CALIOPOLIS

Elmer Masters and I spoke at EDUCAUSE today in a presentation titled "Podcasting the Classroom: Two Models".

Here is the Powerpoint deck from the talk. Elmer used a TiddlyWiki for his talk and I will post a link when I get it – EDUCAUSEPodcasting.ppt

Here is a link to the audio of the talk that I recorded. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 – Educause2006PodcastTwoModels.mp3

UPDATE: Here is a link to a screencast of the presentation that syncs the audio to the powerpoints.

Pamela Jones and the hordes of relentless keyboard kommandoes have been clicking up a storm in these waning days of the SCO v. IBM litigation.

They have just posted a re-working of what PJ calls "IBM’s Greatest Hits" and Groklaw’s "Magnum Opus". It’s titled …

Declaration of Todd M. Shaughnessy with Unsealed or Redacted Exhibits

… but it’s a massively linked documents from IBM of a good portion of the documents relevant to the case. It comes to Groklaw via Pacer as a PDF of images that the community has converted into HTML/text including pretty formatting, links (to all of the other documents in the Groklaw warehouse) and all spell-checked, i-dotted, t-crossed and worked over by volunteers who are more than happy to poke one more stick into SCO’s eye.

Oh, no, this is not personal …NOT.

But Pam is wrong.

The "great work" of Groklaw cannot be reduced to a single document or blog post. This is just the cherry on top, the icing on the cake, the … the … words escape me.

What if every injustice were pursued with the relentless zeal that the Groklaw community brings to their particular passion? Ponder that for a moment.

Law schools could teach entire seminars (several in fact) based on the just the court documents posted on the site, but the editorials and commentary bring color, life and emotion to this case. What a rich treasure of information …. all in one place.

The case is slouching towards conclusion and a recent blizzard of documents have been produced by both sides. 42 months into the case and you would think that there would be no ergs of energy left to transcribe these tedious lawyerly tomes. You would be wrong. With dispatch and depair (SCO’s that is), the Groklawites have punched out the facts for everyone else to read, ponder and dissect.

Groklaw makes litigators out of all who read it and I mean that in the best possible way. We have learned all about trial tactics, motion practice, depositions, evidence, jurisdiction, summary judgement, contracts, copyright … the list is long … and in following Groklaw, I feel like I have been to law school and am ready to take the bar exam (well, perhaps not quite).

Kudos to Pam and the inexorable Groklaw community.

BlackBoard, take note.

This is my second interview with a law professor who teaches patent law. Professor Vince Chiapetta teaches at Willamette University College of Law and has been involved in patent litigation in the past.

The first podcast was with Professor Mary LaFrance of UNLV Boyd School of Law.

Vince was kind enough to entertain my questions and enlighten in me in many aspects of patents, patent law and patent litigation. He clarified many issue for me in regards to the BlackBoard v. Desire2Learn litigation.

I had the benefit of speaking with Vince the day after my return from EDUCAUSE in Dallas where one of the sessions I attended was the BlackBoard Town Hall which others have blogged about here (Chronicle article) and here (Al Essa’s blog). This session left me with more questions than answers and these were fresh in my mind during my talk with Vince.

We talked about many legal issues and so I will come back to this post later and add some links to legal definitions or other articles to help us non-lawyers follow the bouncing ball.

UPDATE: I ran the audio file through Gigabox’s excellent free tool Levelator to make it more listen-able (my voice boomed while Vince sounded distant) to good effect. The link is to the new version.

Click to listen to the podcast or right-click to download – Chiapetta2.mp3

As usual, none of the information in this podcast should be construed as legal advice.

UPDATE:

We covered a lot of technical territory in this podcast. Here are some links that relate to some of the topics covered…

• KSR v. Teleflex – a current patent case going before the Supreme Court soon. This is a link to a blog that talks about the case.
• The term I was searching for about 10 minutes into the podcast was "Skilled Artisan" and here is a link to the USPTO website that helped me. Use your browser (Ctrl-F) to search for "skilled artisan".
• Definition of Mens Rea from LII’s Wex.
• More about the Sherman Act from Wex
• Walker Process Supreme Court case that ties together inequitable conduct and antitrust (link to Findlaw)
• Here’s an article on "inequitable conduct" in patent litigation. I have not read this yet.
• Here’s an article about the US District Court in Texas often referred to as the "Rocket Docket" for patent cases.
• Cost of patent litigration from Wikipedia…"…A typical patent infringement case in the US costs 1 – 3 milliondollars in legal fees for each side. This is despite the fact that 99%of all patent infringement cases are settled. Legal fees inpharmaceutical cases can run 30 million dollars or more due to the factthat billions of dollars may be at stake…."
• Wikipedia article on software patents
• Article on "Markman Hearings" with this quote… "…While the form, timing and scope of "Markman"hearings vary from district to district and from judge to judge, theoutcome is often dispositive of the entire case. This occurs becausethe interpretation of a patent claim, or "claim construction", is thecentral issue in most patent litigation. Whether the litigation focuseson patent infringement or validity, the core issue is often whetherthere is a narrow or broad interpretation of the patent claim…."

I’m off to EDUCAUSE 2006 to give a presentation about the Legal Education Podcasting Project and CALI’s future plans for Classcaster.

Here’s the blurb with a link for our session which is on Wednesday morning at 8:10 am (ooof, I am not a morning person).

If you would like to meet up, drop a note in the comments or send me an email at jmayer@cali.org.

I ran across ProjectPosner.org today and it’s gave me an idea. Judges posting their own opinions – hence the title of this post. – MyJudgeSpace.

The purpose of Project Posner is…

"…Why this site? While Posner’s books and popular writings are easilyavailable to the public, his opinions are difficult or expensive forthe public to access, let alone search. This site, for the first time,collects almost all of his opinions in a single searchable and easilyreadable database…"

It is not clear that Judge Posner is a participant in this project. The creators are Professor Tim Wu from Columbia and Stuart Sierra who works at Columbia are clearly fans of Posner’s work…

"…Richard Posner is probably the greatest living American jurist. He hassat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago since 1981, andwritten several thousand opinions during that time. Posner is also wellknown for his extra-judicial writings and his deep affection for mostmembers of the animal kingdom…."

I think the idea of Judges having a space to post their own opinion might be quite interesting, but, judges have to be careful about their public stateaments and can’t be explaining all the time why they decided a case one way or another. The judiciary, however, does seem to be under attack for its "activism" and I believe that part of what fuels the criticism is the required silence from judges. They must ‘speak’ through their decisions, so what better way to speak louder than to make their decisions more accessible to the public.

Judge Posner is an exemplary case study in this.

"…One thing that distinguishes the opinions is the effort to try and getat why a given law actually exists, and an effort to try and make senseof the law. That can make them more useful than most case reports…."

Judges are busy people and doing the hard work of gathering the cases and creating the website would be too much of a burden, so maybe a service like MyJudgeSpace.com would lower the barrier. Even better, if judges have fan clubs like Posner, then the space should be a wiki where the fans could gather to post the opinions AND discuss them, link them out to other sources, etc. Maybe we should call this WikiJudgepedia.com?

I am thinking that this would be a neat project combining CALI’s technical skills, law student volunteers, law librarians, law faculty and practicing attorneys.

Hat tip to the Orin Kerr for his post at the Volokh Conspiracy for the pointer to ProjectPosner.org.

CALI is pleased to announce the launching of Classcaster.net, a website to support education institutions that want to run their own blog/podcast networks.

Classcaster is a freely available, open-source system of software that can be run on a Linux server for educational institutions to allow their faculty, staff and students to create blogs, post podcasts and manage their own content.

Classcaster.net is the location for the code-base.

Classcaster.org is CALI‘s instance of Classcaster that supports the legal education community and currently has over 50 active law course blogs and over 1500 podcasts from law faculty and law librarians.

We developed Classcaster to explore how to effectively use blogs and podcasts in legal education. The hosted blogging solutions available are very powerful, but they are necessarily focused on a broad audience. We were thinking that education or course-related blogs might need some different featues and focus.

In addition, we wanted to create a service that did not require a computer to post a podcast. Classcaster has a telephone aspect that allows the user to make a phone call, record a long ‘voice mail’ and have that automatically posted to the caller’s blog as a podcast.

We imagined that faculty could use this to record in-class lectures using a cell phone or could phone in a lecture remotely if they were traveling or stuck at home during snow days or whatever.

Classcaster is built on the open source LifeType blogging platform, the open source PBX, Asterisk and some additional scripting that we wrote to make it work together smoothly.

Elmer Masters is the guru behind the guts and glory of Classcaster and is CALI’s Director of Internet Development. As we come to better understand how to integrate blogs and podcasts into education, he will be adding features and functions that will also be made available in the freely available code base.

If you are interested in working with us on Classcaster, stop by www.classcaster.net and post in the fora.

Elmer and I will be presenting at Educause on the topic of podcasting relating to the Legal Education Podcasting Project (which used Classcaster) that was conducted last spring and LEPP II that is going on right now. Stop by and say hi.

Lots of law faculty and law librarians (and at least one Dean) areposting to blogs created at CALI’s Classcaster Legal EducationBlog/Podcast Network.

One of those that I kept runningacross because of the interesting posts was the AELR Blog. It seemedlike someone different was posting every day so I decided to follow upand asked Professor James Duggan at Southern Illinois University Schoolof Law what was up.

The response was even more interesting than I expected.

Heand Library Director Frank Houdek are co-teaching a course in AdvancedElectronic Legal Research and one of the requirements of the course isfor students to find and post relevant articles from the Internet.Here’s the description from the syllabus…

"…Students must subscribe via RSS feed to at least three (3) researchand/or legal technology blogs. Students will be expected to monitor theblogs on a continuing basis and to post information learned from them tothe AELR Blog on a regular basis during the semester (i.e., at leastonce a week, minimum total of 15 postings). While the postings will notbe graded, their level of thoroughness, accuracy, critical analysis)will be considered in determining the "participation" component of thefinal course grade…"

This is cool on so many different levels.

First, it exposes students to all sorts of information on the Web.

Second, all of the other students benefit from the entire class’s work.

Third, everyone else who wants to follow along and can participate (comments are enabled on the blog).

Fourth, students will learn about vetting sources and authority ofthe things they post. Others are reading their work and can see if theydo a good job of finding and analysing the quality of the articles theyfind.

Would something like this be useful for any law school course? Idon’t see why not. It makes the subject matter come alive withreal-time, present-day relevance. It engages the students to fit whatthey are learning into larger contexts. It challenges and teaches the instructors, too.

Here’s what else Professor Duggan had to say…

"…We feel the assignment serves two major purposes:

(1) by having studentsmonitor legal research/technology blogs, they are receiving a "painfree" and self-initiated supplement to the course materials that weprovide to them for the subject matter of the course;

(2) by havingstudents also monitor at least one blog in a subject field of theirchoice (e.g., family law, criminal law, etc.) they are introduced to avaluable method for keeping abreast of developments in their subjectspecialities. .."

Right on!

This is the read/write web applied to education. This is Rip/Mix/Learn.

If you are a law faculty at a CALI-member law school (almost all US law schools), you can setup a blog at Classcaster yourself for your courses. It’s free, and it will benefit your students.

Like so many ed-tech folks who are not lawyers, I have been struggling to understand the implications of the BlackBoard patent and their law suit against Desire2Learn.

Being in the legal education business, I happen to know some really smart law professors who teach patent law and so I am in the process of recording conversations with them about this topic.

Professor Mary LaFrance teaches at the Boyd School of Law which is part of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and she was kind enough to entertain my questions.

The conversation was far-ranging and of necessity, somewhat speculative as to the tactics and intent of the parties.

It is important to note that none of the material in this blog and in this podcast in particular should be construed as legal advice.

Here is the podcast – MaryLaFrance.mp3. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3.

Put this blog post under thinking out loud.

I have been watching the rise of YouTube and Flickr and other media sharing and social software/networking sites and I always wonder what kind of educational angle there is (it’s my job) and I think I see where it’s headed.

I was reading about Yale’s grant from the Hewlett Foundation to post seven courses to the web- materials, syllabus, video – essentially everything but the credit. The Hewlett Foundation is giving them $700,000 to do this and I my first thought was … that won’t scale.

What would scale?

What if the students did the recording themselves and posted them to YouTube? That would scale.

It may sound silly to ask students to do this, but if I believe that video recording equipment will be in every cell phone in about five years. This is jist an extension of Moore’s Law applied to cell phones (many of which already have digital cameras).

Besides, cell phones already have a wireless network connection built-in and I can imagine that while the video is being recorded and stored locally, it is also being streamed directly to YouTube.

Now, let’s build on that.

As the student types her notes into the course wiki (as are other students) they become part of the shared note-taking ecosystem just for that class. Maybe the progressive and far-thinking university has set-up a system like this for their students, but more likely, the students (who are digital natives) have already taken the initiative and done this for themselves. It would not cost much to setup a private wiki using JotSmart or Socialtext.

Flickr comes in as a photostream of what the instructor is writing on the whiteboard which is valuable for different reasons than the video stream on YouTube.

Of course, someone is making an old-fashioned sound-only recording that is streamed/saved to the course blog so that everyone else automatically gets it from the RSS feed they subscribed to at the beginning of the semester. There are plenty of free blog/podcasting services – many are free.

What is missing from this scenario?

The ‘official’ course website, of course. It is not irrelevant, but it is not the only aspect of the course that is on the web – it’s probably just a starting point. The real, valuable information is what the students produce because it represents their efforts to learn.

Faculty may worry about staying ahead of their students, but I think they don’t have to worry – they can never stay ahead of their students. Certainly, the IT departments at universities cannot and why should they when students have all these tools available to them.

Passwords and access-limited sites are not going to be the norm for these students. They are not competing with other students on the curve, they are all trying to learn. Once there is an ecosystem of this type of learning activity, there will be network effects emerging. Students having trouble will search other student’s notes who took the same class (perhaps from the same instructor or others using the same book). It sounds like this would be a meta-tagging/findability nightmare, but not if you include del.icio.us-like tagging to create an ad-hoc taxonomy (or folksonomy) so that people can find each other’s stuff in a very granular way.

All of these tools exist today (well, except for the cell-phone video cams that can stream to YouTube) and so we don’t have to figure out how to design the software. There are intellectual property implications all over the place, but if Yale is giving away the video of the course, how can they object if someone else makes a video for themselves and gives it away?

In a few years, you won’t be able to find a university or professor who can get away with not allowing the classroom to be video or audio recorded.

Isn’t this a good thing?

Students would be smarter, education widely/universally available.

I think so.

CALI has posted its first Family Law lessons on the CALI website. There are four lessons posted so far and many more to come…

• Alimony by Professor Cynthia Starnes from Michigan State,
• Classifying Special Types of Marital Property,
• Marriage Regulations, and
• Visitation and Relocation by Professor Janet Richards from the University of Menphis.

In addition to Professors Starnes and Richards, the other Family Law Fellows working on lessons are…

• Professor Len Biernat from Hamline,
• Andrea Charlow from Drake, and,
• Ruthann Robson – CUNY

Although the lessons are individually authored by the faculty, they review each others work and coordinate on topic selection and share ideas and insights. The lessons are also internally reviewed by CALI staff and they are anonymously reviewed by law faculty on the CALI Editorial Board. This is how CALI Fellowships work. (BTW, we are always looking for faculty with all kinds of subject matter expertise to join the CEB. Contact Deb Quentel – dquentel@cali.org).

The Family Law Fellows have worked exceptionally hard to create high quality computer tutorials for students taking Family Law in law school. These are not flashcards.

I have watched Deb Quentel (CALI’s Director of Curriculum Development and General Counsel) sweat blood over the materials in the CALI Lesson Library and I have been a lurker to some of the intense work that goes into authoring CALI lessons in the past. We at CALI are extremely proud of the work our authors do.

Look for more Family Law lessons to be posted in the coming months.