CALIOPOLIS

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 hearingsposted on YouTube by the judge in the case. Most of the cases seemed tobe drug-related. These videos were a little thin on content, but Iasked 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 legaleducation of a sort.

Here’s the YouTube link so that you can view it yourself…

Ms. Margolin refers to her credentials early in the video…

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

But she goes much further than just describing her practice and herfirm work. There is a short interview with a client and also commentaryabout 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 notbutton-down, suited lawyer – more accessible and friendly to theclients she wishes to attract.

Except for the phone and email contact information, I would not havebeen too surprised to find this on a legal aid website. This is marketsas 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 subjectivemeasure 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.

The good folks at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) have posted some of their TED Talks and the talk by Hans Rosling (Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden) is a real corker.

Here’s his blog.

Watch this video and in 10 minutes, you will be smarter.

This gives me all sorts of ideas about using data to teach. I have read Tufte and long been a student of graphical approaches to making complex topics more clear, but Professor Rosling’s demonstration and enthusiasm really shows how data, statistics and animated graphics of simple charts can make the information come alive.

I’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 wrotethe American Historical Association’s statement on ethics, saidtextbooks were usually corporate-driven collaborative efforts, in whichthe publisher had extensive rights to hire additional writers,researchers and editors and to make major revisions without theauthors’ final approval. The books typically synthesize hundreds ofworks 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 peerreview for its articles. They may be written by experts or insane crazypeople. Or worse, insane crazy people with an agenda. And Internetaccess…"

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 instructorswho otherwise wouldn’t consider this sort of thing to start thinkingabout podcasting or vidcasting, or perhaps taking audio and video clipsand embedding in Web site that might include text based materials orother 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 classesthrough distance learning. Encourage college aged children to takeadvantage 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.