CALIopolis

Here is the link to a screencast of my presentation at AALS on Wednesday, January 7, 2009 in San Diego. I was participating in the "Redesigning Legal Education" session. I had 15 minutes to cover a lot of ground, so I apologize for my fast-talking.

Here is the Powerpoint file... 2009AALSClassroomTechnology.ppt

Here is an MP3 of my talk... 2009_01_07_ClassroomTech.mp3

I am back to blogging. I had to take some time off to recover from quintuple bypass surgery. Let this be a reminder to get your cholesterol checked - mine was over 330 last April - now it's around 150 thankyouverymuch.

I've been back to work for quite some time now (since May), but I had fallen so far behind that I just didn't know where to pick up the blog. Well, it's a new year and I know what my first blog post of 2009 must be...See the next post.

CALI's Director of Membership, LaVonne Molde has pointed out that in my talk at AALS and in my slides, I list CALI as having only 206 U.S. law school members when that number should actually be 208!

Click here for the complete list and if you are a student or faculty at a law school that is NOT a member ... please tell me why not.

Here is the link to the screencast version of my talk at the 2008 Annual CALI Members Meeting held on Friday, January 5, 2008 in New York during AALS.

I had previously posted the podcast/audio recording and Powerpoint slides.

Here ...

AALS2008Carnegie.mp3

... is the recording of the AALS Session: Rethinking Legal Education For The 21st Century. The speakers included...

• Moderator: Edward L. Rubin, Vanderbilt University Law School
  
• Speakers: Vicki C. Jackson, Georgetown University Law Center
  
• Robert Mac Crate, Esq., Senior Counsel, Sullivan and Cromwell, New York, New York
  
• Martha L. Minow, Harvard Law School
  
• Suellyn Scarnecchia, University of New Mexico School of Law
  
• William M. Sullivan, Senior Scholar The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Palo Alto, California
  
• Judith W. Wegner, University of North Carolina School of Law

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.

Paul Caron, blog-emperor and CALI Board Member asked me to contribute to the fascinating thread about "Advice to Erwin Chemerinsky".

The biggest constraint was the 250 word limit.... here's my advice...

As the Executive Director of CALI, I read a lot of feedback from students that pertains to their perceptions of legal education. The single biggest thing that students crave is more feedback. Imagine if you took a job where you were paid at the end of 15 weeks based on your performance -better performance= more pay, but you weren’t told how well you were doing until the end of the 15 weeks. That’s law school. Students are studying hard, but they aren’t sure that they know what they know until the results of the final exam are in.

I would advise Dean Chemerinsky to mandate that all classes provide some form of personal feedback to all students. This doesn’t have to be graded, but it should be substantive. This could be in the form of midterm exams, quizzes or even students evaluating each other’s mini-essays or shared collections of multiple choice questions. The technology tools exist so that this isn’t an undue burden on the instructor or require the hiring of teaching assistants for every class.

It is worth noting that feedback can be bi-directional. The aggregate results of weekly quizzes can tell the instructor where she has lost the students and should provide some additional instruction. If instructors want to read really excellent final exams, then you have to make sure that students are on track throughout the semester. The surprises you get reading the finals are no less disconcerting than the surprises that the students get when you grade it.

I am so excited to make this post.

Here's the press release.

Cambridge, MA – Today at the 17th annual CALI Conference on Law School Computing, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the non-profit Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) proudly announced a new partnership to stimulate innovation in American law schools through a new educational resource sharing platform. This work will be perpetuated by the establishment of the CALI-Berkman Research Fellowship.

“We are looking forward to renewing a fruitful relationship with Harvard Law School through the Legal Education Commons project, which will provide innovative tools and access to open-licensed course materials to our more than 200 member law schools” said CALI Executive Director John Mayer.

The partnership will establish the Legal Education Commons – known as eLangdell for Harvard Law School’s first Dean and the Law Library’s namesake, Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell – where law faculty can share and use openly-licensed course materials to offer students free or low-cost course packs, casebooks, podcasts, and video. Berkman and CALI will also research and develop innovative teaching tools to advance practice skills like client interaction, negotiations, and trial advocacy.

The first CALI-Berkman Research Fellowship will be held by current Berkman Fellow Gene Koo, a 2002 graduate of Harvard Law School, whose research has centered on the use of technology in legal instruction. Gene also helped found Legal Aid University, which provides training and development to poverty lawyers across the country.

“The Berkman Center is happy to build on the relationship Harvard Law established some 25 years ago as co-founder of CALI,” added Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey. “Gene’s devotion to improving education through technology will certainly make this effort a great success.”

Techcrunch mentions a new service called Usphere where undergrads can pay $65 to apply to 33 unnamed colleges. The colleges then send acceptances letters (or not) with the costs of tuition that the student would pay.

LSAC (Law School Admissions Council and purveyors of the LSAT) has had a service for a long time where law students can fill out a single application and have it transmitted to many (most?) law schools that participate in the program. It's a single-sign-on idea applied to law school applications which are pretty similar from school to school.

What if they took it one step further and like Usphere allowed law schools to affirmatively "bid" for students. This already happens to a certain extent - schools compete for students - but the current system does not expose a law school applicants application to every law school. Applicants pick a small number of schools to apply to and the costs of applying to law school is not trivial (several hundred dollars in many cases).

My idea is a riff on Usphere where law schools can view all the applications whether the student has indicated they want to apply or not. This would allow them to approach students that might not otherwise have applied. I believe it could be handled smoothly without generating a boatload of unwanted spam. Schools could indicate a willingness to make an offer and applicants could see who is looking at them.

The network statistics from this would also be amazingly interesting. What kinds of applications result in what kinds of offers? What types of applicants are schools looking for?

As the Techcrunch article points out about USphere, this is more like a Match.com or dating service where personality traits and desired personality traits are matched up .... maybe more like an eHarmony for law school admissions.

It would be difficult to predict if law schools would participate or if there would be any benefit. It sure seems like it would be a good idea. It's a way to escapte the "tyranny" of measuring applicant quality by only LSAT score, GPA and undergrad institution rank.

Professor Leiter is conducting a study of law faculty scholarly productivity (methodology here). The goal (or one goal) is...

"...what is the most effective and efficient way to measure the scholarly impact of a law faculty..."

What if you replace the word "scholarly" with "teaching"?

If you have seen this video...

...then you can imagine how hard it is to measure teaching impact in the same way as Professor Leiter is measuring scholarly impact but perhaps there are some objective numbers that can be discovered and measured.

• number of classes taught
• number of students in those classes
• number of credit hours those classes are worth

These can be culled from the course catalog and a the class sizes by survey.

• casebooks published (first time)
• casebooks updated
• supplemental materials published

Theoretically, we could find this information out from the commercial publisher websites and matching up authors and co-authors with the publication dates to get an average per year.

Harder to get would be...

• adoption rates for casebooks
• sales figures for casebooks and supplemental materials
• whether supplemental materials are required, suggested or recommended.

Some of this could be culled from the course syllabi - many of which are online. There is a certain amount of "everyone knows" regarding what are the most popular casebooks in the major subject areas, but the long tail is harder to measure.

Having a casebook in the marketplace will generate a certain amount of traffic for the authors who must "teach the teachers" as well. This illustrates the point that teachers teach students and teachers teach teachers. Should we measure both? It would seem that teaching teachers has more downstream impact than teaching students. The places that teachers teach teachers include presentations given relating to teaching at ...

• AALS
• Conferences
• Workshops

What about non-traditional supplemental materials?

• CALI lessons written
• Websites related to educational activities
• Blogs and podcasts with educational intent like Classcaster

I can certainly measure the first item and there are over 100 law professors who have written a CALI lesson at some time in the past, but the others would be much harder to track. A lot of web-based educational material is behind a password or inside a learning management system.

None of this speaks to quality, however and so we look back to Leiter's study. He measures quality by citation. If someone else (either a court or another faculty member) has made a citation to your work, it is an indicator of impact and therefor some measure of the works value.

The nearest thing to citation in teaching is casebook/material adoption, but this would not capture the whole picture.

It would seem that potential law students would be very interested in this type of information, especially in the 150 law schools that are not going to end up in Professor Leiter's Top 30 ranking of scholarly impact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I may be wrong however.

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

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

More exploration on this topic to come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The summary of comments is here - 2007SurveyComments.pdf

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

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

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

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

Which one is your website?

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

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

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

... and he adds ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

What if every law student had a blog?

They could post their notes, and commentary on their learning experiences, thoughts about their school and professors. It would be sort of like a disaggregated RateMyProfessor.com, SwapNotes.com all in one.

The value of websites like RateMyProfesser and SwapNotes is in the fact that they aggregate all of this information in one place, but what if all of these law student blogs agreed on a simple tagging system so that the information could be more easily aggregated? Think of this as a del.icio.us for law students. An agreed upon tagging system is basically a taxonomy - something that every librarian understand going back to Dewey.

CALI has over 100,000 law students registered on it's website. Most (all?) of the students come here to run our lessons, but it would not be difficult for us to offer them a free blog account for educational purposes.

Perhaps I am just describing a sort of MySpace for law students, but with a legal education bent.

This is sort of what we were thinking with CALISpaces - a currently underdevelopment project at CALI, but the recent discussion about SwapNotes and other student-note sharing websites has gotten be thinking about the community of law students and what they have to share with each other and with their law professors.

A "safe" place for this community to aggregate it's influence and it's resources seems like it would be a good thing, but I am stuck on whether a blog is the right tool. CALISpaces intends to be a file storage space where files can be selectively shared with others - like other students in a study group, faculty in a course you are taking, etc.

CALISpaces should have some kind of blog or outward facing component to let students put things that they want others to see. It should have a standard taxonomy so that similar resources across all law student CALISpaces could be found, searched and aggregated.

This is very much the Personal Learning Environment or E-portfolio idea that has been discussed on many higher-ed blogs for a couple of years.

Hmmmm.

Here are the websites that I used to construct the collage...

http://swapnotes.com

http://outlinedepot.com

http://stu.findlaw.com/outlines/

http://www.4lawschool.com/outlines.htm

http://gavel2gavel.com

http://www.romingerlegal.com/outline.htm

http://lawschooloutlines.net

http://lawresourceexchange.com

http://ihatelawschool.com

ilrg.com/students/outlines/

http://www.toplawstudent.com/outlines/

I did not dig too deeply into the Google search either. There were dozens of other sites at law schools or law student sites that aggregated links to law school exam banks and student outline repositories.

What's my point?

My point is to re-iterate the point of my last post - if this is a problem for legal education, the solution is to make law school outline websites irrelevant.

L

There seemed to be two major concerns with sites like SwapNotes.com and OutlineDepot.com (only two representative examples being discussed on the LawProf discussion list lately) ...

1. Copyright issues and,
2. Pedagogical issues.

I can't speak to the copyright issues with authority, though I think it might be a rather nuanced problem based on my readings of this list and other sources. The basic argument is that a student’s notes taken during a classroom lecture might contains copyrightable elements that belong to the instructor either in the exact words being spoken, the structure, selection and sequence of the material or something else. I don’t know.

The pedagogical issues are far more interesting to me.

Who controls legal education?

The instructor creates the educational environment, structures the course and assesses the students, but instructors cannot control how students process the environment they are immersed in or what other outside sources they bring in to help them succeed.

Students who effectively and efficiently track the instructor's plan have little or no motivation to go outside the recommended materials. Unfortunately, students can't really tell if they are tracking until the one time they get substantive feedback - the final exam. This opens the door to the anxiety that they are "missing something" and so students search for that “missing something”.

To mitigate this, instructors might have more quizzes or midterm exams or some other method that provides some reassuring feedback to the students, but this is additional work for the instructor and in large classes - a lot of additional work.

If instructors really believe that sharing notes between students is damaging to their learning, they should prohibit it. Of course, students can do what they want outside the classroom, but instructors have the power of the honor code (perhaps power is too strong a word here) and if they feel really strongly about this, they should not allow students to have access to commercial outlines in the school's own bookstore.

This is a straw man argument of course. I don't believe instructor's want to have total mind control over their students. So this is really a discussion about how best to learn the law.

Students get all sorts of mixed signals on this - different signals from each instructor. In the face of these mixed signals, it is actually a smart move to talk to people who have substantive experience - other students who have taken the same class from the same instructor. The course notes are a proxy for that experience, though, a low-fidelity proxy in many cases.

Bringing in the rational/economics aspect, this is an asymmetrical information situation. Not all students can talk to all other students who have previously taken the class. Local school organizations have met this market need by collecting note banks and such and some faculty have created commercial outlines (though commercial outlines don't have the "my professor" angle well covered). This still isn't the perfect solution - students are busy and distracted and may not find the right outline in the right note bank.

SwapNotes.com, OutlineDepot.com and others are a market improvement on the efficiency of finding the right outline (my course, my professor). They are centralized repositories open to anyone and so they reduce the market friction of finding and encouraging contributors and of reaching the customers.

Instructors and law schools probably can't stop students from sharing notes. They can make it less efficient by sending take-down notices to these websites (which some have done). More importantly, I believe, instructors can mitigate the need for students to look for outside sources by making sure they are tracking what they are teaching and letting them know that they are tracking.

So what to do?

Perhaps this is an opportunity for CALI to provide a low-effort solution to faculty that enables feedback loops between instructor and student.

I call this project "10 Questions a Week".

CALI could provide a web service where participating faculty would write 10 multiple choice questions a week for the duration of their course (150 questions or so).

The questions would reflect what was taught in the class the previous week.

Instructors get a permanent URL they give to students and students take the quiz. Instructors get the results and can see if students are tracking what was taught by how many students get the questions right or wrong. If students are not tracking, the instructor can re-cover the material in a later class, assign some optional readings or even create a podcast that covers the troublesome material and gives students the option of listening and doesn’t deduct from classroom time.

This probably could not be a "graded" quizz. You cannot guarantee that the person at the computer is the person in the class, but more importantly, it’s not the point. The point is feedback for the students and the instructor - no pressure.

Here's the Creative Commons part. Faculty can choose to make their question sets available to other faculty as a structured multiple-choice question bank. If they also provide their syllabus and some meta-information that links questions to the casebook (chapter or section), then other faculty don't have to start from scratch. Teachers helping teachers and all that. A beginnings to a Teacher’s Commons for Law Faculty.

CALI pays law faculty to write CALI lessons. I can imagine that CALI would pay faculty to participate so that we can get a critical mass of questions in each legal subject. Once we have a couple of thousand questions in the major subject areas, we can decide if we want to let students create their own self-test quizzes that randomly picks questions out of the question bank. There is a good argument to not giving the students unfettered access to the question bank as that dilutes it’s effectiveness as an evaluative tool, but if the number of questions in the pool is large enough, that might mitigate that issue. It would be a good idea to consult some test-creation experts on these issues.

We might even explore the idea of students writing the questions themselves and testing each other with a moderator-like step in the process for the instructor. I.e. the instructor assigns the students to write 2 questions at the end of the week and then picks the best 10 to assess the entire class. There is something to be said for students writing their own exam questions - makes them think critically about the material in the shoes of the instructor. Students could be further required to provide a reference to the source of their questions and provide a couple of paragraphs that explain they the right answer is right and the wrong answers are wrong. We are talking about law school here.

Either way. This creates two feedback loops. One for the student so that they can see if they are tracking the material and one for the instructor so they can see if they need to make adjustments in their teaching.

The quizzes are automatically graded, so there is no time-sink for the instructor (except those that write the questions for which they would be paid).

It's just an idea at this point, but would anyone be interested in participating in such a project?

I lurk on the LawProf discussion list and was privy to the discussion about student note sharing websites that surrounded SwapNotes.com over the past few days.

I was a bit perturbed by the vehemence of some of the responses and invited Adam Steiner who is a 3L at Cardozo Law School to talk about his company.

In many ways, it's a familiar Internet entrepreneur story. Students were already sharing their course notes via email and other (somewhat) under-the-radar file repositories and Adam saw a way to make the process more efficient by creating a centralized, Creative Common-based respository of student-contributed notes. He pays the hosting/bandwidth bills via advertising on the website.

Some faculty object to this for copyright reasons. I don't go into this aspect in the interview because neither I nor Adam are copyright experts. I direct the reader to Professor Michael Madison's cogent analysis here.

We do discuss the pedagogical issues that are inherent in Adam's enterprise because I believe this has direct overlap with CALI's mission and our work on the creation of a Legal Education Commons (I talk about the Legal Education Commons projects here in a video/podcast of a presentation recently delivered at the Harvard Berkman Center).

The conversation is 28 minutes long and you can listen to it by clicking on the following link - adamsteinerswapnotes.mp3.

I have also invited Adam to speak at the Conference for Law School Computing which will be June 18-20, 2007 at UNLV in Las Vegas. I will also be inviting owner/operators of other law student note-sharing websites.

Like the issue of banning laptops in the classroom, I believe there is more here than what is visible on the surface. I think it would be difficult to for faculty to completely suppress all sharing of student notes for copyright infringement reasons. I think it would be hypocritical to suppress sharing for pedagogical reasons. If you are going to issue take-down notices to websites, you should consider closing your law school's bookstore (or at least telling them to stop selling commercial outlines).

Students of the digital age are very much into RML or Rip, Mix, Learn. I delivered an entire keynote address on this topic at the 2006 CALI Conference. You can watch the video, screencast or listen to the podcast here.

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.

I am always looking for sources of interesting podcasts and one of my staff pointed me to this collection of gems.

Hamline's Conversations in Law.

Lots of intersting topics relating to law, society, culture and even Malcom Gladwell, author of Blink and the Tipping Point.

There is an old joke that I first read in an Archie comic where Jughead is up on the roof of the school on his hands and knees looking for something. The principle, Mr. Weatherbee asks him what he is doing.

"I'm looking for a book I lost yesterday in the cafeteria", Jughead replies.

"If you lost the book in the cafeteria, why are you looking up here on the roof?" inquires Mr. Weatherbee.

"Because the light is better up here." Jughead answers.

What's my point?

There is a new report soon to be published about a study at Winona State University that purports that laptops in the lecture hall hurt student's grades.

There is some good reporting and discussion about the report, here, at the Chronicle of Higher Education website.

The first sentence of the Chronicle article says this...

"...Most professors can vouch for the fact that students with laptops sometimes seem a bit distracted in the lecture hall..."

This is my point. It is not that students with laptops are distracted, it's that before laptops, faculty could not really tell if students were distracted.

Prior to having laptops to hide behind, clever students developed the "attentive and interested" facial expression (at least the polite ones) that is worn at all times in class. It prevents the instructor from calling on you to see if you are listening.

Students have always found ways to be distracted, but laptops are literally "in your face" to the faculty. They are a literal barrier between the faculty and the students.

I have not searched the literature, because I am not sure how I would conduct such a search, but I am reasonably sure that prior to laptops in the classroom, there was not a whole bunch of articles about distracted students.

So does that mean that in the past, students were not distracted? I doubt that. The issue is that laptops have brought to the surface the polite fiction that occurs in classrooms all the time. Faculty teach and students listen or pretend to listen. Now, that pretension is manifest in the student's averted gaze to the laptop screen and faculty cannot ignore that.

Not everyone with a laptop is distracted or ignoring the instructor, but it seems that way just like the Chronicle writer says in the first sentence of the article that I excerpted above.

So, how do we deal with this misconception that laptops are always distracting (not true) and get to the real discussion which is "How do I keep my students from being distracted by anything?"

So what are the arguments for banning laptops? I believe there are some good ones and some good sounding ones, but I also think there are more subtle issues surfacing. I'll come back to that.

1. Laptops are a high-definition distraction and students cannot resist looking and clicking if the screen is right in front of them.

I believe one faculty member even described laptops as heroin- so strong is the need to look at the screen and ignore the professor. This is quite a good argument, actually. If a parade of clowns was going by the windows of the classroom everyday, the instructor would pull the shades. If students brought televisions or radios or wore iPods into class, the instructor would insist that they be turned off. Isn't the laptop a similar distraction?

2. Even if they are not a distraction to these digital native/millenial students, they are a distraction to the students around them who cannot avoid seeing what is on someone else's screen.

This is a variation of (1), but it lays bare the fact that the classroom is a social space and not a collection of individuals. This is key. In a social space, you are expected to pay attention and track the conversation. If you fall asleep at the opera, few people will mind and it won't affect their enjoyment of the performance. If you start to snore, you'll get shushed or sharp elbows to remind you that you are in a social space. You cannot, however, shush a screen.

3. I cannot see the students's faces when they are behind their laptops. It is harder to connect with the students.

I think this is a great argument for banning laptops because it communicates a desire to connect with the students. The problem is that from the student's side of things, they don't always see this effort to connect.

How much connection is needed to teach? How much connection is needed to learn? It's really not something easily quantified, but I don't think many people will disagree that it is important.

4. Students need to learn to listen and analyze without taking notes and especially without typing. As lawyers, they will be in many situations where they cannot have their laptop open and the classroom is a good place to start learning these listening skills.

This is a fairly week argument in my opinion. Students do need to learn listening skills, but I don't think the classroom is a great laboratory for that. Listening to instructors in the classroom is not too similar to listening to clients or listening during to your boss.

Some of these are pretty strong arguments and they speak to the need for faculty to be able to control the educational environment and optimize it for learning. But students are too often unaware of what the instructor is doing - how they are teaching - and sometimes even what they are teaching.

"Hiding the ball" is a hoary old chestnut I hear pulled out all the time about legal education along with comparisons to Professor Kingsfield and the Paper Chase. That movie came out in 1973 - 24 years ago and a LOT has changed since then.

Faculty are in charge of their own classrooms, but like any position of authority, they have a responsibility to their students. Learning is work, but it doesn't have to be drudgery.

I think the laptop issue is a proxy for the discontented relationship between faculty and students in many cases. It is also, therefor, an opportunity to explore a path to greater connectedness.

There was yet another discussion on the Teknoids mailing lists (the list is mostly law school IT folks) on the subject of banning laptops in the classroom (or at least shutting off access to the Internet while in the classroom).

For a long time, I dismissed this topic as so much culture clash, but its persistence and vehemence convinces me now that there is something much, much deeper at play here.

To investigate this, I made a list of reasons why laptops should not be banned and include some discussion around the reasons.

Later, I will list the reasons why laptops should be banned and explore the issues from that direction.

1. If faculty lectures were more interesting, the students wouldn't be looking at their laptops.

This is one of the more perjorative reasons given for not banning laptops and it doubtless has some truth, but it raises so many other questions.

Should faculty be "interesting"? Their goal is to teach, not to entertain and academia should be focused on academics.

However, it does seem obvious that if you can keep your audience's attention, you can teach them something. Seymour Sarason's book "Teaching as a Performing Art" makes the case for the teacher as performer who should use tools of stagecraft to make connections with the students/audience. Notice I did not say "entertainer". Sarason has taught for 20 years and brings much insight to this idea.

Students don't want to be entertained, but they do want to be engaged and if they find little engagement in the classroom, they seek it elsewhere.

2. Because of advanced networking technologies like cell phones, you can't actually block all network access.

This is a non-issue in this discussion. The instructor controls the classroom and if she bans laptops, she can enforce that. It is, however, quite true that it would be difficult to impossible to turn off the network as it is becoming ubiquitous. The real solution, I believe, lies between teh teacher and student and not between the student and the network.

3. Your students will hate you.

This might follow from an instructor who imposes her will on her students as in (2). You cannot teach someone who is unwilling to learn except in the most Pavlovian ways. If (1) were handled well, then this argument becomes moot anyway.

Surely, however, instructors must strike a careful balance between the hard knocks of learning a difficult topic and nurturing proto-scholars. Learning is hard work!

4. Some students use the network access to take notes to a wiki or other net-accessible service.

This is a pretty strong argument as increasing number of students type their notes instead of writing them. This is a mass-culture phenomenon and would be difficult to withstand.

However, there is something to said for kinesthetic learning through writing, editing (and analysis) that is required to summarize complex issues into an outline in real time.

Students that stenographically type everything uttered by the instructor miss the big picture or refrain from in-class analysis.

5. Some students do actual legal research or lookup relevant material that contributes to the quality of the class discussion.

This argumente is often advanced, but I believe it is weak. If only our students were so thoroughly engaged. This is an occasional occurrence - somewhat serendipitous - and useful, but not critical to the dynamic of the classroom.

6. If the instructor would record or podcast the class students would not feel compelled to stenographically type everything.

I am a big fan of podcasting the classroom else, CALI would not have invested so heavily in Classcaster and the Legal Education Podcasting Project(s). I cannot see a downside to recording the classroom for later reference by the student.

This does not resolve the banning of laptops issue, but it does address the "stenographor" arguments mentioned above.

7. Should we confiscate all crossword puzzles too?

This argument is really a variation of (1). It is still true that you cannot make someone pay attention if they are determined to ignore you.

You cannot ban doodling or lack of sleep or in-attention, though you can measure it and fight it with in-class tools like Clickers or small-group discussion.

8. We should put it to a vote with the students or faculty or let the Dean decide.

I don't believe that a blanket policy should be enacted for all students in all classes. There is too much variability in teaching models, subject matter and student-interaction that argue against a one-size-fits-all solution.

Every classroom has to decide what is best for it - both the students and the faculty. What I am not sure about is whether the majority of students should be able to prevent a minority of students - who are genuinely using their computers for good - should be allowed to impose their will. Faculty, of course, can impose their will - but at the risks mentioned previously and they carry the responsbility of creating the effective learning environment.

This issue is really at the core of legal education. If students can effectively tune-out the instructor, then why does the ABA have an attendance requirement and why do schools enforce it?

Who is ultimately responsible for learning to happen? The school and instructors are responsible for teaching to happen, but learning? Sure they have a stake in the success of their students, but to what degree can they impose their imprimatur on the students to make sure that learning takes place?

If law students were adolescents, this would be an easier discussion, but they are adults and so must be engaged in the enterprise of learning as co-equals. Not equals in knowledge or experience, but as equals in the commitment to learning.

The New York Times is reporting that IBM has released a new enterprise social networking suite called Lotus Connections.

What does this have to do with legal education?

The New York Times pieces quotes...

"...Lotus Connections has five components — activities, communities, dogear (a bookmarking system), profiles and blogs — aimed at helping experts within a company connect and build new relationships based on their individual needs..."

Let's break those features down and apply them to law schools...

• activities - the two main activities of legal education is teaching and scholarship. Knowing what someone teaches tells you a lot about them and reviewing their scholarship tells you more.
  
  
• communities - law faculty form communities of scholars within their own schools (somewhat), across institutions but by teaching and scholarship discipline and students form natural communities in the courses they take and among their peers in their class.
  
  
• dogear (a bookmarking system) - two words - legal research. Also a way to find things that is better than search (or at least - augments search).
  
• profiles - the bio or the collection of work that defines you (or that you present to the community)
  
• blogs - for many law faculty, this is scholarship in progress. For students, there are tons of class-related blogs at Classcaster.

What is not listed, but is inherently assumed is that all of these functions reside within a single system with the ability to enter at any point and traverse the links to find people, activities, scholarship and courses that are related to your interests. This is social networking applied to legal education.

CALI is working on a similar beast. At present, we define it across five areas of context...

1. Personal - your articles, powerpoints, podcasts, cases, etc.
   
2. Small Groups - like co-authors of a book or panelists working on a presentation or seminar courses with students and the digital artificacts that they want to share.
   
   
3. Communities - slightly more formalized like AALS sections, all teachers of a particular subject area, all faculty at a law school, all scholars writing in the same area and even courses.
   
4. The Commons - everything that everyone above is willing to share with anyone else.

Within CALI, these are manifesting themselves as ...

CALI Spaces where individual faculty and students can store their own (personal) digital artifacts and share them a few people they are working with (groups) or a community of like-minded folks or everyone. It's a matter of boundaries, context and sharing.

Some things are between you and your co-authors or between you and your students.

Some things are useful and valuable to other torts teachers or other scholars writing in your area (this is also a form of personal marketing of your ideas).

Some things are useful to many teachers and students and you are willing to let them have them under some sort of license like Creative Commons. This is the idea behind the Legal Education Commons.

CALI has been building towards this for a long time, but only recently has our understanding matured sufficiently - and have the tools become powerful enough - for us to implement this system.

If it's good enough for IBM, it's good enough for legal education. Don't you think?

Every year, the membership of CALI meets during AALS to elect new members to the Board of Directors and I give an overview of the previous year plus a look-ahead to the coming year.

2006 was an amazing year for CALI and I expect that 2007 will be even better.

You can watch/listen to my screencast here.

Alternatively, you can listen to just a podcast of the presentation. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - AALS2007CALIMembersMeeting.mp3

I welcome comments, ideas, suggestions, complaints and kudos. Drop me a note at jmayer@cali.org.

Austin Groothuis has updated his list of links to exam advice for law students. I am reproducing it here to make sure it gets wide distribution.

Austin, take it away...

Once again, it's that time of year. If you are a 1L, you are feeling the pressure of your first law school exams. Lucky for you, I've gathered some of the advice out there.

CALI Podcasts

1) Tips for multiple choice exams

2) Top 10 tips for writing a law school essay

3) Three more conversations with law professors about exams

Other Resources

1) Massive compilation of advice on Top Law Student Blog

2) Advice from Permissive Joinder Blog

3) Advice from a professor on Evan Shaeffer's Legal Underground

4) A post about issue spotting from Evan Shaeffer's Legal Underground

5) Advice from Prof. Greg Bowman of Law Career Blog

6) Advice on how to flunk exams from another law student in Chicago.

7) Hofstra's Law Library blog posts more exam week suggestions.

That's a lot of advice and I know if you are a 1L that you probably don't have time to go over it all with exams fastly approaching. But hopefully you have some time to look through and/or listen to some of them.

The Frugal Law Students has a nice post that points to some CALI resources for law students, but the interesting thing about the post is this...

"...If you're pressed for time and want to speed up the pace of listening to your Mp3s ... I condensed an entire Civ Pro Lecture to half the original amount of time. What's great about it is that the tone doesn't change, so it doesn't sound like you're listening to a chipmunk...."

I have given presentations to law faculty over the past two years and mentioned this notion specifically - it always got laughs, but I was serious that it was happening. Now I have proof!

The Desire2Learn website that is tracking the BlackBoard v. Desire2Learn patent lititgation has posted a ruling (PDF) by Judge Clark denying Bb's motion to dismiss D2L's Inequitable Conduct claims.

Inequitable Conduct is described at the Nixon, Peabody law firm website this way...

"...Inequitable conduct is a serious concern to patent holders. Unlike invalidity, which may strike a single patent claim but leave others, inequitable conduct takes out the entire patent and, quite possibly, later continuations and divisional applications...."

... so this is a big victory for the D2L side of the lawsuit. Nixon, Peabody further mention...

"...To find a patent unenforceable due to inequitable conduct, an alleged infringer bears a significant burden of showing inequitable conduct in the patent process through a failure to disclose material information or submission of false material information with intent to deceive. What information is “material,” however, is the source of endless legal wrangling. And although intent to deceive is typically inferred from the surrounding circumstances, it cannot be found solely from the fact that information was not disclosed. There must be a factual basis for finding deceptive intent. Moreover, those two elements, materiality and intent, must be proven by clear and convincing evidence. Finally, if the threshold levels of materiality and intent are proven, the court must still balance the materiality with intent to determine if the conduct as a whole was inequitable...."

If you read the entire Nixon, Peabody article, though, you will realize that this is far from settled, but that's not the point I wanted to make.

D2L passed the first hurdle by successfully defending this defense against a quick dismissal. It will now be a part of the trial and subject to all kinds of discovery, deposition, expert witness testimony, etc. This case just got a lot longer and more complicated.

After reading the decision, I re-listened to my podcast interview with Professor Vince Chiapetta from Willamette University School of Law and have reproduced the relevant section here as a 14 minute podcast.

Click to listen or right click to download - ChiapettaInequitableConduct.mp3

Professor Chiapetta reminded me that there might be a linkage to the inequitable conduct defense and possible Sherman Act (antitrust) cross-claims that Desire2Learn could bring against BlackBoard. Remember, we still don't know what or how much BlackBoard disclosed to the Department of Justice during the review of their purchase of WebCT back in January of this year.

A finding of inequitable conduct - still a far from sure bet - with a paucity of disclosure to the DOJ would be rather damaging to BlackBoard's case I believe.

Please note that IANAL (I am not a lawyer) and none of this should be construed as legal advice).

Elmer Masters, CALI's Director of Internet Development is participating in the group blog "Law School Innovations" and his first post elicited this comment from im Milles on podcasting...

"...Secondly--and as a podcaster myself, this may be surprising coming from me--I'm not sure that the CALI model of course podcasting represents innovation. The most engaging law school classes tend to be those with a high degree of interaction among the instructor and the students. I'm not talking about the tedious first-year "Socratic method" which seems largely to be a thing of the past anyway; I'm talking about smaller classes and electives where students are truly engaged in the subject matter. Podcasting in this context seems to be a step back, to the "sage on the stage" model of teaching. I think podcasting has great value, but I'm not sure that classroom instruction is its best use...."

Emphasis mine.

The first and most important point to be made is that CALI does not have a model of podcasting. It's the faculty who use Classcaster that decide how to incorporate the podcasting into their classroom. We provide the service and give faculty a forum for sharing ideas on what works and what doesn't.

Some faculty chose to merely record the classroom. This was very well received by some students in the class for the following reasons...

• Can re-listen to the lecture
• Can review specific parts of the lecture when going over their notes
• Don't get left behind when necessarily missing a class

Recording lectures is not innovative, but the convenient and effortless ability to do so and distribute it to students anywhere in the world is.Using the web as a simple medium of transport is one of its most basic innovations.

Some faculty decided to record weekly summaries where they re-emphasized important points, clarified points that seemed to generate confusion in the classroom or used the opportunity to expand on explanations when the class time ran out. None of this is particularly innovative, but it does add value to the course (at least the students say so in their survey answers) and the ease of which this is done makes it innovative.

There is another critical innovation in podcasting that Jim does not mention, but I know he is aware of from conversations I have had with him.

Podcasting makes you are a better teacher. It forces you to gather your thoughts and present them in an orderly fashion. More than a few faculty have told me that they listen to their own podcasts as a way to improve their lecturing. This is a form of deliberative practice. You get better doing something by doing it over and over and by reflecting on how you did it and podcasting is the method by which this happens.

Several faculty have also told me that they listen to other faculty's podcasts as a way to get tips and ideas for better presenting material in the classroom. This is teachers teaching teachers. There are rare, few opportunities for law faculty to observe other law faculty in action without the social overhead of visiting another's classroom.

If there is a CALI model for legal education course podcasting, it is to create an ecosystem that allows for seemless sharing of excellent teaching practices, deliiberate practice and for students to benefit from all of this.

In Spring semester of 2006, CALI conducted the first Legal Education Podcasting Project and we surveyed students at the end of the semester to their reactions. I published the tabulate-able results of the survey in this blog post. I read over the student comments in preparation for my EDUCAUSE presentation and realized that I have never published the student comments.

There is GOLD in these comments for teachers and institutions thinking about podcasting and I am providing these comments largely unedited.

In future blog posts, I will single out some comments for further discussion.

I removed a few comments that were not relevant to podcasting and also XXX'ed out any references of names or institutions.

The question text was...

"Comments, ideas, complaints or suggestions on how we can improve legal education podcasting in the future? "

Here are the student responses...

1. I think podcasting is a good idea. It never hurts to have supplemental materials in a high pressure envirionment like law school. I had some problems with accessing the website. This was very frustrating when you needed to hear a podcast to clear up a doubt or question you may have had concerning that particular lecture.
   
   
2. Although I did not listen to any podcasts this semester, I will probably listen to podcasts in the future because my classmates said that the podcasts were helpful for them.
   
   
3. although this is cleary a technical/administrative issue, in classes such as mine, in which there is a lot of interplay between the professor and the students, the fact that you can only hear the professor greatly decreases the value of the podcast. If there was only a way in which the students could be heard responding to/asking questions of the professor, then I probably would have used the podcast much, much more (indeed, had this been more of a lecture class, with little student interaction, then I may very well have used the podcast more frequently).
   
   
4. an excellent supplementary tool.
   
   
5. As I mentioned above, podcasts on discrete topics were great. When the podcasts started to be less specific and labeled improperly they lost their usefulness.
   
   
6. Audio for the lectures is sometimes low and difficult to hear. The best podcasts were the review for the week.
   
   
7. Can't hear the other students so if the teacher does not repeat what was said the Podcast is useless.
   
   
8. Convince more law professors to use the podcasting tool. It is very valuable for students. I did not use it to skip class - I used it to reinforce my class learning and to streamline my outlining process.
   
   
9. Develop Automated presentation where as the podcast plays, there is an optional video that protgresses through notes, etc.
   
   
10. Each professor should be required to take a class or read a manual or something about how to make a podcast. I say this because I think that it is a shame that Professor XXX had to learn on the job. The later podcasts seem to be better than the earlier ones. I don't know if this is because Professor XXX is just getting better at being clear and succint in his podcasts or if he finally learned how to use some editing tools. Either way, I think that it would be to the benefit of the professor and the students if the professor were given some instruction about how to do a podcast before the semester begins. In a similar vein, it might be nice if the professor were given a tutorial on how to use iTunes. The posting of podcasts to iTunes should be mandatory. I say this because it is really the best way to make sure that all the students get all of the podcasts. As soon as Professor XXX got around to doing this, I subscribed and now, when he randomly adds a podcast after the semester has ended and I have really stopped looking at the class website, I still get the new podcast. Also, there needs to be a significant improvement in the sound quality. I am not expecting THX quality digital sound, but everyone needs to be aware that poor sound quality with hisses and pops and other such nonsense really interferes with the message the professor is trying to get across. I cannot stress this enough.
    
    
11. Each recording should be a uniform length or at least approximately the same and/or the length of the podcast should be listed on the website. Podcasts should be posted on a set day each week. I think the more recent method of naming the files is more confusing than the original method. I think it would be better just name with the topic name and the date (example: Causation 4/15).
    
    
12. Even if I miss the class, getting notes from a colleague is still easier and a more efficient use of time.
    
    
13. extremely helpful. I knew that if I didn't understand a point I could go back at a later date and listen to the podcast for clarification. Because I took notes on the computer I would indicate the time slot where I felt lost and then later on go listen to the podcast and more often than not I would be able to clarify the point I was initially confused about. Wish all my classes had this available.
    
    
14. First of all, I want to say that Professor XXX did an excellent job with the podcasts. My biggest complaint about law school in general is that students spend so much time trying to dig out the law from cases and lectures and that many professors "hide the ball" from students instead of really trying to help them learn the material. I'm not an academic, so to me this seems like an enormous waste of time. Law schools and the professors that endorse this methodology usually justify it on the basis of "weeding out" students and that students shouldn't be "spoon-fed" the material. I think these justifications are rediculous. I'm in law school because I want to be a lawyer, and like 99% of law students, I'm motivated to read the assignments and learn the material so that I can use it in practice someday. I don't need a professor to make me work for it - I'm already in law school to work for it. If I didn't want to work, I'd be doing something else and saving myself $60,000. So in my opinion, professors who don't want to make learning the law "too easy" for students are territorial, condescending, and insecure. Let me be clear, Professor XXX is NOT this type of instructor. With that being said, I think the podcast idea is a great idea and a breath of fresh air after 1 1/2 years of classes in which instructors would either refuse to summarize the material covered in class or make me feel like an 8th grader for even requesting a summary. I attended every regularly scheduled class and knowing that Professor XXX would provide a podcast summary of the class in NO WAY enticed me to skip class. I feel confident my classmates would say the same. The podcasts were a great way to review the material prior to outlining and also provided a "big picture" view of the material we covered in class and how it all fit together. In closing, I would STRONGLY encourage every instructor to podcast summaries of their weekly classes. If actually helping students learn is the goal, this is a step in the right direction. Professors who wish to continue to make learning the law more difficult than it needs to be should be reminded that their job is to TEACH.
    
    
15. For some reason, I was sometimes unable to download podcasts off of the cali website. This very likely could be operator error (haha), but it was easier to download them from the website sometimes. I think sometimes the cali server got overloaded...not sure?
    
    
16. Generally, I thought that podcasting weekly lectures was very helpful. I took notes and to a small extent listened to the podcasts as I was doing other things. However, I (along with all the classmates I spoke to) was unable to actually download the lectures as podcasts and make them portable. So I was only able to listen to the lectures when I was near my laptop and in a place where no one around would be bothered--a fairly limited range. I had hoped to be able to listen while going for a walk, riding the bus, etc. The class for which I am using the "podcasts" is one where no outlines are permitted, making the opportunity to listen repeatedly to a topic particularly helpful. Being able to listen to them in a broader range of areas would have helped even more. I liked having weekly podcasts. I think anything more frequent would have felt like a burden rather than a benefit. Weekly summaries also allowed for broader overviews of a topic, and connected topics that were discrete entities during class.
    
    
17. GREAT IDEA! NOW IF THE ATTENDANCE POLICIES WOULD CATCH UP... SOME OF US ACTUALLY LEARN BETTER ON OUR OWN & THE PODCASTS ARE GOOD FOR THAT!
    
    
18. Great Job Professor XXX!
    
    
19. Great Job with the PodCasts. I did not listen to them during the semester, but only at the end of the semester as exam review and to double check my notes. very helpful.
    
    
20. Great way for busy students to make value use of dead time (e.g. commuting). Please keep up the levergaging of technology to make the learning process more efficient.
    
    
21. Hard to hear student questions during sessions that were heavy with student teacher interaction.
    
    
22. Hard to hear students answer the questions the Prof possed. Points were missed if they were answered too far away fromt the recorder.
    
    
23. Having the podcast is nice since in some of my other classes I have to abbreviate notes and pick and choose from what the instructor says since I cannot type the entire lecture. That being said, although I have not skipped class more often because I knew it would be podcast, I have taken poorer notes, and sometime done work for other classes while in this class.
    
    
24. He moved around so much that it created hissing and scratching, and couldn't hear students questions. THus, it was like listening to static and weird noises for 2 hours. So, I wouldn't recommend it unless professors use stationary microphones!
    
    
25. hopefully all will oneday podcast. Also why not stream video in addition?
    
    
26. I couldn't make the podcasts work so that I could down load them. This was frustrating and meant I listended less than I would have liked. These are great though-- I'd just like more access to them!
    
    
27. I did not listen to the podcasts because I did not miss any classes, and I had no reason otherwise to listen to the podcasts. I prefer looking at other students' notes or being in class to listening to the class on multimedia. In the future if I have a class that is podcast, and I do miss a class, I may use it, but I am unsure.
    
    
28. I did not use them during the semester but they have been excellent for going over my outline. I use a mac and I couldn't get itunes to recognize the podcast. I wish I could have downloaded them to a mp3 player.
    
    
29. I didn't know how to get to podcast.
    
    
30. I didn't miss more classes b/c I knew that it was being podcasted, but if I had to miss the class b/c of other issues it allowed me to feel that I wasn't missing anything significant b/c I could listen to the lecture later.
    
    
31. I don't have an Ipod or any other type of Mp3 player, so to me it was inconvenient to have to listen to it on my computer at home when I do all of my studying in the library on my laptop (which would not play the podcasts). I'm sure if I owned a player, it would have been more worthwhile.
    
    
32. I found the podcasting very helpful, especially during the panic of finals. I appreciated the fact that I could go back to a class to clarify a point or topic at any time. I thought during class that if there was something that I was unclear about, I recalled that I could go home and listen to the entire lecture again and not waste any class time asking questions over and over again.
    
    
33. I found the summaries more beneficial rather than classes that were podcasted--the casts were concise and an excellent reference to clarify various notes/points from class notes. All classes should be podcasted!
    
    
34. I like it b/c I found that I missed some information had I relied on my notes w/o the podcast. Podcast definitely allowed me to understand the material better b/c I could listen in on the class session multiple times. Thanks so much Professor XXX :)
    
    
35. I like the idea that I can use the podcast in the car when I would not normally be doing work. I am not sure if this is possible, but it would be nice to be able to insert your own comments into certain parts of the podcast and then save that (modified) version. Then you could have a customized version of the material, which would be very helpful in studying for exams. Other than that, I think that it is a very useful program that I would like to see continue.
    
    
36. I like the podcast because it allows me to go back and revisit what the professor thinks is important. However, some professors will not allow students to record, so I don't know that they would like the idea of podcasting. I find that it is really helpful and I used it frequently.
    
    
37. I liked the podcasting in my XXX class because Professor XXX posted Weekly summaries that were very helpful in helping me in preparing for the exams.
    
    
38. I love the podcasts they are a great tool to reinforce learning of complicated subjects.
    
    
39. I LOVED the availability of the podcast. I felt more confident taking notes in class because I knew that if something was unclear that later on I could double check it. I actually think I listened better because I wasn't so worried about getting everything down in my notes. Also, I had to miss a couple of classes this semester for valid reasons and it really helped me. However, knowing that the classes were podcast did not make me feel like I could just skip class. Professor XXX writes a lot of good stuff on the board so it's preferable to attend class. I listened to the podcasts on my computer. I would have liked to have burned them onto a CD or put them on my iPod to listen to in the car or while I was jogging, but could never figure out how to do it. I think podcasting is great and I think it's awesome that Professor XXX did this. He's a great professor who is really committed to helping students learn so I'm not at all surprised that he was among the first to try this out. I hope more professors use podcasting in the future. it's an incredibly valuable resource. Thanks!
    
    
40. I loved the podcast.
    
    
41. I simply didn't have the time to use it.
    
    
42. I suggest that class lectures be available as podcasts with mandatory attendance. XXX only allowed access to podcasts for few students when for what ever reason could not attend class. I would have liked to be able to listen to class lecture despite being present in class. The podcasting was only for reviews which are not a substitute for class lecture.
    
    
43. I think it is very valuable and that more classes should offer the option. It is a great way to go back and study for exams
    
    
44. I think it's great technology. Inevitably, things will come up and we will be unable to attend class, so this works out great that our classes are podcasted for us. Also, at times the Professor will go through the material too quickly so I will need to go back to the podcast to fill in what I missed. It's a great idea!
    
    
45. I think its a great idea....but it might be better if, for a small fee, the professor made the podcasts available on CD for those students who arent as computer savvy as others
    
    
46. I think that podcast are a great way to supplement notes. I would warn against missing class but, if used properly they are a great tool. I know that after I finished putting together my outlines, I would listen to the podcast and see if I was missing important information or to see if my outline flowed properly.
    
    
47. I think that podcasting is a very viable option. If there are worries about attendance, I recommend that professors maintain a record of attendance with a limited number of absences. I used podcast summaries of subject matter before an exam and I used them when I missed class rather than borrowing another classmate's notes. I found them immeasurably valuable for times when I absolutely had to miss class. I listened to them on a PC and took notes just as if I was in class.
    
    
48. I think the podcasts are a great study tool. If the professor has an attendance policy, the podcasts do not provide an incentive to skip. I hope that other classes I take use podcasts too!
    
    
49. I think they are good. The summaries seem to focus more on better understanding the 'law' which is especially helpful. I feel like in class I am playing 'hide-n-seek' where the law is hiding and I am seeking; but since I do not know how it looks like my 'finding' may be incorrect or a close resembleness but identicle.
    
    
50. I wanted to download the podcast into my computer so I could either burn it or load it onto my ipod, but I could not find directions as to how I could do this. Did I miss it or am I just supposed to know? Thanks...maybe making instructions on this would be a help because I like to listen on my ipod but I had to listen to it on my computer and it wasn't as convenient.
    
    
51. I was confused about how to subscribe to the podcasts at first. I already had Itunes, but couldn't figure out how to get the podcasts. Our IT department gave a link, but when I clicked on it, all I got was code. It wasn't until part way through the semester I was told by someone who figured it out how to subscribe. I know it isn't a problem that comes from your end, but IT departments need to instruct techno-challenged people like me how to subscribe.
    
    
52. I wish the podcast was longer. They are only about 20 minute summaries currently. I'm not suggesting that the entire class is recorded or something like that, but maybe including hypotheticals and examples for different concepts that aren't already in the book or mentioned in class. Love this idea. Listening during the time that I have available and at the places that I am studying is incredibly convenient. I love CALI in general as well. Thanks for thinking of this!:)
    
    
53. I would just like to have more podcasts available in the future.
    
    
54. If I had better instructions on how I could use Podcast (how to use it with an I-pod), I would use it more often. Hearing the students' responses or having the instructor repeat what the students had said more often would be helpful.
    
    
55. If I were more computer savvy I probably would have listened to the podcast more. I recently learned how to do this. I generally view my computer as an overpriced typewriter. with that said: I think the idea of podcasting classes is excellant!
    
    
56. improve the malfunctions.
    
    
57. it is very helpful to know that it's there as a backup for filling in when one hasn't heard every bit of a lecture. it is also good if one wants to go back to review the material of a particular lecture. all in all the availability of podcasts is a good idea.
    
    
58. It is wonderful to be able to download the cast to my computer/ipod. I have other classes that are recorded, but it is so frustrating because you can only listen to them if you are connected to the internet (because they stream the audio). Since I don't have internet at my home, I am forced to stay on campus just to be able to listen to the lectures if I needed to. This is great!
    
    
59. It was hard to hear the comments of other students.
    
    
60. Loved the podcasts!
    
    
61. Maybe make the downloading speed faster?
    
    
62. Maybe redundant recorders, because several times Prof. XXX equipment failed and the podcast was either cut short or nonexistent.
    
    
63. our XXX class involves about 90% discussion and 10% lecture. I think the podcast would be useful in a lecture-heavy class. It is not as practical in a discussion oriented class because you only hear fragments of the conversation. Have a great day.
    
    
64. Please encourage more professors to use it. The pod cast are very helpful for reviews and would cut the demand on office hours during finals.
    
    
65. Podcast is AWESOME! I was introduced to the technology during my undergrad at UC Berkeley. There, the classes were not only podcast, but were available as movie files, so that we could watch the class. It was an INCREDIBLY beneficial tool. It is great when you miss a class, and it is also great when you need to clarify a point. The technology is simple, essentially costless (however much it costs to upload a movie or song file into a computer), and it greatly improves the learning experience.
    
    
66. Podcasting is an absolutely great idea. Though I realize the probable detriment to attendance that would occur if entire classes were podcasted, our professor's 15-20 min class summaries were perfect - you still had to go to class, but the podcasts were a great way of reviewing the material and clarifying things I missed.
    
    
67. Podcasting is especially helpful in clarifying notes or going back over points not fully understood/missed.
    
    
68. Podcasting IS VERY helpful for me. I have a terrible memory so I review the class via the podcast while I am commuting. The fact that I am answering this survey the day before the exam shows the difference the podcast makes, I know the material and I am not freaking out frantically trying to cram it all in at the last minute. The repetition made possible by the podcast pays off.
    
    
69. Podcasts are an important tool for students who realize that every minute of the semester must be used efficiently. Also, they level the playing feild for students that have long distances to travel. I only have two coments that may be useful: First, I find the summary reviews far more useful than problem answers. Second, twenty minutes is a good time limit for a session. Longer sessions are difficult to download.
    
    
70. Podcasts provide a great method to reinforce class material. I found them particularly helpful in reviewing for exams.
    
    
71. Prof. XXX podcasts were a great summary of our weekly lectures and discussions. Very helpful in studying and outlining.
    
    
72. Professor XXX rocks! She cares more about her students than perhaps any professor I have had. Her podcasts were great and so was she....but she gives HARD exams!!
    
    
73. Screening out background noise would improve audio quality, but it was still clear enough to understand.
    
    
74. Some of the professor's podcosts were too lengthy. Encourage the professors to limit them to 30 minutes. Include instructions on how to download a podcast to an mp3 player for those of us who do not know how.
    
    
75. Streamline the encoding process so professor's are more inclined to record and podcast! Otherwise, great program for claryifying issues I missed. thanks.
    
    
76. Summary podcasts were great. They really helped me study for tests. I did not listen to any "normal" class lectures, but I would have if I missed a class session. It would be nice to have podcasts available for missed classes. At XXX, I think Podcasts would have been helpful for Civ. Pro. (because it is complicated) and for Torts (because the Prof. talks too fast to take good notes). The IT Dept. at XXX is great - they made getting the podcasts really easy.
    
    
77. Terrific concept I am grateful for the opportunity. It was very helpful.
    
    
78. Thank you very much for this opportunity. I really enjoyed it.
    
    
79. The ability to listen to a class if I can't figure something out when I am reviewing my notes (especially during exam prep time) is really a great help. I have marked different parts of my notes during class to remind myself where to go back and listen to the discussion again and that has been a real time saver both in class (by not holding up the class) and out of class (so I don't have to spend tons of time trying to figure out what the professor was saying exactly). The only difficulty I have found is that while I can hear the professor's voice quite clearly, I cannot always hear the student's questions or comments. Often, the professor will answer with the common law school answer "it depends," "what do you think," and even sometimes "yes." When going back and listening to the class, there ends up being gaps that are difficult to fill. Maybe if the classrooms could be set up with some typr of microphone aimed toward the students that could pick up that half of the discussion this problem could be solved. This is really a great help! Thank you
    
    
80. The audio is a problem. Without a better system to capture audio, student voices are seldom heard other than muffled and garbled audio. This would not be a problem, except for EVERY case discussed there is a student participating. One half the discussion could be salient, IF the instructor repeats enough so that the Podcast audience can follow. Until this issue is resolved, I believe you have a technology application that is of minimal value.
    
    
81. The instructor may need a better recorder. It seemed to pick up a lot of static or not work sometimes so the recordings either were not available or very hard to understand. It made me less likely to listen to them.
    
    
82. The only problem I really heard with the podcast was that there were times that the Professor was not cognizant of the fact that we cant see the board or the books etc. she was reffering to i nthe lecture, for example there were moments in the podcast such as ".....when doing legal research you will find the answer in this book...(and not referring to it as the black IICLE book etc.) or " as you can see here on the board"...(instead of saying as you can see the research flowchart etc.) - just a little more description would have been good at times to refresh my memory of the exact book, chart, webpage etc. she was referring to in the lecture in class. Other than that I think podcasts are a great idea and I think every Professor should use them:)
    
    
83. The podcast was terrifically helpful for situations when I had to miss class for school-related activities.
    
    
84. The podcasts are great. I want them for all my classes. They really help when I didn't quite get what the prof was saying. Please encourage other profs to use them here at Pepperdine!!
    
    
85. The podcasts were extremely helpful in clarifying any points that were difficult in class. If there were a couple of hypos or something that may be useful for an exam, it might encourage more students to listen to this allready valuable resource for studying.
    
    
86. The podcasts were very helpful - particularly in conjunction with the CALI tutorial on Administrative Law. More than merely summarizing the material we covered for the week in class, the podcasts helped me to see the "big picture" and therefore clarified the broader concepts in the course. I think it is particularly important in learning Administrative law to keep this perspective since the details and procedures required in given circumstances can be confusing. My learning style is both visual and auditory, so having access to the material in different formats was a huge benefit for me. Going into the final exam, I felt that I had a strong grasp on the subject matter and understood the concepts more thoroughly than any course I have taken in law school so far. I'm certain that my grasp of the material was a direct result of having the material presented in different formats. My only suggestion is to keep focusing the podcasts on the larger picture/broader concepts since daily classes tend to focus on the details.
    
    
87. The quality needs to improve and then it will be perfect. It's better than the generic CDs or tapes on the subject, because it is straight from your professor. It is very helpful.
    
    
88. The sound quality on the podcasts is terrible, and it is difficult to understand what is being said. Although the fact that the class was podcast made me less likely to go to class because I knew I would at least be able to get the gist of the class from the podcast.
    
    
89. the technology is useful, some kinks need to be ironed out, such as sound quality.
    
    
90. The value of listening to a class is limited to (1) clarify a point, (2) listen if you missed class. There is no substitute for attending the class; in fact, the recording of the class provides very limited value, since you cannot hear the students' questions and answers well enough. I have found an instructor's specific solo-recording of a topic, however, is of great value. There are a number of schools and organizations providing podcasts on specific topics; effectively a poor-man's Sum & Substance CD audio. I have found these of great value; sometimes because they point out or clarify items of value, other times as a great way to passively reinforce information, helping to internalize concepts.
    
    
91. there's a long delay btwn class and when the podcast is available, when i do miss a class and use the podcast to catch up, that presents a problem bc i don't get to listen to the missed class until days and more classes have passed, so speedier turnaround would make them much more effective.
    
    
92. These podcasts made a great review for final exams. You have a printed version to read along with. The podcast material is concise and allows you to get your arms around the whole course in one span of a few hours. Great idea!!
    
    
93. These worked well for since I often have a hard time concentrating in such a large class... it was nice for exam review and expecially to be able to study while doing something else at home.
    
    
94. they were great- especially the reviews after each section. especially helpful for the any days missed or if the lecture or material was difficult it was nice to be able to go back and review the material. also super helpful for finals and being able to go back and get the wording the professor used and the main points she pointed out to watch for in each doctrine.
    
    
95. This is a great tool. It would be especially useul if the entire lecture were available. THere are some points that are clarified in the dialogue which develops during class. AS far as providing a capsule of the covered material, however, this is awesome. I wish all my instructors used it. I especially wish my 1st year instructors had used it!!! Thanks.
    
    
96. This is an excellent addition to legal education. I realize most law professors will not see it as such for several years down the road. But, for my learning style and schedule the podcast was an exceptional aid to the professors lectures.
    
    
97. This is one of the best resources I have had access to while in law school thus far. Although it is helpful to get notes from classmates if I need to miss class or need clarity on a particular point, I find it much more helpful to listen to the podcast and take notes, that way I get the benefit of the lecture even if ill, or unable to attend class. It eliminates a lot of the pressure of feeling that I may have missed something, or do not understand a point, or took insuffient notes. I hope more professors in the future podcast their classes.
    
    
98. This is the first time I had a podcast for a class, and it was really a great tool. I am appreciative of both CALI and Prof. XXX for agreeing to do this. If one of CALI's goals is to get students to listen to other professors podcasts (from other schools), they should be organized according to subject matter the way that the CALI lessons are on the homepage.
    
    
99. TRANSCRIPTS of podcasts would be very useful. I learn much better by reading something than listening to it. I used the software 'Dragon Naturally Speaking' to transcribe the podcasts, but had very poor results with it. Even then, however, a few written lines worked wonders for my concentration. I was able to listen to the podcasts as I was reading the words and concentrate on the subject - even when I had to supplement with mental notes for what the software missed. Before that phase I had tried listening to podcasts on the ipod while walking my daily mile (pretend to exercise), or through the car radio (ipod) while driving to and from work & school, but I was not 'getting' it. At least not at the level I did when I had the written words in front of me. All in all, I would much rather have THAT level - the podcast level - of instruction in class, during the time that I dedicate to this particular activity: school/learning. THAT level = the podcasts were VERY GOOD and both my opinion of the class and my understanding of the subject would have been much higher had the class lectures been as good as the podcasts. This class is one particular case where someone should say clearly and loudly 'screw the Socratic method, it doesn't work' and go forth with podcast-level lectures IN CLASS. -- Podcasts for the class were a very good excuse to buy ipods and paraphernalia for them, however! :-) (great speaker system for the whole house to listen to the podcast from the ipod! - never actually used for the podcast, but purchased, never-the-less. Thanks for the justification of the expense)
    
    
100. Very helpful...great for clarification.
     
     
101. was a little hard to hear on some -- but other than that -- GREAT
     
     
102. While I did not listen to the pod casts I loved the idea that I could listen if I wanted to.
     
     
103. While I did not miss any classes, I think it is a very useful tool. In the event a student misses a class, listening to the professor first-hand is much better than getting notes from another student. As I prepare for finals, I may use podcast to seek clarification on various points.
     
     
104. Would like be able to see as well as hear the class
     
     

Pamela Jones and the hordes of relentless keyboard kommandoes have been clicking up a storm in these waning days of the SCO v. IBM litigation.

They have just posted a re-working of what PJ calls "IBM's Greatest Hits" and Groklaw's "Magnum Opus". It's titled ...

Declaration of Todd M. Shaughnessy with Unsealed or Redacted Exhibits

... but it's a massively linked documents from IBM of a good portion of the documents relevant to the case. It comes to Groklaw via Pacer as a PDF of images that the community has converted into HTML/text including pretty formatting, links (to all of the other documents in the Groklaw warehouse) and all spell-checked, i-dotted, t-crossed and worked over by volunteers who are more than happy to poke one more stick into SCO's eye.

Oh, no, this is not personal ...NOT.

But Pam is wrong.

The "great work" of Groklaw cannot be reduced to a single document or blog post. This is just the cherry on top, the icing on the cake, the ... the ... words escape me.

What if every injustice were pursued with the relentless zeal that the Groklaw community brings to their particular passion? Ponder that for a moment.

Law schools could teach entire seminars (several in fact) based on the just the court documents posted on the site, but the editorials and commentary bring color, life and emotion to this case. What a rich treasure of information .... all in one place.

The case is slouching towards conclusion and a recent blizzard of documents have been produced by both sides. 42 months into the case and you would think that there would be no ergs of energy left to transcribe these tedious lawyerly tomes. You would be wrong. With dispatch and depair (SCO's that is), the Groklawites have punched out the facts for everyone else to read, ponder and dissect.

Groklaw makes litigators out of all who read it and I mean that in the best possible way. We have learned all about trial tactics, motion practice, depositions, evidence, jurisdiction, summary judgement, contracts, copyright ... the list is long ... and in following Groklaw, I feel like I have been to law school and am ready to take the bar exam (well, perhaps not quite).

Kudos to Pam and the inexorable Groklaw community.

BlackBoard, take note.

Lots of law faculty and law librarians (and at least one Dean) are posting to blogs created at CALI's Classcaster Legal Education Blog/Podcast Network.

One of those that I kept running across because of the interesting posts was the AELR Blog. It seemed like someone different was posting every day so I decided to follow up and asked Professor James Duggan at Southern Illinois University School of Law what was up.

The response was even more interesting than I expected.

He and Library Director Frank Houdek are co-teaching a course in Advanced Electronic Legal Research and one of the requirements of the course is for students to find and post relevant articles from the Internet. Here's the description from the syllabus...

"...Students must subscribe via RSS feed to at least three (3) research and/or legal technology blogs. Students will be expected to monitor the blogs on a continuing basis and to post information learned from them to the AELR Blog on a regular basis during the semester (i.e., at least once a week, minimum total of 15 postings). While the postings will not be graded, their level of thoroughness, accuracy, critical analysis) will be considered in determining the "participation" component of the final course grade..."

This is cool on so many different levels.

First, it exposes students to all sorts of information on the Web.

Second, all of the other students benefit from the entire class's work.

Third, everyone else who wants to follow along and can participate (comments are enabled on the blog).

Fourth, students will learn about vetting sources and authority of the things they post. Others are reading their work and can see if they do a good job of finding and analysing the quality of the articles they find.

Would something like this be useful for any law school course? I don't see why not. It makes the subject matter come alive with real-time, present-day relevance. It engages the students to fit what they are learning into larger contexts. It challenges and teaches the instructors, too.

Here's what else Professor Duggan had to say...

"...We feel the assignment serves two major purposes:

(1) by having students monitor legal research/technology blogs, they are receiving a "pain free" and self-initiated supplement to the course materials that we provide to them for the subject matter of the course;

(2) by having students also monitor at least one blog in a subject field of their choice (e.g., family law, criminal law, etc.) they are introduced to a valuable method for keeping abreast of developments in their subject specialities. .."

Right on!

This is the read/write web applied to education. This is Rip/Mix/Learn.

If you are a law faculty at a CALI-member law school (almost all US law schools), you can setup a blog at Classcaster yourself for your courses. It's free, and it will benefit your students.

Put this blog post under thinking out loud.

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

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

What would scale?

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

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

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

Now, let's build on that.

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

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

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

What is missing from this scenario?

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

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

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

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

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

Isn't this a good thing?

Students would be smarter, education widely/universally available.

I think so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow!

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

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

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

Emphasis mine.

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

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

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

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

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

More on this later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a brilliant idea.

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

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

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

Ever wondered what Deans do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn't that a good thing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am delighted to post that CALI now has 201 US Law School Members.

This past week, the University of Virginia School of Law joined CALI and the recently launched, Drexel University College of Law also joined.

This brings the number of US Law School CALI Members to over 200 for the first time in our 26 years of existence and represents almost every law school in the US.

For a complete list of CALI's members and affiliates, click here.

Austin Groothuis works for CALI (as do I), but he is also a 2L at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

His blog has been attracting some positive attention (follow link and see the above graphic) and I realized that I was remiss in mot mentioning this myself after the appropriate disclosures.

The blog is loosely aimed at folks considering law school, but Austin can't help but write from his own experiences in law school. This is all to the good and he has been doing a great job of posting insightful and honest advice.

He has also put out an open call to any law students or pre-law students for any questions or advice that they want. Brave man.

Seriously, take him up on his offer. We have tons of contacts and the CALI staff has over 50 years of experience working in legal education ... or like the saying goes...

We're from CALI and we're here to help.

Need to get back into "law school mode"? Here are some podcasts that are up your alley.

Elmer pointed me to the NPR-sponsored website for Justice Talking where they post MP3s of shows that are law-related.

Recent programs posted include...

• Immigration Reform
  
• Collecting DNA from the Accused: Will it Help or Hurt Law Enforcement?
  
• The Roberts Court: What Can This Term Tell Us About the Future of the Court?
  
• Are Lawyers Necessary in all Cases?

... and others.

For you lawyers, you can get CLE credit for listening to the shows via a link on the site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's a screenshot ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emphasis mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But this is not the point of this post.

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

1) attempt to gather peer evaluation data

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

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

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

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

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

etc, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More to come on this.

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

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

This podcast is 29 minutes long.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell me I am wrong.

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

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

The blog Lanny on Learning says...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes indeed!

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

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

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

This screencast is 27 minutes long.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a podcast from Subtech 2006.

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

This podcast is 47 minutes long.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The podcast is 4 minutes 44 seconds long.

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

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

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

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

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

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

c

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

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

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

This podcast is 9 minutes and 2 seconds long.

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

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

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

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

The powerpoints for the presentation are here.

Paul Maharg blogs about it here.

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

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

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

This podcast is 55 minutes and 19 seconds long.

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

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

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

This podcast is 31 minutes long.

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

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

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

This discussion between Martin and Maharg is 12 minutes long.

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

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.

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.

What are the career prospects for an IT Professional in education?

Maybe this book will answer that question and many others. From the blurb...

"...provides an overview of current principles and practices for mentoring and developing the next generation of IT leaders in higher education. Edited by EDUCAUSE Vice President Cynthia Golden and written by top leaders in the industry who have distinguished themselves and their organizations for sharpening others' skills, institutional savvy, and ability to lead, the book's chapters are organized into two sections: the organizational perspective and the individual perspective. ...."

The entire book is available online in PDF or HTML format here.

There are also audio interviews (we call them podcasts in these parts) with various CIOs from over half-a-dozen universities and community colleges (none from law schools) here.

I have some extensive travel to be doing and will report back as I read.

Read along with me.

I gave the opening keynote at the 2006 Conference for Law School Computing yesterday. Here is the powerpoint deck from the presentation.

1759-JohnMayerThursdayPlenaryFINAL.ppt (17 MB)

Here is a link to a WMV video of the presentation.

Here is a link to an MP3 of the presentation.

Update: Tom Boone at UNLV Boyd School of Law provides an excellent precis here.

This is an podcast interview in our continuing series of podcast interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project this past semester (Spring or Winter) of 2006.

Professor Robin Craig of the University of Indiana-Indianapolis School of Law recorded the classroom for her Property II course.

The podcast can be found here - click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - robincraig2.mp3

This is the next interview in our series of interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project this past semester (Spring or Winter) of 2006.

Professor Thaddeus Pope of the University of Memphis School of Law recorded the classroom for his Health Law course.

This podcast is 38 minutes and 46 seconds long.

Here is the link to the podcast. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - ThadPope.mp3

This is the next in our series of interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project this past semester (Spring or Winter) of 2006.

Professor Steve Bradford of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Law recorded weekly summary podcasts for his Securities Regulations course.

This podcast is 22 minutes and 36 seconds long.

Here is the link to the podcast. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - SteveBradaford.mp3

Here is the next in a series of podcast interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project this past semester (Spring or Winter) of 2006.

This interview is with Professor Peter Henning of Wayne State University School of Law. Professor Henning created weekly summaries for his Professional Responsibility course.

This podcast is 30 minutes and 50 seconds long.

Here is the link to the podcast - click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - PeterHenning.mp3

This is an interview with Don Zhou who is a 1L at William Mitchell College of Law and the Head of Technical Services in the Law Library. He heard about the podcasting project and approached several professors in courses that he was taking and gained their permission to post recordings of the classes on the law school's internal BlackBoard course websites.

This was an especially interesting podcast because Don provides insights from the student perspective and he repesents an interesting model for introducing podcasting into legal education that I had not considered before. Because Don did all the work of setting up the digital recorder, converting the files and uploading them to a website, he lowered the barriers to podcasting for the faculty in the courses he took. Whatever his motivations, he personally benefited and also shared that benefit with the other students in his classes.

This podcast is 20 minutes and 40 seconds long.

The link to the podcast is here - click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - DonZhou.mp3

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.

This is the next in our series of interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project this past semester (Spring or Winter) of 2006.

Lee Peoples is the Associate Director for Faculty, Research and Instructional Services and teaches at the Oklahoma City University School of Law and created weekly summaries for his class Advanced Legal Research, Foreign, Comparative and International Law.

This podcast is 18 minutes and 15 seconds long.

Here is the link to the podcast. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - LeePeoples.mp3

Here is the next podcast interview in our continuing series of interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project.

Professor Norm Garland of the Southwestern University School of Law used podcasting in his Constitutional Criminal Procedure course. Professor Garland also makes extensive use of Powerpoints and is experimenting with posting videocasts of his classes (audio + Powerpoints) as well.

Here is the podcast. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - NormGarland.mp3

This is the latest interview with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcastaing Project this past spring semester.

Professor Carole Buckner of Western State University School of Law used podcasting in her Civil Procedure II course.

The podcast can be found here - click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - CaroleBuckner.mp3

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

Professor Karin Mika of Cleveland State University - Cleveland Marshall College of Law used podcasts in her Advanced Legal Research course.

This podcast is 31 minutes and 48 seconds long.

Here is the link to the podcast. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - KarinMika.mp3

This is the next in a series of podcast interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project.

Professor Aaron Fellmeth of Arizona State University School of Law recorded the classroom of his Patent Law class. He is a self-proclaimed "fast talker" and believes that the podcast helped his students because they could go over the material a second or third time.

This podcast is 20 minutes and 32 seconds long.

Here is the link to the podcast: Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - AaronFellmeth.mp3

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?

During my podcast interview with Professor Scott Burnham, we were joined by James Cramer, Director of IT at Montana who discusses a survey he conducted of students who were in Professor Burnham's Contracts courses in relation to their use of the podcasts. We also talk about technical issues, equipment setup, staffing and the future of podcasting at the University of Montana School of Law.

This podcast lasts 25 minutes and 10 seconds.

Here is the link. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - jamescramer.mp3

Very interesting stuff in this podcast. Montana is going to pre-subscribe their incoming students to the RSS feeds of podcasted classes next fall. I believe they are also starting a new laptop requirement in the fall which makes this possible. All student machines will also come pre-installed with Audacity and iTunes.

This is is our third interview with a law faculty podcaster who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project this past Spring 2006 semester.

Professor Scott Burnham recorded weekly summaries and recorded the classroom for this students. (Full disclosure, Professor Burnham is on the CALI Board of Directors).

This podcast is 17 minutes and 15 seconds long.

Here is the link. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - scottburnham.mp3

Immediately after talking to Scott, James Cramer, the IT Director at Montana joined the conversation to discuss surveys that were conducted of the students who were in Scott's class and on some of the technical issues surrounding the setup of recording the classroom (both students and instructor).

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.

This is the second in a series of podcast interviews with law faculty who participated in the Legal Education Podcasting Project. This interview was conducted on Friday, May 26. 2006 with Professor Willliam Gregory from Georgia State University School of Law.

Professor Gregory recorded the classroom for his students (including extensive presentations by his students) while teaching Securities Regulations. You can listen to his podcasts here.

This podcast is 26 minutes long.

Listen or download - WilliamGregory.mp3

I recently finished reading Michael Madison's pre-print article Legal Scholarship and the Economy of Prestige and it was very enlightening, but I had the thought that I have never seen a ranking of law faculty whereas I have seen law school rankings and read discussions, papers and diatribes in the hundreds.

In all of the conversations I have had with faculty about prestige and identifying prestigiious faculty, there is a certain amount of "everybody knows" and not much empirical fact, so I wondered what sample survey questions would look like to get at how to measure individual faculty prestige.

The first step, though, was to look up the word 'prestige' and I learned that it has a French root for the word illusion. How ironic!

I am not sure how truly valuable the results of such a survey would be and I would rather not step into the tar pit of law school rankings AND have half the law faculty population screaming for my head, but sometimes us amateur ethnologists have to go where others fear to tread.

To find out who is prestigious and how much, we could survey law faculty and ask them who they think is prestigious. This is a little like picking the top ten movies of the year, so maybe that's the way to do this...

Who do YOU think are the top ten most prestigious living law faculty?

Perhaps it would be informative to also ask why.

This survey might yield a somewhat predictable collection of names that would doubltless have a relationship to the amount of publicity that some faculty get via their books, government service, political leanings, blogs, etc. This would especially be true as survey respondents get to the second half of the list. I tried to mentally create a similar list for law librarians (of whom many I know) or technology leaders (of whom I read about every day) and it gets darn hard when you get to 7, 8, 9 and 10.

A better survey might be to break this down by legal subject area.

Who do YOU think are the top three most prestigious living law faculty in <subject area>?

This seems pretty straightforward and in fact, I can parse this a little bit because the number of ways to be prestigious in a particular legal subject area is limited.

• Writes the best articles and gets them published in the most prestigious law journals (yes, I realize that this is a little circular here, but go read Madison's article)
• Authored a popular casebook on the topic
• Wrote a treatise on the topic
• Co-authored the law on the subject (thinking here of legislative drafting and participation in the Uniform Code process)
• Has authored well-received books (think Lessig here)
• Personal knowledge
• and lately, perhaps, has a popular or well-regarded (much visited) blog on the subject (think LawProfessorBlogs here)

So the survey question might look like this instead...

Who do YOU think are the top ten most prestigious living law faculty due to<fill in the blank here like journal articles, casebook authorship, blog, government service, etc. etc. ?

There are other prestigious things like being a judge or running for office, but I have to discount these because they are prestige economics in a different economy and I want to stay focused on the legal education academy.

There is also a second order prestige for some of the items mentioned above. Law faculty get prestige by being at the top tier schools vs. lower-tiered law schools. Casebook publishers have some kind of prestige ranking I am sure, but in saying that I realize that I really don't know more than that other than how long they have been publishing, so I guess the number of years of being in business has a prestige of sorts. This obviously explains the lack of creditbility that many startups have or new players in a market - will they last?

Where you get your articles published affects their prestige more than what the article is about (at least at first). High prestige law journals are more widely read and so there is a simple prestige of exposure of your ideas.

The whole "Is Blogging = Scholarship" question seems to me to be an attempt to create new micro-prestige beta products where people are trying to say something interesting, citable, valuable, noticable and prestigious. You can't say something prestigious. Prestige comes from others saying that what you said is important or interesting.

Can something be known to be prestigious before it is widely regarded as prestigious absent such signals as the school the person teaches at or the journal it is published in? I think not. It's a competitive marketplace of ideas - almost Darwinian.

Some of the above are somewhat objectively measurable. It is possible to know who has written a book or an article and to use SSRN's or other surveys to see whose articles are most-cited or downloaded. Popularity of books can be measured by survey or book sales, though accurate sales numbers are difficult to obtain for niche markets like this.

So, why would I be interested in this? I am not a law professor, but I deal with them every day and law faculty prestige comes up in all kinds of discussions about CALI, choosing authors for Fellowships, getting support for new projects, etc. I want to use prestige as a proxy for wide exposure. Prestigious faculty command more attention.

But, prestige seems very subjective and very contextual except when it is used in the grossest (or least granular) sense like when deciding to extend tenure or a promotion, picking a speaker for a conference, etc. You don't just pick the most popular, you judge that person's impact on the situation (the law school's prestige as a sum of its faculty prestige) or the audience they will attract (like for a conference).

I am very tempted to try to run this survey just to see what happens, but to provide cover, I should probably find a prestigious faculty member to get the word out.

Ironic, isn't it?

Well, maybe the French are right and prestige is just an illusion.

I have been interviewing faculty for the past couple of days who were involved in the Legal Education Podcasting Project and one of the questions that I put to each of them is ....

As technology improves to deliver even more high fidelity digital lectures - audio and video, do you think that this medium will come to replace the instructor in the classroom?

So far, no one has answered in the affirmative, but the answer was not always an unqualified 'YES'.

Most of the faculty I have interviewed abjured that there are certain portions of teaching that can be replaced with a recording and that this can free up time for more substantive discussion or interaction inside the classroom. So, one side effect of podcasting is that law faculty are manipulating the medium of teaching depending on the message. This is not a universal finding by any means, just an observational anecdote at this point, but it makes some sense.

Today, I ran across this article with this sub-title...

"...A lecturer at a West Yorkshire university has abolished traditional lectures in favour of podcasts..."

This instructor teaches biochemistry to English undergraduates, but the point is that other educational podcasters are seeing similar things. The money quote from the article is....

"...Some lecture classes have 250 students, so I question the effectiveness of a didactic lecture for an hour..".

Emphasis mine.

Currently, I am also thick in the final planning for the 2006 CALI Conference and I had recently been reading about un-conferences. Wikipedia says that un-conferences are...

"....An unconference is a term that arose in the geek community to describe a conference where the content of the meeting is driven and created by the participants rather than by a single organizer..."

The inestimable Dave Winer (inventor of blogging and RSS) gets some credit for this ... uhmmmm ... innovation.

"...Winer's unconference is a discussion leader with a topic moving a microphone amongst a large audience of 50 to 200 people...."

... which to me sounds like the classroom discussion that podcasting makes more possible. Once there is a history of widely available podcasts from a critical mass of instructors, students may have already heard all the lectures (including all the jokes) that an instructor has to give. They may come to class more prepared than any past students ever have.

NIRVANA!

Imagine having your students over-prepared for class. I may be dreaming, but bear with me on this for a moment.

This dream classroom would also be a big challenge to the instructor. The solution is the Un-Classroom where the instructor is the discussion leader and the students "teach" the class. The instructor is part Guide and part Sage since she both guides the discussion and corrects student misunderstandings and provides clarifications or injects further chaos to challenge. Perhaps more importantly, the instructor teaches the students how to evaluate information and how to think critically. Isn't this the point of legal education?

I think this is what Mark Prensky was talking about in his writing when he opined that today's teachers cannot possibly keep up with today's Digital Natives.

"...the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language...."

(Note: I have previously linked to a podcast by Marc Prensky here)

I agree (so far) with the podcasting faculty that live instructors are not in near-term danger of obsolescence. I do think that podcasting will have second-order effects that we are just beginning glimpse in this first experiment. I will be posting interviews with about a dozen faculty over the next couple of weeks from law schools all over the US who have taught all kinds of courses. It will be interesting to hear what they have to say.

Update: I re-worked the recording in Audacity to remove as much of the static that crept into the recording. The podcast link below links to the new recording.

This past spring semester, CALI conducted the Legal Education Podcasting Project where over 30 law faculty used podcasting in their courses. We conducted surveys of the students mid-semester and are in the process of conducting an end-of-semester survey as well.

We also are interviewing the faculty about their experiences and their thoughts on how podcasting affected their students and their own teaching.

This is the first of a series of interviews to be posted and it is with Professor Jennifer Martin of Western New England College of Law.

Professor Martin's class podcasts can be found here.

This podcast is 33 minutes long.

Here is the podcast link. Listen or download. JenniferMartin2.mp3

The title of this post is taken from Jeff Jarvis’ post on Buzzmachine. It’s a great article and I wanted to do my characteristic read in relation to legal education. Let’s start with a clip...

“...The problems with books are many: They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources. They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader. They try to teach readers but don’t teach authors. They tend to be too damned long because they have to be long enough to be books. As David Weinberger taught me, they limit how knowledge can be found because they have to sit on a shelf under one address; there’s only way way to get to it. They are expensive to produce. They depend on scarce shelf space. They depend on blockbuster economics. They can’t afford to serve the real mass of niches. They are subject to gatekeepers’ whims. They aren’t searchable. They aren’t linkable. They have no metadata. They carry no conversation. They are thrown out when there’s no space for them anymore...”

Let’s unpack this one item at a time with an eye towards legal education, casebooks and electronic casebooks.

“...They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. ...“

This is certainly true of casebooks. They are updated every 3 to 6 years and in between are supplemented manually by conscientious instructors who obtain and photocopy additional readings. Electronic casebooks could be updated immediately and downloaded quickly. Editions would be more gradual and granular as new cases are added and commentary is updated. A change log could be maintained and instructors could subscribe to the casebook like you can subscribe to a Wikipedia page to watch if it changes.


“...They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources. ... ...They aren’t linkable. ...“

Casebooks use parts of cases and with universal access for law students to Lexis or Westlaw, it is relatively simple to find the full case online. The casebook is at the center of the course, but it is an island that is linked only manually to the online discussion (if there is one) and to other supplemental materials that could assist the student in their learning (like CALI lessons, law review articles, blog posts, etc.). An electronic casebook could link to all sorts of things including the course website, podcasts and even a directory of all course websites for all of the courses using the same book. Dialogue and study groups formation could occur between students at different schools studying from the same material.


“...They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader. They try to teach readers but don’t teach authors. ... ...They carry no conversation...." “

The relationship of importance regarding casebooks is between the student and the instructor. The author is an an invited, but silent guest in the classroom and would probably have a lot more to say if given the opportunity. Each casebook could have its own blog with comments or questions posted by anyone and filtered by the author much like an open source software project where the lead developer decides what gets into the shipping version including reasons why or why not a particular change is accepted.


“...They tend to be too damned long because they have to be long enough to be books. ...“

Most casebooks have more material than is necessary for an entire course. This is to allow them to be used in a broad range of courses depending on the instructor’s desires or time constraints. Still, the students carry around the whole thing. Electronic casebooks need only be as long as the instructor wants with no additional material (or additional material linked via the web). Curriculum reform that causes changes in the teaching material need not force the instructor to jettison the entire book. Different length and interdisciplinary courses could be assembled from several books digitally if the materials were available in a recombinant format.


“...they limit how knowledge can be found because they have to sit on a shelf under one address; there’s only way way to get to it. ...“

A lost casebook is lost. Buy another. A lost electronic casebook is never lost, get another copy from the web. Access it from any internet browser and make backup copies. Keep a copy forever on into practice. Build a library of casesbooks, cases and notes.


“...They are expensive to produce. ..“.

These are guesses. 20% goes to the bookstore. 50% pays for the paper, binding and amortizing the printing press. 20% is the publisher’s profit and the remaining 10% finds it way to the author. Electronic casebooks that are downloaded eliminates the first 70% mentions and cuts out one middleman. A collaborative open content casebook publishing enterprise cuts out the other middleman (the publisher). That leaves a lot of room for the author and also leaves room for more authors to participate.


“...They depend on scarce shelf space. They depend on blockbuster economics. ...“

This is more relevant to mass-market books, but shelf space is a problem in law school libraries.


“...They can’t afford to serve the real mass of niches. ...“

As mentioned before, new courses that cover multiple disciplines could have their own electronic casebook - assembled from parts and multiple authors and sources. Each course taught is its own niche with the course materials coming to represent a form of instructor-assembled vanity press from parts. It takes a village to each some courses.


“...They are subject to gatekeepers’ whims. ...“

Casebooks go out of print all the time. Authors retire, die or quit updating. Publishers crunch the numbers and drop the non-sellers. Electronic casebooks would never go out of print and could be supported by the fan base. Three instructors at three different law schools could share the load of updating their niche of niche of a niche course materials.


“...They aren’t searchable. ...“

Casebooks have TOCs and indices, but, well. Not only are electronic casebooks searchable - ALL electronic casebooks are searchable. Students could have access to a smorgasbord of learning opportunities. If the instructor assigned material is confusing or ill-constructed, other alternatives are a click away and searchable and findable.


“...They have no metadata ....“

Authors of casebooks often write teacher’s manuals for instructors. These are often as long and dense as the casebook itself and being physical books themselves suffer from all of the above maladies of books. This meta-data is not actually about the book, but about teaching and so in aggregate could be the basis for what is traditionally called a knowledge management system of best practices - but that’s waaaay too formal. At best, it’s an ongoing conversation between and among colleagues who teach the same subject and seek the best path for their students. Faculty do not share their best teaching practices in very many places (nor are they particularly encouraged to). The sharing of this knowledge should be a natural and light-weight bonus of an electronic casebook assembly and publishing system.


It’s time for electronic casebooks. Plain and simple.

The Program in Research in Information Technology of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation invites nominations for the 2006 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC). In support of the Program’s mission to encourage collaborative, open source software development within traditional Mellon constituencies, these awards—to be given for the first time in 2006—will recognize not-for-profit organizations that are making substantial contributions of their own resources toward the development of open source software and the fostering of collaborative communities to sustain open source development.

Call for Nominations — Research in Information Technology

Classcaster may fit in here:)

Tim O'Reilly reports on some usage statistics by programmers who have the option of purchasing PDF, paper or both versions of new books being published by his press. He reports ....

• 60% choose PDF only,
• 36% choose PDF and paper version
• 4% choose paper only

Mind you, this is after three months of their new Rough Cuts offering which provides access to new titles from O'Reilly.

So 96% at least want the PDF version of the book and the article quotes a user who gives these reasons...

• PDFs are searchable,
• PDFs are portable,
• PDFs can be obtained immediately by downloading (especially updates) and they are cheaper - at the very least due to the lack of shipping cost.

So, if electronic casebooks were available to law students, would these numbers and reasons hold?

Programming (especially learning to program in a new language) invovles a lot of looking up and some extended periods of reading from the book. There is a certain back-and-forth rhythm associated with the first 48-72 hours of learning a new programming language or system and this gradually changes to less book and more programming as time goes by.

This is not the same as reading a casebook. There are extended periods of reading and note-taking, followed by some discussion in class with classmates or in a study group. Notes get updated, some re-reading might occur and there is a last bit of note refinement in the week before the final exams. Not quite the same, but let's look at the reasons for preferring PDFs and see if they apply to law students.

• Searchable - this would certainly be useful to anyone studying a subject and wanting to find something that they had previsously read or find some phrase, term or concept that came up in class or discussion - check.
  
• Portable - portability is always a benefit. PDFs weigh a lot less than 1000 page casebooks. - check.
  
• Obtained immediately and cheaper due to no shipping cost - downloads certainly imply that there are no shipping costs - check

The question is whether the behavior of law students will be similar to programmers. Will law students prefer PDFs to the print versions?

I don't know.

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.

Image from the movie "12 Angry Men".

I ran across a post today on one of the Educause blogs by Phillip D. Long of MIT about some open source software that lets you create a set of links into a commercial DVD so that you could jump to parts of a movie. The point of the post and the software is to legally use movie clips in the classroom. The software does not copy an portion of the movie or do any de-encryption or DeCSSing or anything that would alert the DMCA police. Instead it lets the instructor create pointers into the DVD and save them so that when the DVD is inserted into the computer's player, the pointer can be clicked and the clip can be played.

I have seen discussions of the use movies in legal education (if interested, follow the link and search for 'movies') for many years and I know that at least one faculty member has a VHS tape of clips that they use year after year. (Of course, VHS players are getting harder to come by these days).

Besides the 12 Angry Men depicted in the image above, there are all sorts of law-related movies.

• My Cousin Vinnie
• And Justice for All
• The Firm
• The Pelican Brief
• Runaway Jury
• A Few Good Men
• A Civil Action

I know I am just scratching the surface here. There are also plenty of situations in movies that could analyzed for their legal content. The list of movies could be quite long.

I had the inane thought that CALI could create a website where faculty would post the names of movies and descriptions of the clips that they have used (or would use) and a description of the legal education concept being illustrated. This alone might be rather useful since not everyone has seen every movie and if all the faculty pooled their ideas, everyone would benefit from this collective knowledge.

But, what if we took this another step?

DVDs of movies can be gotten rather cheaply these days - say $10 a copy. CALI could purchase a couple of copies of all of the movies and lend them out to faculty for use in their classrooms along with the software that points to the relevant clip. When the class is over, the faculty could return the DVD to CALI. Kind of a CALI as Netflix or CALIFlix or something.

Even with lots of participants, there won't be too many times when multiple faculty want to use the same movies at the same time and for the most popular movies, we could purchase multiple copies. A couple hundred movies would only cost a couple of thousand dollars and the shipping costs are relatively insignificant.

Ideas like these often have all sorts of unintended consequences, so perhaps it would best to start with the database of movies and clip descriptions - survey law faculty - and go from there. Since this is exam time for many law schools, it's the perfect time to bug law faculty since they will do almost anything to procrastinate from grading exams.

;-)

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.

Here is a slightly easier way to find podcasts from the 2006 AALS Annual Meeting held in January of this year. I took the lists from all four days, combined them and stripped off any sessions that were not podcast and stripped out the session descriptions. Only the sesctions, titles and speakers (and of course links to the podcast) are included. Using your browser's find function (Ctrl-F), you can find a podcast for the section or speaker that you want.

The text was too big to fit into a blog post, so it can be found here on the CALI website.

As I have mentioned before, I listen to 10-20 podcasts a week and I am going to make it a point to blog about the best that I come across. These types of posts will be rather infrequent.

The first podcast is Stephen Downes giving a talk in Tennessee. He is a Senior Researcher at Canada's National Research Council. In this talk, Stephen goes way beyond the curve to project the end of education as we know it and I found his arguments quite compelling. Stephen is one of our great thinkers in this space and his talks are complex, home-spun and accessible at the same time.

The second podcast is from Mark Prensky giving a talk in Shropshire, England about gaming and its use in education. He ranges widely, but makes insightful points about how gaming has rich possibilities for integration into formal and informal educational spaces.

Give them a listen and let me know what you think.

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.

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!

There are many new projects in the works that I will be blogging about here. As always, if you have ideas, suggestions, complaints or comments, feel free to drop me an email at jmayer@cali.org. We are always looking for ways to better serve our member law schools and law students.

From page 55 of Professor Yochai Benkler's book Wealth of Networks ...

"...A billion people in advanced economies may have between two billion and six billion spare hours among them, every day..."

(a) There are about 10,000 law faculty employed in US law schools today.

(b) There are 30 subject areas in the CALI Lesson Library which more or less represent the topics of most of the classes taught in law schools.

(c) Most law school classes are 3 credits or 3 hours a week for 15 weeks or 45 hours of classtime.

Multiple b x c = 13,500 hours of classtime.

Divide by a = 13,500/10,000 = 1.35 hours/faculty.

Now, let's say it takes 10 hours to assemble a really excellent collection of materials for that 1.35 hours of classtime, and let's say every faculty member did that and shared it with everyone else. 10 hours or a little more than a single day and all class materials are covered.

Now, let's get more realisitc.

Let's say 500 law faculty did this (5% of the total). They would have to create 20 times more materials or 20 x 1.35 = 27 hours of classtime each to cover everything which would take 270 hours from each of this mighty 500 or about 270/50=5 1/2 hours a week for a year.

5 1/2 hours a week for a year from 5% of all law faculty to create teaching materials for 30 different subject areas covering almost all of legal education.

There IS wealth in networks!

From page 56 of Wealth of Networks ...

"... The economics of production in a digital environment should lead us to expect an increase in the relative salience of nonmarket production models in the overall mix of our information production system, and it is efficient for this to happen - more information will be produced, and much of it will be available for its users at its marginal cost..."

Now, how do we coordinate this?

This is my third post on my reading of Professor Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks.

Quote from page 31...

"...Technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice..."

I am enamored of Benkler's choice of the word "feasibility". It implies what is possible, not what is certain and this is certainly a central theme of the book. Just because the web allows for new ways to do things - different approaches to education, example, does not mean that they are going to happen. At CALI, we are constantly exploring the feasible as new ideas and technologies become available or more widely available.

While working for Chicago-Kent in the early '90s, we developed electronic casebooks using Folio Views, but sustaining that project was not feasible because it required laborious conversion from the paper book and difficult-to-obtain permission from the print casebook publishers. We could only experiment with electronic casebooks if every student purchased the paper work. We could not change, update, mix or add to the electronic version. We could not share our products with other law schools either. The net doesn't solve the permission problem, but if that could be dealt with, the adding, updating, mixing and sharing problems are made feasible by the web.

... and further on page 32..

"... we can harness many more of the diverse paths and mechanisms for cultural transmission that were muted by the economies of scale that led to the rise of the concentrated, controlled form of mass media, whether commercial or state-run... "

Once you have a mechnism in place for adding, updating, mixing and sharing, new paths of production and new products become possible. The casebook in not inviolate. It is a collection of edited and commented material. It is almost entirely text and a good portion of it is public domain.

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?

I have long been interested in the idea of using game theory in education - especially in legal education. The most notable examples of this are...

The Interactive Courtroom from PLI where the student watches the video of a trial unfold and must click to object and then respond with the correct reasons for objecting. If you don't click, testimony that is detrimental to your client goes into the record and you lose the case. If you object for the wrong reasons, the judge admonishes you. The point is to learn the arcania of evidence and hearsay.

The folks at Transmedia, Inc. have been publishing s similar game called Objection (and variants) for some years now using animated actors instead of live video.

Commercial games like In the First Degree from Broderbund (I could not find the game on their website - it may be discontinued, but you can find it on eBay) and the Law and Order PC games based on the television show. Both of these seem to be versions of finding the clues and not missing anything.

Paul Maharg who teaches at the law school at the University of Strathclyde developed a kind of video game (he might not like this characterization) called Ardcalloch where his graduate law students interacted with live tutors via a fake town called Ardcalloch.

If you know of others, let me know and I will update this post.

The real reason for this post, though, is a recent presentation I ran across called "Putting the Fun in Functional - Applying Game Mechanics to Software".

Running through the slideshow, it game me all sorts of ideas about applying game mechanics to legal education. Here are the ideas organized under the game mechanic described in the presentation ...

Collecting

• Collect all the facts and sort out the relevant and irrelevant ones in a hypothetical
• Collect the "right" cases, discard the "wrong" ones in a legal research excercise

Points

• Most CALI lessons allow Scores to be Saved already
• Points for completing ALL of the lessons in a particular subject area.
• Points for grades (if students will share this information - perhaps anonymously)

Redeemable Points

• Since we can see what lessons students have run and they can save their scores, we could give prizes for completing numbers of CALI lessons (with scores showing that they did well on the lesson to prevent gaming the system).
• Prizes to schools with the most students doing lessons
• Prizes to schools with the most lessons run by the students

Social Points

• Let students take screenshots of questions and share them others to discuss the question and the answers
• Let students comment on specific questions that other students can view after they have answered the question (sort of a comment feature that is granular down to the question level). Of course, we could have comments per lesson - this would be more like Amazon's reviews.
• Student receommendation system (like Amazon's listmania) where students recommend lessons for particular courses or specific study topics.
• Aggregate points/reviews for lessons to the authors. This could be an interesting feedback for the authors to suggest changes or improvements to the lesson or as advice to future authors of CALI lessons;

Points - Leaderboards

• Top students based on scores in CALI lessons
• Top schools - perhaps broken out by year in law schools
• Top Authors of CALI lessons
• Top lessons (we do this a little bit already in the CALI Zeitgeist).

Points - Levels

• Additional content available only to students who complete a certain number of lessons.
• Prizes for levels

Feedback

• Students who complete many CALI lessons with high scores are asked to share their study strategies.
• Students who are awarded CALI Excellence for the Future Awards asked to describe how they got the highest grade.
• Students who run lots of lessons are invited to be paid reviewers of new lessons (or even existing lessons). This would be a way of vetting students into a CALI Editorial Board like arrangement.

Exchanges

• Screen sharing where two students can virtuall run a CALI lesson together with a chat channel or even a VOIP channel using Classcaster technology. This would be alike a Team Fortress feature.
• College bowl like challenges between teams of students (or individuals) on a CALI lessons or on a series of questions randomly drawn from CALI lessons in a single subject. This would be interesting - kind of a multiple choice moot court competition.
• Let students share their "lessons run" lists with the community as a sort of tag list - perhaps let them tag the lessons with super-simple ratings (1-5 stars).

Customization

• Different skins for CALI lessons - or at least different colors
• Let students build their own lessons using AutoPublish and then share the results via LessonLink.
• Hmmmm, if students are sharing questions and reviews, might as well let them upload photos or bios of themselves - Law Student MySpace?

That was an interesting thought experiment. Do you have other ideas? I would love to hear them. My email is jmayer@cali.org.

Tim O'Reilly was chatting with Bill Gates during the recent MIX06 conference and this little comment made me sit up and take notice...

BILL GATES: ...
We've believed in the idea of getting reading so that you have a device that's thin enough, light enough, cheap enough, high resolution enough so that you want to read off of the screen, and therefore all the benefits of being able to annotate, remember what you've read in the past, have videos and animation in that, so that that just becomes the standard way you do things.

One of the domains that we're particularly optimistic about is students, where we take textbooks that the teacher could not customize, were not very interactive, could not sort of put the material into different context, and we get that into digital form.

TIM O'REILLY: That's interesting; I'd love to work with you on that. We have an initiative called Safari U which lets people remix any of the books in Safari for textbooks.

BILL GATES: No, that's great. Clearly for the teacher to have that flexibility they've got to have the right tools, the rights issues can't stand in the way. But I think, say, ten years from now we'll look back and say, wow, textbooks, why did we put the money into that, now we've got this universal tool that every kid just uses instead....

... emphasis mine.

So customizable, interactive textbooks are on Microsoft's radar. That's not surprising.

I think 10 years may be a little pessemistic. Things are moving much faster than that. I keep running into all sorts of indicators that 2007 will be the year of the ebook and the education sector will be leading the way.

I ran across a series of articles from 2003 in the always excellent FirstMonday online journal that give clarity to this idea.

"....Will our thinking be dominated by the conventions and business models of print publishing (and the current power relationships among publishers, readers, and authors), and by our cultural practices, consumer expectations, legal frameworks and social norms related to books, or will we discard these traditions ..."

I think the answer is that we will evolve new meaning for online books just like we are evolving new meaning for online newspapers, online classifieds, online commerce, online music and everything else that changes when it goes all digital.

This isn't all or nothing. A book is just a data format, and a high-level one at that. What's inside any particular book will determine how it translates into a different digital experience. Not all books are the same (duh!).

When the casebook is all digital it's amenable to Rip, Mix Learn from both the instructor and the student.

Textbooks or casebooks seem particularly capable of becoming something else in an all digital format. Textbooks track a class and so seem to be dis-aggregate-able into portions of the syllabus of the course. Student notes are just comments to the blog of the book. Faculty lectures are just the podcasts and the slides from the presentation. Course management websites bring these all together, but even these are evolving into more lightweight (blog) interfaces so that they can be made more accessible for busy instructors.

The next year will be very interesting to watch.

We conducted a survey of law students who are in the classess of faculty who are participating in the Legal Education Podcasting Project and the summary results are reported here LEPPMidSemesterSurvey.pdf.[pdf]

There were 388 student responses from 18 different law schools with the University of Baltimore School of Law topping the list with 69 responses (Thanks Baltimore!).

Respondents were about 2/3 (62%) 1Ls and the rest 2L and above.

Note that not only has this project been an introduction to podcassting for the faculty, but that almost 80% of the students had never listened to a podcast.

Over 1/4 of the students have listened to five or more podcasts, though 1/3 have listened to none or only 1 podcast. This number looks better when compared to the number who plan to listen to the podcasts in preparation for final exams.

Over 2/3 of all respondents rated the podcasts as Excellent or Above Average which is a good sign that students appreciate the availability of this media for their studies.

The real gold in this survey is in the student comments. To keep student responses anonymous, I will summarize their responses in a seperate post.

This is an actual photo of one of the tornadoes that hit Springfield, Illinois last weekend.

What do sniffles and snow days have to do with tornadoes and hurricanes?

All of these are a cause of a cancelled class or an instance of a student missing a class. With the web, podcasting and simple digital technology, this doesn't have to happen as often as it has in the past.

CALI is launching the Legal Education Emergency Planning Project (LSEPP) to help law schools keep on teaching despite large and small interruptions to the school's physical plant.

The link above goes to a wiki page where we encourage law school technology folks to contribute their ideas about this project. The project idea originally started as a discussion between CALI and the LII to share resources to create backup servers for our respective services in the case of service interruption.

Then Katrina hit.

There was a huge and generous outpouring of assistance from the IT community for the damaged universities. The problem was that there was no coordination and it resulted in some confusion for students and faculty about where to go to get the latest and most authoritative information. This all got worked out, but for most schools, the entire semester had to be cancelled.

Looking around a bit, we noticed that many Florida law schools close down at least once a year due to hurricanes (actual or threatened) and that law schools have been closed for other reasons like flooding basements (Chicago-Kent in 1993), hijackers (NYLS in 2001), tornadoes (U Kansas last week), fires (Buffalo a couple of years ago), etc etc.

The degree and extent of the disaster is more severe in some cases than others, but the result for the students and faculty is the same - cancelled classes.

The sniffles and snow days are just very minor examples of this. With podcasting like the type being done by law faculty at Classcaster, students need not miss a lecture due to sniffles and faculty need not cancel a class due to snow days.

With more coordination and effort, a school could limp along with a website, podcasts and email using facilities that are planned into the LSEPP project for a couple of weeks - at least until longer-term planning can take hold. This is a good use of distance education.

That's the goal of LSEPP.

So, if you have ideas on how we can make this project work for you, go on over to the website and contribute.

---

This the second in a series that riffs off Rob Reynolds insightful post at Xplanazine titled "Five Laws of Product Development for Education in the 21st Century. Here is Part One: We No Longer Know How They Want To Know.

2. Convergence Will Stay Ahead of Content

Here's a quote from the Reynold's post...

"...Every aspect of a course or textbook should be able to map to the technological convergence present via a cell phone or advanced iPod and should do so in such a way that allows the user to control the experience... "

Let me riff on this in two ways.

"... user to control the experience ..."

In education, there are two users. The faculty who are constructing the environment that will most efficaciously allow students to learn it and the student who takes what they are presented and try to make sense of it for their own personal learning goals.

This is Rip, Mix, Learn from both the faculty and the student viewpoints (and incidently, the theme of this year's Conference for Law School Computing).

Traditionally, the tools and materials that were available to faculty to construct the learning experience were rather blunt. In legal education, it is primarily the lecture and the casebook.

Faculty can do whatever they want in the lecture - that's their creative domain, but they are often constrained by the need to 'cover the material' and this limits their opportunities for deep or more relfective discussion before the class time us used up.

Faculty typically parse the casebook by creating a playlist of sorts that points to the casebook and the lectures telling the student what to read, when to read it and when it will be covered in class.

So a syllabus - which is essentially a time-based outline - also maps nicely onto a hyperlinked model of a table of contents - which maps nicely onto an outline that is hyperlinked into the chapters of the book. Since it is all time-based, this maps nicely onto the blog/feed/RSS model of delivery of legal education. I see why edubloggers are so excited. about the use of blogs to transform education.

But back to convergence.

Before we can put things together the way we want to - in other words - before instructors can construct the educational environment in the way that is best for the students, they have to have the pieces to do the construction. The Mix part of Rip, Mix, Learn is so much easier if the ingredients can be mixed together.

In the digital realm, this means that the pieces have to be disaggregated or at least disaggregatable. It is hard to disaggregate a paper textbook. What faculty need is a digital textbook where the chapters, sections and paragraphs can be re-used or re-purposed or re-placed or re-sequenced without a lot of stress, work or intellectual property rigamarole.

Next, instructors need tools to construct the course from the pieces. The final product has to be updatable (when you teach the next semester) and deliverable in different media (like websites, RSS, PDF for printing, etc.). This is where the converge part of convergence starts to happen in education.

If you are, CALI is conducting a very short survey (5 minutes tops) that you can fill out here.

It was written by a couple of CALI's authors - Professors Joe Grohman and Ron Brown from Nova Southeastern. The comments received so far have been excellent. Please partcipate to help us decide some future directions for CALI lessons.

Are

It looks like this year will be a watershed for new ebook readers. The popularity of Apple's iPod and the business model of iTunes has shown the way for this to work.

There are at least three ebook readers due for release in the next couple of months based on Eink technology.

The most anticipated is the Sony Reader (or called the Libre in Japan where it is current available).

A Chinese company Jinke has an entry due out in Spring of 2006. They are already selling a version of this reader in China.

Finally (well probably not finally as I would bet there are others that I don't know about), but last in my list is the Irex reader.

I plan to purchase at least one of these and do a session at the CALI Conference. I will have more to say about ebook readers and ebooks generally as they apply to legal education in the near future.

I was having a very interesting discussion with Elmer Masters about how law faculty categorize what they do and how they think during the creation of legal education and scholarship. One high-level categorization system could be the "school of thought" that is being promulgated within the lecture, article or case commentary or analysis.

As a non-lawyer, I am only dimly aware of the concrete categories, but as a developer of social software pertaining to legal education, I am in need of understanding much more about what these categories are and how concrete they are.

A google search on "legal schools of thought" brings up some semi-familiar terms - even to me...

• the Chicago school
• feminist jurisprudence (via Wex which is looking more and more interesting every day!)
• critical legal studies (via Wikipedia)
• legal positivism
• natural law
• legal process
• law and economics

...and this was from looking only at the summaries that Google provides on the first two pages of search results. I realize that I am scratching the surface here because while I do want these top level categories of 'schools of thought; I am actually more interested in 'schools of thought' that are even more narrowly construed - down to specific legal subject areas or doctrines within specific topics of those subject areas.

It is at this point that I realize I am encountering exactly what 1Ls encounter as they seek the black and white and find only shades of grey and that some of these shades of grey have been around long enough to attract a name - a small school of thought (thoughtlette?).

I wonder if law faculty (or lawyers and judges for that matter) have generalized agreement on the boundaries of these schools of thought. As I think of my own profession - computer science - I realize ... of course they do ... but it would be rather difficult to find in one place all the mini-schools of thought in all of the different computer-related fields. It must be so in law as well.

So this is the mini-research project I have assigned myself. Find and list all of the major legal schools of thought (Wex and Wikipedia have bolstered my optimism) and talk to faculty in specific subject areas (Torts, Copyright, Criminal law, etc, etc.) about the schools of thought that exist below the surface of these major topics.

Why do this?

The articulation of this information is useful in constructing social software that is immediately recognizably useful to law faculty and valuable to law students - that is what CALI does.

It is quite possible, however, that the best articulation will be accompished via a bottom-up process, i.e. a folksonomy that is gradually built via many small encounters with material by many individuals like del.icio.us. That is actually a good metaphor for what I seek - a del.icio.us of legal schools of thought tags.

Can you assist?

Michael Sparks the Computing Services Director at LSU Law School conducted a survey of how law schools manage wireless access in their classrooms.

The survey pdf is here: wirelesssurvey.pdf.

There were 56 responding law schools and the results should not be too surprising. Some schools are using technology to restrict student surfing by either switching off the wireless access points or by using special software that students cannot circunvent.

Other schools use social means like instructions from the faculty or the Code of Conduct to control behavior.

There are two very good sides to this issue:

If the classroom is not interesting enough to engage the students, then faculty should make it more interesting....

... and ....

Faculty have a right to control their classrooms.

I agree with both and I believe that faculty will trumps all else. It is their responsibility to create the environment that delivers the educational message in the manner they desire. This is not to say that students who surf or doodle or generally don't pay attention cannot be considered an unspoken backchannel to the instructor. There could be value in having the students decide what the best policy is.

Multi-tasking or 'partial continuous attention' is a new facet of today's millenials and just because they are looking at the screen does not mean they are not tracking the class.

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI www.cali.org) has a launched a project where over 50 law faculty from 44 US and one Canadian law schools are creating podcasts of their courses in the Spring 2006 semester.

The goal of the project is to investigate the use of podcasting in legal education. Faculty and students will be surveyed throughout the semester to determine their reactions to this new legal education medium.

About half of the faculty will be recording all of their classroom lectures and the other half will be creating weekly summaries of the course. The podcasts will be posted to blogs hosted on CALI�s Classcaster service (www.classcaster.org).

The individual faculty have the option of putting the blogs behind a password only for their students or leaving the blogs open for the public Internet to listen along.

Besides blog/podcasting space, all faculty have been provided with a personal digital recorder (specifically, and Olympus ws-100) and a lapel microphone which allows for hands-free and podium-free recording in the classroom.

Podcasting is just audio delivered over the Internet. When connected to a blog and an RSS feed, students can set up a subscription so that it automatically downloads new podcasts to their MP3 players (i.e. Apple iPod).

Legal education has a long oral tradition. The classroom lecture is the core of legal education, but once it�s done, it�s done. CALI posits that when students can re-listen to classroom lectures or weekly summaries created by the instructor, they will benefit educationally. CALI seeks to understand the qualitative benefits from the student and instructor viewpoints.

Some students take too many notes and do not listen carefully to classroom lectures. Even the best students may miss something or need to hear it more than once before it sinks in. Some students are better aural learners than visual learners and would benefit from access to audio recordings of lectures or weekly summaries. Every student is different and every instructor is different. One size does not fit all.

CALI expects that this project provide excellent insight into how a podcast-enhanced course might be done differently and better than a non-podcast-enhanced course. Ideas that arise from this project will manifest as new features and services from CALI and especially in design changes in the Classcaster service.

A forum for faculty to discuss technical issues and share experiences has been setup and interim observations and analysis will appear from time to time at CALI�s blog at caliopolis.classcaster.org. A list of participating faculty and their schools and courses can be found at www2.cali.org/index.php?fuseaction=help.faq&topicid=0000000010#66.

On Monday January 9th, 2006, Prof. Jennifer Martin at Western New England College of Law recorded her Business Organizations class and posted the lecture to her Classcaster blog becoming the first law professor to podcast her course using the Classcaster system. This first podcast launches an ambitious CALI project that will see over 50 faculty members from CALI member law schools create blogs and podcasts for their courses during the spring 2006 semester. The project is intended to examine the usefulness of podcasting and blogging in legal education. CALI is providing digital voice recorders and extra support to the faculty members chosen to participate in the project.

Classcaster is a course blogging system that provides faculty, librarians, and staff of CALI member schools with a new way to interact with students and communities. A Classcaster blog provides authors with tools for posting not only traditional blog articles but also tools for podcasting and sharing any documents and/or files with students and communities. For more information about Classcaster, please read the Classcaster FAQ or the Classcaster whitepaper. A forum for discussing Classcaster is available here.

MBS said it surveyed students at campuses that offered the digital textbooks and discovered that the biggest factor in students' decision to buy digital textbooks was their price. Student said the books should be discounted between 33 percent and 50 percent. According to MBS, the most popular electronic books sold were in the fields of history, law, and technology.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: E-Book Program Expands

Note that law is one of the areas listed as most popular with students.  I'm still looking for hte original source for this.

technorati tags: ebooks, education, caliopolis

The good news for the technophobics is that podcasts are (relatively) simple - the MP3 files generated by podcasters are relatively easy to create and don't require high-priced equipment, allowing teachers to record without a large investment of time or money by the school.

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Advertisement feature | Podcasting for schools - the basics

Good article that outlines what you need to get started podcasting including a number of good links to podcasting tools and resources.

technorati tags: podcasting, education, caliopolis

Through this event, we are looking to highlight the ways in which tools of new media and the social web are impacting higher education. Are you doing something with blogs or podcasts in student admission? Are you developing online communities for alumni? Have you tried classroom podcasting? Are you a student who's pioneering the use of blogs or wikis at your institution? We would love to hear about your thoughts and experiences.

Thomson Peterson's Syndication for Higher Ed >> HigherEd BlogCon 2006 Call for Presenters

Sounds like a natural for Classcaster and our recently launched podcasting project. John and I will put something together for this.

technorati tags: higher ed bloggercon, classcaster

The AKFQuiz package lets you easily make your own quiz games or learning exercises. These can be used either with grquiz in a graphical environment (SDL), with crtquiz on a text terminal, or with diaquiz in a GUI environment. There is also a line oriented variant, linequiz, which can be used as a backend. A CGI-variant can be installed on a Web server to offer exercises via the Web.

freshmeat.net: Project details for AKFQuiz

Handles multiple choice, true/false, multiple correct and very short answer type questions.  Works from a simple text file, no GUI authoring tool, but text file format is straight forward.  Could be used as simple tool for creating web-based quizzes.

technorati tags: AKFQuiz, distance education, web based learning

There is an inherent tension between law schools, teachers and students.

School wants student to succeed - be happy - become a rich alum and donate - and pass the bar.

Teacher wants to student to learn - and not bug them too much - and only learn what the teacher thinks is important. Teacher wants a lot of control over the educational environment. They are, after all, primarily responsible for the "education" that happens in educational institutions - or so they think.

Students want the credential, the job, the loans paid off, the bar passed - with balance between life and job and learning and stress. Here is the catch, however.

Students wants to learn the way that they want to learn.

It's almost too simple a statement, but it means that students are in ultimate control of the educational process. They are not "in charge" and they are not the final authority and they are not always primarily responsible, but if they don't show up, nothing happens.

So that means, that schools and teachers must get students to show up - that's motivation. It's a natural, important and vital part of education. In law school, however, it's given fairly short shrift. Law students are adults, after all, and so they should not need to be reminded to bring their pencils to class and all that. This has some truth to it as well.

Let's cut to the chase...

Schools wants results.

Teachers wants control since this leads to student learning.

Students want the least hassle to satisfy authority of teacher and nab the credential which the school is reluctantly granting only after you have jumped through all 36 hoops (courses) to get the JD.

Where is CALI is this?

CALI lessons are written by teachers and so controlled by teachers - but since we have decoupled the teacher from the student - we have decoupled the authority. This gives back a lot of control to the student - hence students use our lessons, teachers do not. This is a constant point of discussion within CALI - "Why Don't More Law Faculty Assign CALI Lessons?"

A couple of years ago, we started making our lessons much smaller which helped students (because they became more findable). One of the stated goals of making smaller lessons (we called them lessonettes!), was to make them more reviewable and assignable by law faculty. Anecdotal evidence tells me this was a complete failure.

So why does CALI have steady membership?

Schools want their money's worth and as long as there is relevant activity and return-on-investment - they stick around. CALI gives huge return-on-investment. (IMHO) They could get more return if their teachers assigned more lessons, but this comes back to the control issue and the tension between schools and teachers.

I am not terrifically worried. Students are finding our lessons and telling us they like them for the reasons we designed them. But I do believe that we need to understand better the relationship between schools, teachers and students if we are going to be effective in creating better tools in the future.

The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and the Center for
Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) are collaborating on a
project to create podcasts, digital audio recordings, of most of the
presentations to be made at the 2006 AALS Annual Meeting to be held
January 3-7, 2006 in Washington, DC.

CALI staff will be handling the logistics of capturing the recordings
and processing them for posting to www.aals.org/am2006/. It will take a
few weeks to process the recordings of over 120 sessions, but once they
are posted, they will be available to anyone with a web browser and MP3
player software on their personal computer. Alternatively, the MP3
files can be downloaded and played on portable MP3 playser like the
Apple iPod.

"Law faculty make presentations at AALS about cutting edge issues in
legal scholarship." opines John Mayer, CALI's Executive Director.
"Faculty cannot attend every session and law students normally have
almost no access to these presentations. CALI believes that by
providing this service, faculty may find material that they can use in
their upper-level seminar courses that will be of interest to students.
It is a way to connect scholarship and teaching in a very direct
manner."

"We are delighted to be working with CALI to provide this resource to
law schools." states Jane LaBarbera, Associate Director of AALS. "This
is a bit of an experiment and we are hoping that it is well received so
that we can decide how to proceed in the future."

AALS is a non-profit association of 166 law schools. The purpose of the
association is "the improvement of the legal profession through legal
education." It serves as the learned society for law teachers and is
legal education's principal representative to the federal government and
to other national higher education organizations and learned societies.

The AALS holds an Annual Meeting every year in January and five or six
workshops and conferences throughout the year. The AALS publishes a
Directory of Law Teachers and a quarterly newsletter, as well as other
publications. Much of the learned society activities are done by the 85
AALS Sections, which plan programs at the Annual Meetings and publish
newsletters throughout the year.

CALI is a U.S. 501(c)(3) non-profit consortium of law schools that
researches and develops computer-mediated legal instruction and supports
institutions and individuals using technology and distance learning in
legal education. CALI was incorporated in 1982 and welcomes membership
from law schools, paralegal programs, law firms and individuals wishing
to learn more about the law.

For additional information, please contact...

Jane LaBarbera, Associate Director, AALS - jlabarbera@aals.org

... or ...

John Mayer, Executive Director, CALI - jmayer@cali.org

Duke University has discovered that iPods are a hit in class. A year after the university gave all freshman students the little white music players, the number of students using iPods for class work has quadrupled, and the number of courses incorporating iPods has doubled, the university announced.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Invasion of the iPod People

Article includes this link to the list of Spring 2006 course that will be making use of iPod technologies, though, the page notes, not all course will require student use of iPods.  Of note, no law courses are listed.

technorati tags: ipod, Duke University

The Emory Wheel Online reports that Emory University chemistry professor Justin Gallivan is offering enhanced podcasts of his chemistry classes available free via iTunes.

Thomson Peterson's--Syndication for Higher Ed--Emory Chemistry Professor Offers Enhanced Podcasts

Not in the law school, but close. Good article that highlights the benefits of podcasting as a supplement for students who still attend class regularly. Article makes it clear that listening to podcasts is not a substitute for actually attending lectures.

technorati tags: podcast, education, Emory

California recently adopted a law that stiffens data-security requirements for academic researchers who work with confidential information about human subjects. Some observers predict that other states will follow suit. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Safeguards for Personal Data

This new law covers data provided by state agencies to non-profit research orgainzations including universities for academic research.  Other states are likely to follow.

PennTags lets you organize and share your bookmarks. You can use the UPennToolbar or the PennTags Bookmarklet to post websites into your tagspace.

PennTags /

This is intriguing.  A local social tagging effort aimed at gathering the collected bookmarks of UPenn together in one tagging space.  Seems to focus on academia for the moment, so it is bit like gathering up the collective web research of the community.  CALI has an interest in this sort of tagging effort with a pilot law school directory based on Scuttle, and it is easy to see it expanded into something like this.  Imagine all of the bookmarks of legal scholars across the country.

technorati tags: scuttle, tagging, law schools

A study by the Sloan Consortium found that a growing number of colleges are putting online more of the courses that they offer in a face-to-face setting. The consortium, an organization that promotes standards for online learning, found that more than three out of five institutions offering face-to-face undergraduate or graduate courses offer them at the same level online. The survey also revealed that more college officials see distance learning as crucial to their long-term strategies. The survey can be found at the Sloan Consortium Web site.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Online Options

This trend will catch up with law schools in the near future.  CALI's work with CODEC and Classcaster is intended to bring awareness about and tools for online education to law schools.  You can download the complete text of the study here.

technorati tags: CALI, Classcaster, CODEC, distance education

In an announcement about Google Base on the company's blog, CollegeBoard.com is listed as one of the first users of the service. The service has a section for "course descriptions" and another on "education."

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Google Helps Students Search for Colleges

Well, this is interesting. A lot of the content in 'course descriptions' is from the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. It is easy to see CALI adding Lessons here, even our subject outlines. I do wonder how this will be integrated into the regular Google results.

technorati tags: CALI, Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, Google base, distance education