CALIopolis

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.

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