CALIOPOLIS

Rob Reynolds over at Xplanazine has a great post called "The Five Laws of Product Development for Education in the 21st Century" that I would like to use to riff on legal education and law practice.

1. We No Longer Know How They Want To Know

Legal Education and Law Practice have had an electronic component in the research area that predates the web. I recall in 1988 when I was the computer guy at Chicago-Kent, giving out our seven Lexis passwords to all students so that they could do legal research from home. Today, all law students have 24/7 access to the near entirety of case law, citation systems, statutes and regs. This is available to attorneys as well for a price, but an increasing amount of this material is cheap or free via government fed or advertising supported websites.

This latter availability is important because it is also available to the rest of the world as well.

Books are still paper-bound, but there have been forays into ebooks in the past (Folio anyone?) and the emergence of companies like VitalSource and Fourteen40 seem to indicate that an increasing number of paper casebooks will be available in electronic format in the future.

Law Office Management and Case Management software has been around forever, and I have seen several open source projects starting to cropup that serve this vertical market as well. The presence of open source alternatives is sometimes an indicator of the commoditization of a marketspace.

A couple of years ago, I started to say things in my presentations like "Everyone Should be a Lawyer". It was meant to be provocative, but it’s more true than ever. With the fact that everyone can represent themselves in legal matters, everyone IS a lawyer already – albeit an inexperienced or uninformed one.

State and County Law Libraries are on the front line of this and from lurking on their discussion list and being a member of the AALL-SIS devoted to these folks, there is a trend of fewer lawyers using these libraries and a huge increase of pro ses or self-representing litigants showing up and asking for help (pdf).

Combine these two notions – that e-filing on the web will open up a gigantic aggregatable marketplace for everyone to participate and that everyone CAN participate and there will be tremendous market pressure for those participants to be less experienced and less uninformed.

This is what I call the coming age of Legal Literacy.

E-filing is to law practice what blogs are to journalism – with one very important difference. Without the JD, you cannot represent someone else and there is that wide and opaque space called "unauthorized practice of law" if non-JDs or automated systems attempt to give legal advice to someone else.

The problem is what constitutes legal advice and what constitutes legal education? There’s the opportunity. There are all sorts of ways to learn more about the law without going to law school, but this area has been barely scratched on the web. You could say its too hard to teach amateurs about the law, but who would have thought that so many people would have so much technical literacy or that so many people are playing journalist on evenings and weekends either (i.e. 30 million blogs).

Legal Literacy is in for a perfect storm on the web. Law is both technical and social. You can win your case if you have the law on your side or if your arguments are persuasive and you can avoid trouble or affect behavior with social engineering. The threat of legal action has always been the nuclear option in business negotiations. It is ripe for dis-aggregation as the rest of the populace realizes that lawyers have been using more fine-grained tools forever like negotiaion, alternative dispute resolution or just plain understanding the "source code" of the system to make it work. Shout out to Professor Lessig for that last sentence.

Code is Law on the Internet, but Law is Code for Society and Lawyers are Hackers.

With e-filing and self-representation, we can all be hackers and isn’t that a scary thought. .

E-filing and the resultant surfacing of how the courts work (or don’t work in some cases) will bring to bear an entire marketplace of ideas to rid the system of inefficiencies and unfairness. The Net hates inefficiency and tries to route around it. I am not saying that we are headed towards a utopian situation. I am saying that the system is due for a shake-up and we do not know how it will shake out.

How can we teach law students about that today? We don’t know and that’s the point of this first law of product development.

I will follow this thread in future blog posts as I look at the other four laws.

Image by Eric Molinsky who does great artwork for CALI lessons. This one is from Internet Legal Resources – Free Resources.

If you are, CALI is conducting a very short survey (5 minutes tops) that you can fill out here.

It was written by a couple of CALI’s authors – Professors Joe Grohman and Ron Brown from Nova Southeastern. The comments received so far have been excellent. Please partcipate to help us decide some future directions for CALI lessons.

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It looks like this year will be a watershed for new ebook readers. The popularity of Apple’s iPod and the business model of iTunes has shown the way for this to work.

There are at least three ebook readers due for release in the next couple of months based on Eink technology.

The most anticipated is the Sony Reader (or called the Libre in Japan where it is current available).

A Chinese company Jinke has an entry due out in Spring of 2006. They are already selling a version of this reader in China.

Finally (well probably not finally as I would bet there are others that I don’t know about), but last in my list is the Irex reader.

I plan to purchase at least one of these and do a session at the CALI Conference. I will have more to say about ebook readers and ebooks generally as they apply to legal education in the near future.

This is the CALL FOR SPEAKERS for the 2006 Conference for Law School Computing.

Registration will be up in a few days.

The hotel will take phone call reservations, but not web reservations
just yet – don’t let that stop you as hotel rooms GO FAST and we lose
them 30 days before the conference.

EVERYTHING can be accessed at www.cali.org/conference

2006 CONFERENCE FOR LAW SCHOOL COMPUTING

RIP MIX LEARN

*** CALL FOR SPEAKERS ****

What: 16th Annual Conference for Law School Computing
When: Thursday – Saturday, June 15-17, 2006
Where: Nova Southeastern Shepard Broad Law Center, Fort Lauderdale, FL

Submit proposal ideas at www.cali.org/conference

Register SOON at www.cali.org/conference

$395 – CALI members
$695 – Law school/non-members
$995 – non law school attendees

Hotel information at www.cali.org/conference

SHARE YOUR KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND IDEAS

Are you …

‒ law faculty,
‒ law librarian or
‒ IT staff

with experience using, installing, supporting or building IT-based
systems for teaching at your law school? Are you an…

‒ Administrative systems developer,
‒ Help desk staffer,
‒ Webmaster,
‒ Instructional designer,
‒ Graphic artist/Flash programmer, or
‒ A/V/Classroom Technology guru?

If so, you have real-world experience to share as a SPEAKER at this
conference. Speaker registration fees are discounted $395, though you
will have to cover your own transportation and hotel costs.

If several people propose similar topics, I may group them into a
panel-o-presenters. If you are interested in becoming a speaker or
panelist, let me know. If you want to speak, but can’t decide on a
topic, send me an email with your areas of expertise and I will try to
accommodate you. This is YOUR conference, help me to make it GREAT!

In the past, I have included a list of possible session titles. I am
going to break from tradition and see what comes flying in over the
transom. Get your creative juices flowing.

I came home from the store just now and was listening to a fascinating discussion about RSS and the transparency of corporations and business models of blogging and aggregation. When I hit the driveway, I sat in my car for a few moments because the discussion wasn’t over yet I didn’t want to turn off the car and miss the rest.

It was a Driveway Moment, but a false one.

I wasn’t listening to the radio. I was listening to a podcast on my iPod Shuffle. Specifically, it was the Gillmour Gang‘s latest discussion that I ran across while downloading something else from ITConversations.

This is not the first time this has happened.

This is why I love podcasting.

I have had numerous driveway moments listening to National Public Radio’s Chicago affiliate WBEZ, but certainly not every day or even once a week. When Terri Gross interviews someone in an area of special interest or on a topic that I am interested in, I listen avidly and when they don’t, I feel a small letdown that I will have to listen to something or someone that I know little about and so it will be (blechhh) educational for me – you know, expand my horizons and all that.

Podcasting lets me find audio content that is almost always worthy of a driveway moment, but it doesn’t have to happen serendipitiously. I now regularly listen to 10-15 podcasts per week while I am driving to/from work, walking the dog and doing the laundry.

Almost all of these (at present) are work-related – something to do with technology or education or the law and so it’s a little like adding another 10 hours to my work week without any pain. In fact, it’s great to have the distraction on the dog walks and they are a great alternative to my meagre music library.

This relates to podcasting in education and the Legal Education Podcasting Project. If students can add another few hours of study time – painlessly – to their schedule, that may be good. If they are listening to recorded lectures or summaries of classes that they have attended, the need to listen intently is lessened – they can pick up new insights or information and process it with the benefit of being several days or weeks away from the material. The more you study, the better off you are and if studying doesn’t seem like studying, all the better.

This is not for everyone. I realize that. But that’s what technology should be all about – giving us choices in how we manage, organize and consume information – our information.

If I am right, podcasting class lectures or summaries is a no-brainer and may actually be a significant improvement in efficient educational delivery.

I was having a very interesting discussion with Elmer Masters about how law faculty categorize what they do and how they think during the creation of legal education and scholarship. One high-level categorization system could be the "school of thought" that is being promulgated within the lecture, article or case commentary or analysis.

As a non-lawyer, I am only dimly aware of the concrete categories, but as a developer of social software pertaining to legal education, I am in need of understanding much more about what these categories are and how concrete they are.

A google search on "legal schools of thought" brings up some semi-familiar terms – even to me…

• the Chicago school
• feminist jurisprudence (via Wex which is looking more and more interesting every day!)
• critical legal studies (via Wikipedia)
• legal positivism
• natural law
• legal process
• law and economics

…and this was from looking only at the summaries that Google provides on the first two pages of search results. I realize that I am scratching the surface here because while I do want these top level categories of ‘schools of thought; I am actually more interested in ‘schools of thought’ that are even more narrowly construed – down to specific legal subject areas or doctrines within specific topics of those subject areas.

It is at this point that I realize I am encountering exactly what 1Ls encounter as they seek the black and white and find only shades of grey and that some of these shades of grey have been around long enough to attract a name – a small school of thought (thoughtlette?).

I wonder if law faculty (or lawyers and judges for that matter) have generalized agreement on the boundaries of these schools of thought. As I think of my own profession – computer science – I realize … of course they do … but it would be rather difficult to find in one place all the mini-schools of thought in all of the different computer-related fields. It must be so in law as well.

So this is the mini-research project I have assigned myself. Find and list all of the major legal schools of thought (Wex and Wikipedia have bolstered my optimism) and talk to faculty in specific subject areas (Torts, Copyright, Criminal law, etc, etc.) about the schools of thought that exist below the surface of these major topics.

Why do this?

The articulation of this information is useful in constructing social software that is immediately recognizably useful to law faculty and valuable to law students – that is what CALI does.

It is quite possible, however, that the best articulation will be accompished via a bottom-up process, i.e. a folksonomy that is gradually built via many small encounters with material by many individuals like del.icio.us. That is actually a good metaphor for what I seek – a del.icio.us of legal schools of thought tags.

Can you assist?

Michael Sparks the Computing Services Director at LSU Law School conducted a survey of how law schools manage wireless access in their classrooms.

The survey pdf is here: wirelesssurvey.pdf.

There were 56 responding law schools and the results should not be too surprising. Some schools are using technology to restrict student surfing by either switching off the wireless access points or by using special software that students cannot circunvent.

Other schools use social means like instructions from the faculty or the Code of Conduct to control behavior.

There are two very good sides to this issue:

If the classroom is not interesting enough to engage the students, then faculty should make it more interesting….

… and ….

Faculty have a right to control their classrooms.

I agree with both and I believe that faculty will trumps all else. It is their responsibility to create the environment that delivers the educational message in the manner they desire. This is not to say that students who surf or doodle or generally don’t pay attention cannot be considered an unspoken backchannel to the instructor. There could be value in having the students decide what the best policy is.

Multi-tasking or ‘partial continuous attention’ is a new facet of today’s millenials and just because they are looking at the screen does not mean they are not tracking the class.

Interesting article that speaks to one of the main experiments we are conducting with the Legal Education Podcasting Project: Classroom recordings vs. Weekly summaries.

"…Recording a lecture may not produce a good podcast. This point was madeby a colleague, Michael Rappa, who produced podcasts for his Fall 2005course. His says, "It is not as simple as just recording lectures." Hisapproach has been to record a separate 30 minute presentation coveringthe lecture content. Is this worthwhile?…"

Every year, CALI’s members meet during AALS for a membership meeting. This year’s meeting was in Washington, DC on Thursday, January 5, 2006at the Washington Hilton and Towers Hotel.

The following folks were elected (or re-elected ) to the CALI Board of Directors.

Mohyeddin Abdulaziz, U of Arizona
Steve Bradford, Nebraska
Ron Eades, Louisville
Scott Burnham, Montana (re-elected)
Paul Caron, Cincinnati (re-elected)
Ken Hirsh, Duke (re-elected)
Peter Strauss, Columbia (re-elected)

We wish to express our sincere appreciation to the following who are leaving the CALI Board of Directors.

Barbara Glesner-Fines, UMKC
Michael Norwood, U of New Mexico
Kinvin Wroth, Vermont

The complete list of the CALI Board of Directors is here.

Afterthe meeting, I gave a little talk (25 minutes) on past, current andfuture activities planned for CALI. You can view and listen to thattalk as a screencast here.

Includedin the talk are statistics on CALI’s membership, lessons and lessonusage (50% increase over last year!) as well as announcements about theLegal Education Podcasting Project, The Law School Disaster Preparedness Project (more on this soon), Crossword Puzzles and pictures of my dog.

As always, comments, ideas, suggestions and complaints are welcome.

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI www.cali.org) has a launched a project where over 50 law faculty from 44 US and one Canadian law schools are creating podcasts of their courses in the Spring 2006 semester.

The goal of the project is to investigate the use of podcasting in legal education. Faculty and students will be surveyed throughout the semester to determine their reactions to this new legal education medium.

About half of the faculty will be recording all of their classroom lectures and the other half will be creating weekly summaries of the course. The podcasts will be posted to blogs hosted on CALI�s Classcaster service (www.classcaster.org).

The individual faculty have the option of putting the blogs behind a password only for their students or leaving the blogs open for the public Internet to listen along.

Besides blog/podcasting space, all faculty have been provided with a personal digital recorder (specifically, and Olympus ws-100) and a lapel microphone which allows for hands-free and podium-free recording in the classroom.

Podcasting is just audio delivered over the Internet. When connected to a blog and an RSS feed, students can set up a subscription so that it automatically downloads new podcasts to their MP3 players (i.e. Apple iPod).

Legal education has a long oral tradition. The classroom lecture is the core of legal education, but once it�s done, it�s done. CALI posits that when students can re-listen to classroom lectures or weekly summaries created by the instructor, they will benefit educationally. CALI seeks to understand the qualitative benefits from the student and instructor viewpoints.

Some students take too many notes and do not listen carefully to classroom lectures. Even the best students may miss something or need to hear it more than once before it sinks in. Some students are better aural learners than visual learners and would benefit from access to audio recordings of lectures or weekly summaries. Every student is different and every instructor is different. One size does not fit all.

CALI expects that this project provide excellent insight into how a podcast-enhanced course might be done differently and better than a non-podcast-enhanced course. Ideas that arise from this project will manifest as new features and services from CALI and especially in design changes in the Classcaster service.

A forum for faculty to discuss technical issues and share experiences has been setup and interim observations and analysis will appear from time to time at CALI�s blog at caliopolis.classcaster.org. A list of participating faculty and their schools and courses can be found at www2.cali.org/index.php?fuseaction=help.faq&topicid=0000000010#66.