Subject: Teaching cyberlaw with cyberspace
Date: Saturday, March 22, 2003 7:18 PM
From: Jonathan Zittrain <zittrain@law.harvard.edu>
To: <cyberprof_list@uclink4.berkeley.edu>

Hi,

I'm a longtime listener, first time caller to Cyberprof.  (Well, nearly 
first time.  I think I posted a question about the DMCA three years ago.)

I write now to see if there's interest in an experiment I'm helping run 
that I hope could network ourselves and our students together in useful, 
non-annoying, non-hassleful ways.  So long as the Internet remains open to 
E2E innovation, the idea is to build some tools in a "courseware" space 
that is so far disappointingly littered with instant messenger, threaded 
discussion lists, and static web pages.

Here's the idea in three stages:

Phase 1: Networking classes/groups around specific questions.  (done and 
available)
   We've built web-based software through which a prof can ask his or her 
students a question.  They answer by a deadline, at which point each answer 
is routed randomly to another student for a reaction, with as many cranks 
of the wheel as desired.  Students end up critiquing each other one-on-one, 
developing a portfolio of views around a subject, without the unevenness of 
participation (or overwhelming activity) of a more freeform message 
board.  Other features include self-rating of posts in a given discussion 
round, allowing the more interesting answers to rise to the top in the 
resulting sets of answers.  Students who answer "no" to a question before 
offering comment can be specifically paired against those who answered "yes."

Phase 1.5: Networking across classes and groups. (done and available)
   Different groups/classes registered on the system can come together over 
a shared question -- so the students in a U.S. cyberlaw class can find 
their answers critiqued by an Australian class, and vice versa.

Phase 2: Open source syllabus development (in progress)
   The only people more willing than Stallmanesque coders to share their 
hard work are teachers who have put time into developing a course 
syllabus.  The idea is to log our syllabi into the system in a way that 
lets us easily graze from one to the other, combining our own materials 
with drag and drop items from others' lists -- replete with links to the 
works where possible.  Amazonesque ratings and collaborative filters can 
allow the daring to go beyond browsing and ask for "items like this one," 
or a list of teachers who "teach the sort of stuff I do."

Phase 3: Shifting the way law schools and schools generally learn, by 
changing how they learn using the Net.  Making a class that's not connected 
to other classes examining the same ideas/readings -- but from different 
angles -- seem a bit isolated and two-dimensional. (future refinement)

So, two years and approximately $1 million later, the software is now up 
and ready to use -- and I'd love to solicit as many people as want to try 
it.  Of course, the more people who use it, the more opportunities there 
are to link classes together.

See <http://h2o.law.harvard.edu> for the actual system; 
<http://h2oproject.law.harvard.edu/rotisserie.html> for the open source 
code if you want to run it yourself (of course, you can also just register 
on our server); and <http://h2oproject.law.harvard.edu> for some of the 
philosophy.

So far as I can tell these sorts of tools are useful for pretty much any 
humanities/liberal arts undertaking, but the hope is that cyberprofs are 
particularly game to experiment with this stuff and provide critical 
mass.  The project has been funded by and hosted at Harvard Law so far -- 
with some help from MIT -- but it's in no way proprietary.  Help at all 
levels is eagerly sought, and, by way of bottom line -- please feel free to 
write to me off-list if you'd like to experiment with the system, set up a 
course shell for it, and contemplate using it for your next (or current) 
teaching undertaking.

Jonathan



Jon Zittrain
http://www.jz.org
zittrain@law.harvard.edu