easily available to the public, his opinions are difficult or expensive for the public to access, let alone search. This site, for the first time, collects almost all of his opinions in a single searchable and easily readable database..."

It is not clear that Judge Posner is a participant in this project. The creators are Professor Tim Wu from Columbia and Stuart Sierra who works at Columbia are clearly fans of Posner's work...

"...Richard Posner is probably the greatest living American jurist. He has sat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago since 1981, and written several thousand opinions during that time. Posner is also well known for his extra-judicial writings and his deep affection for most members of the animal kingdom...."

I think the idea of Judges having a space to post their own opinion might be quite interesting, but, judges have to be careful about their public stateaments and can't be explaining all the time why they decided a case one way or another. The judiciary, however, does seem to be under attack for its "activism" and I believe that part of what fuels the criticism is the required silence from judges. They must 'speak' through their decisions, so what better way to speak louder than to make their decisions more accessible to the public.

Judge Posner is an exemplary case study in this.

"...One thing that distinguishes the opinions is the effort to try and get at why a given law actually exists, and an effort to try and make sense of the law. That can make them more useful than most case reports...."

Judges are busy people and doing the hard work of gathering the cases and creating the website would be too much of a burden, so maybe a service like MyJudgeSpace.com would lower the barrier. Even better, if judges have fan clubs like Posner, then the space should be a wiki where the fans could gather to post the opinions AND discuss them, link them out to other sources, etc. Maybe we should call this WikiJudgepedia.com?

I am thinking that this would be a neat project combining CALI's technical skills, law student volunteers, law librarians, law faculty and practicing attorneys.

Hat tip to the Orin Kerr for his post at the Volokh Conspiracy for the pointer to ProjectPosner.org.

CALI is pleased to announce the launching of Classcaster.net, a website to support education institutions that want to run their own blog/podcast networks.

Classcaster is a freely available, open-source system of software that can be run on a Linux server for educational institutions to allow their faculty, staff and students to create blogs, post podcasts and manage their own content.

Classcaster.net is the location for the code-base.

Classcaster.org is CALI's instance of Classcaster that supports the legal education community and currently has over 50 active law course blogs and over 1500 podcasts from law faculty and law librarians.

We developed Classcaster to explore how to effectively use blogs and podcasts in legal education. The hosted blogging solutions available are very powerful, but they are necessarily focused on a broad audience. We were thinking that education or course-related blogs might need some different featues and focus.

In addition, we wanted to create a service that did not require a computer to post a podcast. Classcaster has a telephone aspect that allows the user to make a phone call, record a long 'voice mail' and have that automatically posted to the caller's blog as a podcast.

We imagined that faculty could use this to record in-class lectures using a cell phone or could phone in a lecture remotely if they were traveling or stuck at home during snow days or whatever.

Classcaster is built on the open source LifeType blogging platform, the open source PBX, Asterisk and some additional scripting that we wrote to make it work together smoothly.

Elmer Masters is the guru behind the guts and glory of Classcaster and is CALI's Director of Internet Development. As we come to better understand how to integrate blogs and podcasts into education, he will be adding features and functions that will also be made available in the freely available code base.

If you are interested in working with us on Classcaster, stop by www.classcaster.net and post in the fora.

Elmer and I will be presenting at Educause on the topic of podcasting relating to the Legal Education Podcasting Project (which used Classcaster) that was conducted last spring and LEPP II that is going on right now. Stop by and say hi.

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.

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.
  

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.

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!

Update: It is exam time and that means the CALI servers are running white-hot. We passed 600,000 lesson runs a few hours ago - only 2 1/2 weeks since I posted that we had passed 500,000. Good Luck to all on your finals!

It is often difficult to measure the quality of the work you do and this is especially difficult if you are in the education business. A byproduct of having all of our materials on a website, we can measure their numbers and sometimes how often they are used or accessed.

To perhaps quote Josef Stalin...

"Quantity has a quality all its own"

In the last couple of weeks, we passed two milestones that are worth reporting. CALI lessons were run over 6500,000 times this school year (as measured since 7/31/2005) and there are over 1,000 podcasts posted on Classcaster (including those from the 2006 AALS Annual Meeting), but the great majority coming from law faculty podcasting their classes in the Legal Education Podcasting Project.

Almost 60,000 law students are registered at the CALI website which is slowly creeping up to the 50% mark of all law students in the United States.

The comments we receive from students about the lessons and the feedback we got from the Mid-Semester survey of law students in the podcasted classes indicates that our work is appreciated, and I promise you, ... we are just getting started!

Every year, CALI's members meet during AALS for a membership meeting. This year's meeting was in Washington, DC on Thursday, January 5, 2006 at the Washington Hilton and Towers Hotel.

The following folks were elected (or re-elected ) to the CALI Board of Directors.

Mohyeddin Abdulaziz, U of Arizona
Steve Bradford, Nebraska
Ron Eades, Louisville
Scott Burnham, Montana (re-elected)
Paul Caron, Cincinnati (re-elected)
Ken Hirsh, Duke (re-elected)
Peter Strauss, Columbia (re-elected)

We wish to express our sincere appreciation to the following who are leaving the CALI Board of Directors.

Barbara Glesner-Fines, UMKC
Michael Norwood, U of New Mexico
Kinvin Wroth, Vermont

The complete list of the CALI Board of Directors is here.

After the meeting, I gave a little talk (25 minutes) on past, current and future activities planned for CALI. You can view and listen to that talk as a screencast here.

Included in the talk are statistics on CALI's membership, lessons and lesson usage (50% increase over last year!) as well as announcements about the Legal Education Podcasting Project, The Law School Disaster Preparedness Project (more on this soon), Crossword Puzzles and pictures of my dog.

As always, comments, ideas, suggestions and complaints are welcome.

Mayers12DaysXmas2005.mp3

This is a recording of a long Mayer Family Tradition - the singing of the 12 Days of Christmas. One family member is chosen as the "Maestro" (did I spell that right?) and chooses - at random - and without warning - someone to sing each "day" of Christmas in the song. Hilarity ensues.

technorati tags: km, legal tech, legal km, knowledge management

Slashdot is discussing wi-fi access in the college classroom in an article ominously titled...Is Wi-Fi Ruining College?

Here's an interesting solution that is likely to have some traction with law faculty...

"...I'm a student at Harvard Business School, where they have a fairly interesting solution for handling this problem. While every campus building has wireless access, all the access points in the classroom buildings require a web based log-in that checks your student ID versus your class schedule. If you're scheduled to be in class at that moment, you are denied wireless access to the internet (in any classroom building)..."

We've heard all the discussion on both sides of this...

• If students are paying, that's their problem,
• If faculty are boring, students will not pay attention anyway,
• Students could doodle or do crossword puzzles,
• Faculty should make the classroom more intereactive and interesting,
• The web is a seductive, shiny thing and no one could help themselves checking their email,
• There are valid educational uses for accessing the web inside the classroom like...
• Students looking up things that the instructor is talking about to better understand the material,
• Studenst IMing each other with the answers when one is called upon,
• Faculty integrating websites, research, etc into the classroom time,
• Students use their PCs to take notes, so you can't refuse them access to their PCs,
• Eventually, it will be impossible to block network access via cell phones, PDAs, mesh networks, wi-fi max, wi-fi muni, etc.

Here's a thought experiment. If a student did not attend any classes and still can get a 'A' in the course, does that negate the need for the classroom time?

Let me pose this thought experiment more generally (I did this at the CODEC workshop last April). If students are willing to pay the full tuition and they prove that they can pass the bar exam, would you 'sell' them their degree?

In case it is not obvious, I am asking whether law schools are selling education or a credential and whether students are buying an education or a credential.

I think the answer is both, but I know that schools place a lot of weight on student bar passage rates and quite a few schools are developing their own non-credit bar review courses to bring these numbers up. Is this just a natural manifestation of the disconnect between legal education and bar exam passage?

11/20/2006 - Update - Tipping Education's Sacred Cow: Reconsidering the Lecture

This blogpost considers whether lectures can be replaced by "coursecasts" where the student can pause and take notes, etc.

Why not do it both ways? Faculty can continue to deliver the live lectures and archive the video and audio for students to re-visit later. I don't think that the synchronous, live class meeting will go away, but it could be improved.

Coursecasts/podcasts/CALI lessons could cover doctrine and the live class could be interactive, socratic and discussion-oriented. Bligh says that lectures have limited capacity to deliver information and almost no ability to change attitudes or opinions. It is discussion with others that engages the student mind. Expect a future article on deconstructing the lecture.

Seattle University School of Law is the first law school in the nation to partner with Legal Aid University to provide state-of-the-art training for legal aid and pro bono lawyers and clinical law programs.
Law school faculty will support design and development of LAU's online and in-person curricula and training programs. Ada Shen-Jaffe, a distinguished public interest practitioner in residence, will anchor the West Coast headquarters of LAU. Her first project will be strategic planning, organizational and leadership development for LAU. Shen-Jaffe, an expert dedicated to providing quality legal services for all, also will advise the university provost on leadership development for a more just and humane world.

Seattle University - News and events - University news

Current statistics for Version 3.1 are:Number of Bloggers: 202 bloggers.Growth: Since the last census on June 16, 2005, the number of bloggers has grown from 130 to 202, an increase of 55%! That’s a big increase in less than 5 months.

Concurring Opinions: Law Professor Blogger Census (Version 3.1)

Via BoleyBlogs. This list includes achart with links to all 202 blogs on the list. I should aggregate these. One thing the census doesn't reveal is what the content of the blogs is, how often they are updated, and how much institutional support there is for faculty blogging.

Next steps in RSS, Reading Lists - Think about adopting this idea of RSS Reading Lists for legal ed. Berkman's H2O Playlists come pretty close. John could elaborate more here.

Using WebHuddle, you have options—and flexibility. Meetings can be conducted either in conjunction with an enterprise’s existing teleconferencing service, or utilizing WebHuddle’s optional voice over IP. WebHuddle also offers recording capabilities—presentations can easily be recorded for playback over any web browser for those who missed the live meeting.

WebHuddle -- Alternative Communication

There is an intriguing bit here that seems to indicate that you can stream PowerPoint with audio.

The terrific Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Education has been featuring lectures and other educational materials at CALI Radio, otherwise known as the ClassCaster, for several months now.

A natural extension for podcasting. Between Lawyers: technology + culture + law

And they got it mostly right. It is important to note that Classcaster is the platform that CALI Radio runs on.

A pilot program that lets college students buy digital textbooks from their campus bookstores has gotten off to a slow start. But the company that runs the project says the early returns show at the very least that students are interested in e-books.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Digital Textbooks Struggle to Gain a Foothold on Campus

E-books are something that have been around for a long time and their time may never come. The key thing in getting students to use this sort of thing is to give it to them as a tool. Add the ability to remix the text, annotate it, share it, etc. If all an ebook does is give you some computer based version to read off the screen or print, then it is never going to get anywhere.

Obviously, this would be a great channel to deliver educational content as well. The phones are not combo/MP3 players, but that's where the world seems to headed and if they have some kind of deal on minutes, then the cost of listening (re-listening) to recorded audio lectures is negligable. This is the space that ClassCaster is all about.

The home page of the company doing this for Montclair, Rave Wireless, Inc. does mention the idea of personal mobile blogs and even talks about "in-class polling as assessments" which is eInstruction territory.

Can you say convergence?