CALIOPOLIS

I was reading an interesting article over at the TeleRead blog titled "ThoutReader Meets Scholarly Book: An Experiment and Review" and one particular passage really caught my eye.

"…Until hardware comes out that makes me feel like I’m reading a bookinstead of cruising the web, the decrease in concentration caused by myweb-ADD will constrain me to p-books; when I’m reading somethingserious, I want to get away from all the distractions of the Internet, not have them at my fingertips…."

Emphasis mine.

Thisis the aspect of ebooks that makes devices like the Sony Reader moreinteresting and compelling. It’s similar to a description I onceread about watching movies on a computer. When you are using yourcomputer, you are leaning forward – ready to interact. When you are watching a movie on your television, you are leaning backward,expecting not to interact. These postures are indicative of thecontext and so the interface or device must take them into account.

Readingbooks on your computer when you are leaning forward invitesinteraction, linking and distraction. Why do you think they callit a "browser" and not a "reader".

Oddly enough, this was one reason why we discardedthe idea of putting CALI lessons into a DVD format. The contextwas all wrong. Students expect to interact with CALI lessons -leaning forward, and CALI lessons on the television invite the user tolean backward – be passive. (I should note that it was suggestedthat CALI lessons on the television would make an interesting drinkinggame for law students on Friday nights like Trivial Pursuit DVD).

It’s not as simple as this, however.

Whenyou are reading a novel or a long passage, there is some passivity tothis. When you are interacting, there is some interactivity tothis. Duh. But reading a textbook or studying aneducational subject can have elements of both. Sometimes you areabsorbing the information, sometimes you want to take notes, makelinks, look something up, etc. Some people are constantly in thismode with everything they read, but I would suggest that most peopleare in this mode more often when they are reading textbooks. Learning is a series of interspersed periods of absorb and integrate,passive and active, learning backward and leaning forward.

WhenI am browsing the web or reviewing new articles in my news reader, I amin a semi-between state of passive and active (pactive?), and when Ifind something where I want to drill down, I lean forward and becomeactive. If it is a long-ish article, I lean back and becomepassive.

I could lay this on the device manufacturers andsay that they must design their ebook readers to be capable in eithersituation so that I can transition easily between active, pactive andpassive. The television is pretty passive, with a small amount ofactive via the remote. The laptop is pretty active and too heavyto lean back on. The new lighter, smaller, ebook readers that arecoming out in the next few weeks might hit that sweet spot that is pactive.

We’ll see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collecting

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

Points

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

Redeemable Points

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

Social Points

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

Points – Leaderboards

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

Points – Levels

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

Feedback

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

Exchanges

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

Customization

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

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

Back in December, I interviewed Professor Patrick Wiseman of theGeorgia State University College of Law_ about his experiences inpodcasting. He offers excellent advice to law faculty interested increating audio materials for their students.

Interestingly, Professor Wiseman got started recording his classes so that he could listen to them himself and so improve his teaching. This an excellent side-benefit of podcasting.

:Q1. The big question, of course, is … Has attendance to your class dropped because students can listen to your lectures outside of class?

There was some evidence of this when I first started to record my classes (Spring 2003). At the time, although I had an attendance requirement, it was on the honor system. On one particularly bad occasion – students with legal writing papers due did not show up, and maybe 60 of 80 students were present – I complained that my "supplement", the recording, was being used as a "substitute" and that my generosity in making the class available in recorded form was being exploited. (Having said, and recorded, that, I
stopped the recording and put that up as the class podcast for the day! I did, in fact, record the rest of the class and made it available weeks later.) The students present suggested that I start taking roll. I did so, and attendance has not been an issue since. In fact, last semester, I reverted to the honor system (while promising to take roll if attendance seemed to drop off) and it was not a problem!

:Q2. Has the fact that you record your lectures changed how you teach or what you present in class?

I’m careful to speak in complete sentences, and I try to remember to repeat student questions before answering. Sometimes, of course, the class is very conversational and some of that gets lost in the recording (another reason why the recording is no substitute for being there). And I suspect I’m tempted to "lecture" rather than converse because that will be more useful in recorded form. Some courses I don’t record at all because I specifically want them to be as conversational as possible (First Amendment, e.g.). I suppose one could record some classes within a course – those that are setting ground work – and not others, but I’ve not really tried to make that distinction. I did not record a Q&A review session recently, but told students that if they wanted its benefit they needed to be there.

I’m also "tied to the podium," because that’s where my recorder is, whereas I used to prowl the front of the classroom. (Use of the SmartBoard tends to keep me there now as well.) I think being in one place for most of the class is probably a good thing. (But having a lapel mic might be nice as it would free me up to prowl once more!)

:Q3. Explain the technical setup – what hardware is used to record the lecture, what software is used to process it in post-production, what website or blog is used.

I’m also using our SmartBoard instead of a whiteboard or blackboard, and I save the pages at the end of class. (It’s not "animated", but it does save each page.) That’s uploaded to my class website together with the mp3 file.

I’m using a handheld mp3 player/recorder (a now obsolete but still functional PoGo RipFlash). It connects to my office PC via a USB cable and I simply save the file to our web-accessible network drive, and rename it appropriately – e.g., a class held on November 10th, 2005 would have two files on the network drive, 20051110.pdf (the SmartBoard file) and 20051110.mp3 (the recorded class). I don’t do any post-processing to improve the quality. The recorder is surprisingly good at picking up voices from quite deep in the room.

I use my own class management system, which is template driven. When the syllabus page for each class is invoked, the underlying software checks for the presence of those files for the day and, if one or the other is present, links to "Today’s podcast" and "Today’s whiteboards".

:Q4. Are your lectures behind a password?

Yes.

:Q5. Are your class lectures up and available after the class is over? Do you know if students who are planning to take your class listen to them?

I wish you’d stop calling them ‘lectures’! I probably do talk too much (and recorded classes might be less useful if I didn’t), but my classes are more in the nature of somewhat one-sided conversations than monologues or soliloquies!

The only access to the recordings is through the current syllabus to students currently enrolled in the class. But a student newly enrolled in this year’s class who figured out what the URL looked like could always listen to classes from last year. In other words, it’s still password protected, but any remaining security is through relative obscurity.

Another benefit of recording classes, at least if a teacher has a predefined syllabus and pretty much sticks to it, as I do, is that on those rare occasions when I’ve had to miss class (one year it was a snow day, this year I had ‘flu) I was able to provide the recording of the class from the previous year. I don’t recommend doing that often, but it was nice to know I could if I had to.

:Q6. Have any of your colleagues expressed interest in your podcasting?

Only to say that they think it’s neat that I do it. No-one has expressed an interest in doing it too.

:Q7. Do you think your recorded lectures have improved your student’s learning?

My students tell me it does, that they do in fact listen to them. We’re a commuter school, so lots of students have long car rides home. I can’t imagine listening to my classes on the ride home, but at least some students do.

It would be hard to say exactly why, but my exams in recent years have been better than before. Among the things I’m doing differently is the class recording (but I’m also doing the whiteboards, and stressing in ways that I haven’t before the value of doing practice exams).

Teaching, and the factors that go into it working or not, is (at least as I do it) unscientific. It would be hard to design a controlled experiment which could isolate one factor from another.

:Q8. Have your recorded lectures made you a better teacher?

I was always inclined to speak in complete sentences! I think, as I suggested above, that it may have made my students better learners and, to that extent, it’s made me a better teacher. I think students found my mobility at the front of the classroom a bit distracting, and I don’t do that now. I’m conscious (although not in a way which distracts me) that the class is being recorded; I think, as a consequence, I try a bit harder to have a class be relatively coherent, as a whole.

:Q9. What advice would you give to other law faculty considering to podcast their lectures?

Ask why you’re doing it. I originally started recording class because I sometimes say things which surprise me, and then forget it after the fact; in other words, I recorded class for me, not for my students. Then it occurred to me that, if I have it, why not make it available to them. I continue to record class more for my own benefit than theirs, although I’ve not had occasion to go back and listen very often myself, at least in my first-year Property class. (I record my upper-level Constitutional Law
class as well.)

What I would not presume is that students will listen to the recorded classes; some will, and I’m happy to make it available to those who find it a useful resource, but many won’t. So I think the idea of podcasting a lecture, expecting people to listen to it, and then discussing the material in the f2f class meeting, as has been suggested, is unrealistic and overburdensome on students. (I also, frankly, don’t get why the reading assignment alone is not enough to provoke discussion if that’s the way a teacher prefers to conduct class.) I try to get my students to be self-aware about their own learning style, so that auditory learners have the use of the recording, whereas kinetic learners find it more useful to write things down during class, etc.

And I would suggest recording only those classes which lend themselves to fairly extended faculty presentation, the ‘sage-on-the-stage’ kind of class (as, I think, my first-year Property class appropriately is). The ‘guide-on-the-side’ kind of class probably won’t record well (which I think is why you refer to ‘lectures’; they lend themselves to podcasting, whereas conversations, unless very structured, do not.) That said, I still think a recording of a class which the student attended has value to
the student who finds it useful – that’s not as tautological as it sounds! If something is missed during class, all the students know that they can listen again later and fill in the gaps. Of course not all students will do this, and maybe, for those who are obsessive about law school, it is potentially harmful, because they feel it necessary to use every resource. On balance, I think – so far, I could change my mind – that it’s better to make the resource available than not.

Thanks Patrick!

This screencast from the ACLU is funny and unnerving. [Note: requires Flash] If you want to get really creeped out, read David Brin’s "The Transparent Socity". A book he wrote some years ago, but it tells a chilling tale and also offers hope and solutions for dealing with universal lack of privacy.

Here’s the link.

CALI worked with AALS to record almost all of the sessions. This was a rather hastily organized effort and kudos goes out to Jane LaBarbera and Carl Monk for trusting in this experiment.

There are almost 200 hours of audio recordings of the sessions from the AALS Annual Meeting. We missed some sessions due to inability to get a sound feed, a few technical glitches and a smattering of all the things that can go wrong in an operation like this.

Still, the results are rather impressive and we learned a whole lot about volume podcasting and we plan to employ that expertise in future CALI projects.

I am going to highlight podcasts from the collection from time to time and I expect that some will also find there way into CALI Radio as well.

I also plan a future blog post on a "Behind the Scenes" of how we did it so that you can learn from our successes and mistakes.

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

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

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

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

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

… emphasis mine.

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

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

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

"….Will our thinking be dominated by the conventions and business modelsof print publishing (and the current power relationships amongpublishers, readers, and authors), and by our cultural practices,consumer expectations, legal frameworks and social norms related tobooks, or will we discard these traditions …"

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

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

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

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

The next year will be very interesting to watch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

danah boyd is one of the most insightful bloggers on the net and in a recent post she talks about "super publics".

"…In talking about "super publics," I want to get at the altered state ofpublics – what publics look like when they are infused with thefeatures of digital architectures. What does it mean to speak acrosstime and space to an unknown audience? What happens when you cannotpredict who will witness your act because they are not visible now,even though they may be tomorrow? How do people learn to deal with apublic larger and more diverse than the one they learned to make senseof as teenagers? How are teenagers affected by growing up in anenvironment where they can assume super publics? I want to talk aboutwhat it means to speak for all time and space, to audiences you cannotconceptualize…." – link to article

This quote made me think about how the Constitution was written for the super public across time and for that matter, how judges write their opinions knowing that they will be read and interpreted over long periods of time into the future.

I would bet that there someone has studied how case opinion writing has elements of writing with an eye towards the future – and how that makes it different from other kinds of writing.

The left-rigft blogoshphere makes a lot of hay out of juxtaposing a politicians words then and now because changing your mind is a bad thing, but when a judge writes an opinion – its like a time capsule or a message in a bottle that will wash up on thousands of future digital shores with who-knows-what impact.

This is what makes the Supreme Court so darn interesting. They write for the ages and they know it. Boldness is not a good trait IMHO.

Ms. boyd also says….

"… A reporter recently asked me why kids today have no shame. I told herit was her fault. Media is obsessed with revealing the backstage ofpeople in the public eye – celebrities, politicians, etc. Morerecently, they’ve created a public eye to put people into – Survivor,Real World, etc. Open digital expression systems coupled with globalnetworks took it one step farther by saying that anyone could operateas media and expose anyone else. What’s juicy is what people want tohide and thus, the media (all media) goes after this like hawks. Addthe post-9/11 attitude that if you hide something, you are clearly aterrorist. Should it surprise anyone that teenagers have responded byexposing everything with pride? What better way to react to a superpublic where everyone is working as paparazzi?…"

Wow.

This reminded me of that old saw about imagining that every one is in their underwear if you are nervous about giving a speech – except in our digital future (and teenage digital present) – everyone is sitting their in their underwear and everyone else is taking pictures. It’s the democratization of Candid Camera or America’s Funniest Videos – except it gets kind of tiresome after awhile.

Maybe that’s the solution to future privacy – not that we will have any, but that we are lost in the crowd. Unfortunately, digital media doesn’t keep us lost if someone is interested.

A few years back, I became lost to Google. In the late 1990’s you could Google ‘John Mayer’ and you find me or some presentation I had given on the first page. Today, it’s all about some singer who won a Grammy and who my niece says is really cool. Maybe my generic name is a blessing?

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

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

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

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

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

Then Katrina hit.

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the goal of LSEPP.

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

—

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

2. Convergence Will Stay Ahead of Content

Here’s a quote from the Reynold’s post…

"…Every aspect of a course or textbook should be able to map to thetechnological convergence present via a cell phone or advanced iPod andshould do so in such a way that allows the user to control theexperience… "

Let me riff on this in two ways.

"… user to control the experience …"

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

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

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

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

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

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

But back to convergence.

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

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

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