Collaboration Tools

I am attending a Boston area Ed Tech group that meets periodically to share ideas around instructional technology in higher in education. Today, we are discussing real time collaboration technology.

The first speaker (Peter Hess, MIT) is discussing different Web conferencing software. The first technology, Yugma, wasn’t working well (due to network issues) so we skipped it. It is a free web conferencing technology so feel free to check that out at a later time. We are looking at ooVoo, a free online video chat and video conferencing.

The free version provides:

• 3-way live video chats
• Unlimited 1-minute video messages
• Share and send files up to 25MB each
• Video effects

Moving on to Vidyo, we have another Web conferencing software to demonstrate. This company is the first to take advantage of the most recent enhancement to the H.264 standard for video compression.

People in the meeting are now introducing themselves and discussing what they are doing with Web conferening efforts at their own school. We hear people are using WebEx, Elluminate, Adobe Connect, Radvision, Wimba, and Saba Centra.   Many are still in an evaluation stage and some mention they aren’t satisfied with the results (e.g., performance issues).  People are using Web conferencing for faculty consultations with students, conferencing, meetings, online video technologies for the library and distance learning.

Phil Knutell from Bentley is talking about their 17M library renovation. You can see his slides from the Nercomp Web site. View some of the new rooms on the Bentley Web site. People in his class are required to do presentations. Students are required to give feedback to people about their presentation via the class Wiki (located on Blackboard). Peer evaluation is done using survey tool in Google spreadsheets. He states it is simpler to use than Perseus SurveySolutions or SurveyMonkey. He also creates a syllabus in Google docs means he does not have to upload or download the file. He simply inserts links to published doc from the course Bb site.

• Hybrid class support team:
  • Got tired of tracking versions/revisions & not being able to edit if checked out
  • Wanted public URL on web server so TAs could view, but uploading to web server or using SharePoint a hassle
  • Inviting collaborators, assigning permissions, & learning to use very easy (95% of most-used Office 2007 features)
• Library wiki and blog allow entire staff to contribute

Daniel Jamous from FAS asks about student privacy issues. Phil states it can become an issue if you let it become an issue. Google states they are a higher education focused server. Yes, the student information is stored on their server but they state they don’t have any interest in accessing it.  For K-12 and higher ed, google applications is free. Are their FERPA issues? Possibly. He is impressed with the company’s commitment to privacy.

Filed under: Educational Technology, General, Instructional Technology

CALI 2008: Using Animation in Class-Bring your Hypos to Life

Marjorie A. McDiarmid, Professor of Law @ West Virginia University College of Law

Teach about 125 students Evidence in Fall. Students have difficulty thinking of applying how Evidence works in practice. It is like learning how to play chess without ever seeing the chess board. She uses turning point technology to group responses based upon the original decision to sustain or overrule. You can see if people made a mistake on the first question whether that mistake carries forward. What we are doing is giving people a slice of a courtroom example. In her view, she doesn’t need a complicated 10 or 15 role play to get to the point where she can get to with this technology.  The other pro is that you can put something like this together in 15 minutes. It is much more labor intensive to build a role play. The advantages of using this methodology, is that it is more attention getting and in some fundamental way, more concrete. The students are seeing how those questions get asked in a courtroom setting and she can teach the students the skill of how to hear it. It has to involve not only training of the mind, but absorption of the materials as they come and reaction time. 

Vox Proxy is the software she uses to create the animation within PowerPoint (see a demo PPT here). The high price is around $200, but there is educational pricing that is much less. There is also a thirty day free trial. Vox Proxy does not work on a MAC. She did a quick demo of how you can add characters, movement and dialog to the simulation.  If you are looking for something a little more advanced, I did a quick search and found someone who stated Antics is like “Vox Proxy on steroids”. She feels the animation makes concrete the situations that students may have trouble visualizing. Then, she can get the audience engaged when she employs the TurningPoint technology.

Filed under: General

CALI ‘08: Case Corpus, Free Case Law, OAI and the Kitchen Sink

Elmer Robert Masters, Director of “Internet Fun” or Internet Development for CALI, emasters@cali.org

Presentation slides

So what can I do with 710,000 cases?

http://public.resource.org :

 

• Cases and more
• Open for anyone to use

 

You can get GPO, patent, trademark, etc., at this Web site. It is a snapshot of opinions, but they are not committed to keeping it up to date (they are thinking about it though). It answered a threshold question…whenever we have ever wanted to do something with case law, where are we going to get all that case law. That was really a hard question to answer. We were left having to buy them but they were poorly marked up.

CaseCorpus: http://casecorpus.org/949/F.2d/1241

If you look at these in Firefox you will get a better visual.

LII

Thomas Bruce

Does the wisdom of crowds work for law? Who’s really authoritative with regards to tagging?

Open access to law isn’t new. As a concept it goes back to Edward cook in 1628. What cook was talking about an intellectual access issue. It was in French and most couldn’t ready it. In 1780 Bentham was in favor of public access to law. There were all sorts of people thinking about this topic. Open access isn’t new as an Internet activity either (e.g., Hermes Freenet/LII).

There are three points that legal OA architecture must consider. For 90% of the audience, case law isn’t the main point, the audience isn’t the same and they do not do comprehensive research like it is taught in law school.

OFFICIAL BODIES

Who’s in the new legal infospehere? In the research community we have engineers, business schools, political scientists, computer scientists, information scientists and law schools. Who is online running Web sites? All federal courts (per the e-Gov act of 200, state courts (highest appellate courts now completely online, lower levels are lagging behind), legislatures were always ahead of the pack, agencies riding the e-government wave (the DMV model, Intragovernmental business processes, meaningful dialog with public less common, but there). Overall, none of these legal information blogs are entirely distinct from one another anymore and different audiences start in different places.

A WIDE VARIETY OF NEW ARRIVALS

Many more LIIs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldLII), advocacy organizations (public.resource.org, OMB watch, sunlight foundation), new academic players and Law-sort-coms (Justia, FastCase).

THESE NEW ENTRANTS ARE ALL DIFFERENT BIRDS

Differently motivated, decentralized, administratively independent, differently funded, operating in a wide variety of national settings. Everyone’s situation is very different and thus taking different approaches.

There is a need for standards and interoperability. We need some set of agreements about a set of meta-data. It must be standardized to a degree and sensitive to cost factors.  Metadata is cheap and Classificactory metadata is pricey. Language technologies will help with this. We need to find a way of finding out what’s where. We need a way of linking to newly available resources online from legacy documents and via familiar namespaces/citations. We need some sustainable funding models. The set that exist is extremely diverse.

Things that are not essential exist too. We don’t need everything under one roof. We also don’t need standardized case markup. On the other hand, XSLT answers most needs and some regional standards are emerging in Africa and Europe.

Demonstrations

OAI4Courts guided tour: http://oai4courts.wikispaces.com/OAI4Courts+guided+tour

OAI based repositories should answer who I am, what have you got and how is your repository organized. OAI provides for sets

 

Filed under: General

CALI ‘08 Plenary: Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau

Ken Martin sums up this plenary well on his blog.

 

Filed under: General

Joining Deliberate Practice Methods with Technology to Advance Legal Skills

Professor Larry Farmer, Brigham Young University, J. Reuben Clark Law School

Professor Clark uses deliberate practice to master a skill set. Typically this involves a component of a larger skill set, precisely defines the task, selects level of difficulty and prepares to practice the task. Practicing the task requires concentration, is not inherently enjoyable, organized and systemic. Reflective analysis of the practice experience (e.g.,informative feedback, performer evaluation, identification of errors, monitor improvement and goals) helps one to figure out what was wrong, modify and then repeat the process.

What are the challenges transferring this to legal education? 

• dissecting the skill set
• articulating a set of well-defined tasks that leads from sub-skill learning to a functional, integrated skill set
• motivate effective participation
• providing enough practice experiences
• cost effective performance evaluation
• timely expert feedback

In the end, he found he needed to rely heavily on technological resources that he could bring to the class and the students to facilitate the discussion. He used a video capturing device to record reflections of students. Then, he used MediaNotes for evaluation/feedback. Finally, he used a SharePoint site for the distribution of video and project files.

He states that if you are going to get a lot of recording done, you are going to have to do it in the classroom. It has changed the class configuration for him. There is an attendance requirement. What is done in class does not follow the traditional format. At the beginning, there is a one hour training but from then on students are required to be self-sufficient. Students pair up and work for the whole hour on interviewing and practice skills. He stresses you need to use noise-canceling lapel microphones, web camera and headsets.

It can be challenging to overcome technical hurdles and competing noise since there is simultaneous recording. The task of evaluating video is also challenging.  Managing the real time demands of video review, mastering the mechanics, guiding the evaluation process and preserving context while focusing on specific events can be difficult.

Each student becomes a standardized client. They retain the role throughout the semester. They are assigned to work with specific roles. The students come to the Sharepoint site where they can go to prepare themselves to do the exercise. They pick up the exercise files (e.g., gives graphic of what they should accomplish, what issues they need to attend to [skill they need to demonstrate]) and it takes about two hours of preparation. They spend another hour performing and then another hour evaluating.

Former students who have performed well are now in practice. They can become reviewers to 4 or 5 students to provide feedback on exercise evaluations and as virtual tutors and mentors. Sharepoint automatically notifies reviewers. The reviewers can catch mistakes, give them feedback and mentor students over time. Because this is all done digitally, it makes the location of the reviewers irrelevant. It makes it scalable.

In summary, this kind of setup helps promote scaleable skills instruction, avoids instructor burn out, connects practitioner experience and law school instruction in a mutually beneficial way, reviewers provide new ideas and feedback, closer to the coaching experience and TAs can be trained to be reviewers/mentors after entering practice.

Filed under: General , CALI

Voices of American Law Project: CALI 08

Wayne Miller, Director of Educational Technologies, Duke University School of Law

This project began in 2002 and got funding from various sources (e.g., Center for Instructional Technology, Educational Technologies Group, grant from Duke for Instructional Projects). It was done almost completely “in-house”. Trying to figure out how to make the project is sustainable.

http://www.voicesofamericanlaw.org/

The Web environment provides faculty with a way to moderate what is shown or not on the voicesofamericanlaw site. The DVD offered a number of pluses for the project (e.g., available for sale, easy controllable distribution model, fair amount of upfront investment in duplication)

Alex Anderson, Video Production Specialist, Duke University School of Law

Preproduction: select a case, 2 student compile info for review, make initial contacts & acquire permissions. Sometimes making travel arrangements is involved with the process. Usually they can shoot about three individuals per day.

Production: 2-4 individuals will take a camera case, tripod case, light kit and large flight case. Lighting setup includes back light, interview subject, key light and fill light (chimera). The key light is about 45 degrees over. Videotaping the producer asks questions and you need to make sure you written permissions. Shoot B roll of the person being interviewed, of locations and of anything else that might add visual interest.

Post Production: Review, import, create rough cut and add finishing touches. Then, they duplicate tapes into DVD with time codes, transcribe from DVDs and producers review and make initial cut decisions. Import tape assets into editing system (final cut), gather additional still images, newsreel, etc. and import. Producers make initial cut and then do narration scripting. The final touches are added with music, slates and names. Final videos are created and then DVD, Real and Flash versions are encoded.

Filed under: General

CALI 2008 Keynote: Paul Maharg

Conference for Law School Computing:Transforming Legal Education

Paul is a professor from the Glasgow Graduate School of Law who wrote a book called “Transforming Legal Education”.  

Here are the main points of his talk:

1. Summary of Themes of Transforming Legal Education, 
2. Signature Pedagogy, 
3. Transactional Learning , 
4. SIMPLE, 
5. Into the Future.

How can use simulation in teaching and learning the law? He jokes that his own legal education was a mix of boredom and terror.  

E.L. Thorndike and John Dewey both were on the progressive wing of education in the 1920s. There were striking differences in their approaches. One was a psychologist (Thorndike) and the other was a philosopher and educationalist (Dewey). One emphasized teaching strategies (Thorndike) and the other emphasized learning ecologies (Dewey). The classroom in 1908 was teacher dominated and situated in a classroom. However, active learning is much preferred by most when asked which kind of learning is preferred.

Four key themes of TLE: Experience, Ethics, Technology and Collaboration (elective affinities) are the four key themes of transforming legal education. Participants need to share content and method. Transactional learning is a specific form of problem based learning. There are seven distinguishing elements: active learning, performance, reflection, collaborative learning, process learning, relevant professional assessment and ethical standards. 

Signature pedagogies: surface structure (observable, behavioral features), tacit structure (values and dispositions that the behavior implicitly models), deep structure (underlying intentions, rationale or theory that the behavior models) and shadow structure (absent pedagogy that is or is only weakly engaged).

Are we using technology just because it is there or someone else has said we should use it? Simulations are close to the world of practice, but safe from the realities of malpractice and negligent representation. They enable students to practice legal transactions and facilitate a wide variety of assessment.

What is SIMPLE?  SIMulated Professional Learning Environment. It is a Web 2.0 technology that allows to students to experience the practical application of law. It is a two year funded project that enabled staff and students to manage the educational and organizational issues that arise from the implementation of  a legal transaction.

Simulation-personal injury negotiation project: Divide students into four firms. On the left of the web site you have staff tools (e.g., events, staff resources, manage, simulation) , and folders (e.g., received, sent, drafts, notes to file, templates, minutes of meetings). Students co-opted to community-police plagiarism. Students carry out authentic client based work. ICT is used to create multiple versions of tasks via document variables and support for tasks. Students take responsibility for their transaction activities. The grade is given to the firm NOT individual students and that promotes collective ownership of the task.

For the future, the aims are to be collaborative (staff, students, different institutions), be international (enabling students to work with others around the world), work through bodies such as the Global Alliance for Justice Education, integrate with other forms of simulation (e.g., standardized clients) and organize like Mozilla. They wold like to develop more teaching, learning and assessment templates (including curriculum guidelines), provide tools to create a more sophisticated map and directory for a virtual town, enable more variety of comms media between students and simulated characters/staff, offer more sophisticated monitoring and mentoring functions, evaluate student and staff experiences in using the simulation environment and design more functionality (eg. voice, 3D, etc).

Blog: http://zeugma.typepad.com,

Book: http://www.transforming.org.uk/

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/paulmaharg,

SIMPLE: http://tinyurl.com/2mqdhw,

SIMPLE Foundation: http://simplecommunity.org

Filed under: General , CALI