CALIOPOLIS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

Are you taking a course where the instructor is using podcasting?

If so, we have a survey that we would like you to take. CALI has been supporting law faculty podcasting through the Legal Education Podcasting Project for over a year now and every semester we (try to) survey law students who are in any courseswhere podcasting is being used. If your professor is recording theclassroom or creating supplementary podcasts (summaries, guestspeakers, etc.), then please follow this linkand tell us about your reactions, experiences, suggestions, commentsand complaints about podcasting in legal education. Your feedback willhelp us to improve the Classcaster service that we provide for free to law faculty.

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.

Professor Garrett Power has spent 30 years writing his casebook which is titled: Constitutional Limitations on Land Use Controls, Environmental Regulations and Governmental Exactions.

He has posted the 704 page PDF to SSRN and the University of Maryland’s Digital Commons website.

In this 24 minute conversation, we talk about his motivations and expectations for the casebook and open-access content.

Click here to listen or right-click to download – GarretPower2.mp3

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

Instead, follow the link and read grow smarter.

Or listen to the podcast here.