CALIOPOLIS

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

Call for Nominations — Research in Information Technology

Classcaster may fit in here:)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know.

Clicking around my Bloglines feeds today and the following set of articles from Slashdot were displayed…

The first is about streaming content from a home-grown media center running Linux to your cell phone. In other words, the cell phone as a delivery platform for all sorts of media.

The second is about Google releasing an Ajax framework for building net-centric applications – PC is needed, but not necessarily vital since these would all run in anything that can run a browser.

The third is about IBM supporting Open Document Format which wrenches customer lock-in of Microsoft Office users.

The juxtaposition is with the last entry with Bill Gates saying that PCs are dead yet.

Draw your own conclusions.

Kevin Kelly’s New York Times Magazine article "Scan This Book" sure has stirred up a lot of comment in the blogosphere with worthy commentary at Teleread, Nick Carr (including excellent comments from Kevin Kelly himself) and a promise of future comment and the full text of the article at Sivacracy.net.

Whenever I read articles about ebooks or books in any form, I am a little dismayed at how all books are summarily lumped together as though the act of putting print to paper and binding makes the content all similar somehow. You can’t talk about books like this as much as you can’t talk about things with wheels being all the same or people with red hair being all the same. The idea of books needs a far more thorough unpacking than it has received.

Kelly does do a little bit of this in his article…

"…At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into singlepages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippetswill be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just asthe music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or"playlists," as they are called in iTunes), the universal library willencourage the creation of virtual "bookshelves" — a collection oftexts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books,that form a library shelf’s worth of specialized information. And aswith music playlists, once created, these "bookshelves" will bepublished and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors willbegin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages.The ability to purchase, read and manipulate individual pages orsections is surely what will drive reference books (cookbooks, how-tomanuals, travel guides) in the future…"

Whither textbooks? I emphasized the word "remixed" because this is a pet theme of mine (especially this year as the CALI Conference theme is Rip, Mix, Learn).

I think Kelly missed the MOST liquid of books – textbooks.

Almost no one reads a textbook from cover to cover. It is typically read chapter by chapter and in even smaller "snippets". The language of textbooks is such that it does not have as strong a voice as a novel, so if a textbook is assembled from parts written by different authors, there is less cognitive dissonance in the reader.

This is even more true, I believe, in casebooks – the textbooks of legal education. Collections of cases are written by many different writers – judges who author the opinions. These are interspersed with commentary and analysis by the casebook author (sometimes multiple authors). The very nature of the law is one of writing by committee and reading any recently passed or proposed statutes will show you what tangled prose comes out of that process sometimes. .

Textbooks and casebooks are already re-mixed by the crude (in a digital sense) instrument of the syllabus. A syllabus for a course is the playlist that Kelly talks about in education. In the digital book future, the syllabus and the table of contents become nearly indistinguishable. Why inefficiently give students 5 kg of dead trees – of which only portions will be read – when you can give them lightweight electroncs (and only the electrons) that they are required for the course. Hyperlinks can provide further information on the web. This makes even more sense if you instantiate the book into paper for the purposes of dealing with cultural transitions from pbooks to ebooks (print to electronic).

A textbook is a virtual artifact in space in time that is temporarily instantiated in paper and ink for the duration of a course.

A syllabus is a set of time-based assignments that acts as the metronome of the course to pace the students (and the instructor) through the marathon of the course.

Textbooks are frequently updated (every 3-6 years) and they would be updated more often if it was up to the publisher in order to suppress used-book sales. (See CALIPirg’s "Rip-off 101: Second Edition
How the Publishing Industry’s Practices Needlessly Drive Up Textbook Costs" for the full story).

Updating liquid books is trivial – just like updating web pages. Sure the textbook should remain reasonably static for the duration of the course – let’s not drive ourselves too crazy, but certainly the textbook can be updated, refined, enhanced, tuned, polished and improved semester to semester if it starts life as a virtual entity and only arrives in the front of student in physical form a week before it is printed on demand from www.Lulu.com and shipped – bypassing the bookstore and their 20% markup.

This inefficiency is exactly what mass digitization can improve. We didn’t and couldn’t know that we were being so inefficient because print and ink was what we had. Digital texts are what we have now and they will inevitably change the way we use the texts.

Change is coming.

Change is here.

Reading an interesting article in the New York Times today titled "Scan This Book" by Kevin Kelly that had some numbers that I thought I would have some fun playing with…

"… From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have"published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays,25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos,TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages…"

Emphasis mine.

How much disk space does this represent?

32 million books at 1 MB per book = 32 million million bytes or trillion bytes or 32 terabytes.

750 million articles at 1/10 MB per article = 75 million million bytes or 75 terabytes.

25 million songs at 10 MB per song (high resolution) = 250 million million bytes or 250 terabytes.

500 million images at 50 MB per image = 25,000 million million bytes or 25,000 terabytes.

500,000 movies or to keep the scales consistent 1/2 million movies at 2000 MB per movie = 1000 million million bytes or 1,000 terabytes.

3 million videos, TV shows, short films at 1000 MB per = 3000 million million bytes or 3,000 terabytes.

100 billion webpages or 100,000 million webpages at 1/10 MB per webpage = 10,000 million million bytes or 10,000 terabytes.

32 (books)
75 (articles)
250 (songs)
25,000 (images)
1,000 (movies)
3,000 (tv, video, short films)
10,000 (webpages) +
——-
39,357 terabytes or about 40 petabytes (the NYTimes article puts it at 50 petabytes, so my calculations aren’t too far off).

Checking Froogle for hard drive costs and things round out to around $1 per GB or $1000 per terabyte, so the cost of storing a digital copy of the entire world’s movies, literature, songs, articles and webpages is…

$39,357,000

Huh!

Pocket change for any of the big players in data storage like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM and others. Well within reach for most governments wanting to give access to the world’s knowledge to their citizens – heck, it’s within reach for most large cities and most state university systems and even some larger libraries.

Kryder’s Law is similar to the more familiar Moore’s Law applied to hard disk density (and perhaps to cost) and the Wikipedia entry tells the tale for the future…

"…If current rates of growth are maintained then within two decades, aconsumer will be able to store all of the creative works produced byevery member of the human species in a $100 storage device, including realtime video capture of ones entire lifetime…"

Emphasis mine.

The NYTimes article is a bit more precise, but never-the-less compelling…

"…Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library tohouse 50 petabytes. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet…"

But this is not the best point. Having everything digital makes it potentially accessible, re-usable, re-mix-able and makes us all potentially smarter and more dangerous.

The inimitable Doug Kaye, CEO of the Conversations Network and a thoroughly enjoyable person to listen to has a podcast on recording phone calls and live events for podcasting. This is a geeky talk, but there is are few people with more on the ground experience in recording for podcasting.

He has advice on devices, microphones, Skype, ISDN and even live-casting.

More great podcasts on the geeky side of podcasting at the Podcast Academy event here.

Having recently posted about the Legal Guide to Podcasting from Creative Commons, I was delighted to learn that there is a Legal Guide for Bloggers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Now I must go off and read it!

Here is another podcast that is fascinating, entertaining, educational and thought-provoking. Bruce Sterling is a write of science fiction and a futurist as well as a non-fiction author. The image above is clickable to his latest work on "space and time objects" or "spimes".

The podcast is from 2006 O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference via the ITConversations folks. It’s worth a listen.

Image from the movie "12 Angry Men".

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, what if we took this another step?

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

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

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

😉

The good folks at Creative Commons have put together a Podcasting Legal Guide that is comprehensive and thorough as seen by these non-lawyerly eyes. I thought this quote from Larry Lessig’s forward was particularly apt…

"…This Guide is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to figure outhow best to follow the law. It is also an outstanding recommendationfor the non-profit I run, Creative Commons, for as you will see as youwork through the insanity that copyright law has become, CreativeCommons is a simple alternative to this complex mess…"

My emphasis.

Reading through guide does give one a sense of looking for the whiterabbit or more appropriately, the Mad Hatter. Lots to study here.

—-

Update: Just realized that one of the authors of the Podcasting Legal Guide hasalso participated in HigherEdBlogCon with two Quicktime movies that youcan watch. The presentation is titled Legal Issues in Podcasting the Traditional Classroom.