About CyberOne

Thoughts on the deposition:

The story of the deposition really began the previous day at the status hearing. The hearing was a success for us: the judge set an early trial date of December 1 against the wishes of Plaintiffs’ counsel. After the hearing, Plaintiff’s supervising attorney informed Prof. Nesson that he could only bring 2 students along with him to the deposition because they could not find a conference room large enough to accommodate more. She said it was absolutely impossible to get a larger room. I mentioned that the students won’t mind squeezing a bit, but she said “no, we can’t crowd the court reporter.” Notably, Plaintiffs’ deposition team would include 3, and at times 4, attorneys; apparently they were unwilling to afford Joel the same-sized team. In any event, Prof. Nesson and Plaintiff’s supervising attorney engaged in back and forth about this, until Prof. Nesson stated quite matter-of-factly “We are bringing 3.”

As a side note, Joel asked on the day of the hearing whether he needed to dress in a particular way for the deposition. Prof. Nesson said that ordinary clothes would be fine. Joel decided then and there that he would wear a Boston Red Sox t-shirt. It was meant to be his own small dig at Plaintiffs’ counsel: they were from Denver, and Joel was thinking about the Red Sox defeat over the Rockies in a recent World Series.

Our team met briefly the morning of the deposition. As promised, Joel was in his red sox t-shirt. Prof. Nesson’s chief advise to Joel was to be a “warrior:” You have your story, and you calmly and coolly state that story; you stay calm and focused at all times; you do not let them antagonize you or rush you or take you off your rhythm; you answer their questions with as few words as possible and by telling your story; nothing more; nothing less.

We arrived at local-counsel’s law offices and were shown to the conference room. I was expecting something small and cramped. The conference room was large enough to comfortably fit over a dozen people. The plaintiffs’ lawyers at the deposition were: the case’s supervising attorney; a junior attorney; and plaintiffs’ in-house counsel.

The supervising attorney took the deposition. Joel was apparently trying to really get into his “warrior” persona – he put on sun-glasses, maybe to keep them from seeing the whites of his eyes? She immediately began by asking Joel a litany of questions about how Prof. Nesson became involved in the case. For each question, Prof. Nesson asserted attorney-client privilege. This happened for about a dozen questions; each time, plaintiffs asked Joel a question, he said “I’ve been instructed not to answer,” plaintiff asked Prof. Nesson if he was instructing Joel not to answer, and Prof. Nesson said “yes.” It was all quite repetitive, until Plaintiffs began asking about whether Joel reviewed documents with Prof. Nesson. Unsuprisingly, Prof. Nesson asserted privilege. In-house counsel asked to go off the record.

The in-house counsel stated that the questions they were asking were completely ordinary and routine, they are not subject to privilege, and he has never been in a deposition where privilege was asserted. He explained that the contents of the documents may be privileged, but not a description of the nature of the documents; parties are required to produce “privilege logs” all the time. He then implied that Prof. Nesson was out of touch with current legal practice because he was a professor and doesn’t take many depositions these days. Prof. Nesson responded by commenting on the bullying nature of the litigation: the record companies are inappropriately using bullying tactics against the public in general, and have been unnecessarily harsh in their dealings with Joel in particular. The in-house counsel replied by saying that he has quite different views on the matter: many people get laid-off every year because of lost sales due to file-sharing and that is who he was fighting for. With regards to Joel’s case, he stated that Plaintiffs have been extremely generous with him and have afforded him many courtesies because he was pro se. He noted that Joel was the one being unduly harsh when he filed two separate motions for sanctions. As evidence of Joel’s supposed disrespect, he pointed out: “Here is a kid who shows up in our office wearing a Red Sox T-shirt and sun glasses!” The decision was made to save that conversation for another day and continue the deposition.

Eventually, the line of questioning went towards inquiries about other people who used or may have used Joel’s Kazaa account on the family computer. One by one, Joel listed off family and friends who used the computer over the years and explained why he thinks they may have used Kazaa (e.g., “they are music fans;” “they burn CDs;” “they download things”). The questioning for each such person took about 15 minutes or more. After 4 of these iterations, I had to leave to get to my clinical. I’m very curious about what else happened and how the deposition ended.

We have an idea and a project this week in class. The idea is empathic argument, the project is podcasting. My father returned to the idea of empathic argument in Monday’s lecture to try to make it a bit more concrete. And he certainly did that with his main example: the battle rap scene from 8 Mile. He argued to our students that Eminem made a masterful empathic argument in that scene. How did he do it? He started off his argument by clearly and fairly stating the case for his opposition in a way that even his opposition wouldn’t disagree with. He says, with much obscenity that I’ll leave out, “Yes I live in a trailer park. Yes I’m white. Yes he slept with my girlfriend. etc. etc. But I’m still standing her in front of you, still being a good rapper.” And then he goes on to make his argument for why his opponent is not good. By doing this, he leaves his opponent without anything to throw back at him. There is nothing his opponent can say that he hasn’t already said.

So how does this demonstrate empathic argument? The idea is that if you want to persuade someone of something, you first have to make them understand that you understand their point of view. And you can do that by stating the facts of the situation and the issues at stake in the dispute in a way that they can agree with. Once you’ve done that, you can argue against their point of view from a common ground of understanding of the dispute.

We went on, in Tuesday’s class, to put this idea into practice by having 4 very brave students volunteer to make their own empathic arguments about the projects that they’ve chosen to do for the class. They did this in 2 and half minute oral statements that we recorded and put up as podcasts. I won’t link to them now because we’ve given all the students a week to produce a 2 and a half minute podcast that empathically argues their positions and these 4 students, like the rest, may wish to put some finishing touches on their work from class today. If you are looking for some discussion of empathic argument or a really good tutorial on how to make a podcast yourself, check out the lecture.

Tonight in office hours in SL we did it again. This time we did it live by role playing various arguments where students, Gene and I wrestled with what empathic argument is and how to do it effectively. The transcript of tonights office hours is available here.

We’re trying to demonstrate that we can offer a Harvard course that is integrated for multiple audiences, including an unenrolled audience of at-large participants, without diluting the experience of the enrolled students or the brand of Harvard. Well, we’re doing pretty well by our students I think, but so far we’ve been managing it because of a huge amount of (very rewarding) time spent on the course by the teaching staff and a lot of good-natured flexibility from the participants. One casualty of the time I’ve been putting into the course has been this blog. But I recently received some very good advice from an experienced blogger: post often, even if the posts are short–it is good to have a big thoughtful post from time to time but the pressure to do that all that time will result in a long hiatus of the sort I’ve been taking.

The time I’ve been spending on this course has been going into all sorts of things, among them the attempt to support the at-large participant community and encourage some grassroots organization to emerge from within it. Since the idea of at-large participation in the course is supposed to be scalable, we are trying to avoid actually managing the at-large participants ourselves. Instead, we’re hoping to help some leaders emerge from that community to help organize group projects and enrich the class experience with interaction between participants. In spite of the many challenges, it is happening. Here’s a few bullets to give you a quick idea of what’s happening:

* Over 100 people have joined the mailing list for at-large participants.
* At least two at-large participant groups have formed in Second Life consisting of at-large participants who want to help organize the at-large participants. (CyberOne Open Access is the one to join if you want to help!)
* At-Large participants have organized a home page for themselves on the wiki to try to organize their own group projects.
* These projects include a substantial group of students working to post-edit the course videos into better video productions, a wiki exploring the nature of identity, a Second Life installation promoting environmentally friendly practices at Universities, and more.
* At-Large participants have been gathering at office hours and a separately scheduled Sunday meeting time in SL. You can see some transcripts of the SL meetings on the At-Large Participant home page.
* Berkman Island is a lively place in the evenings these days because of the wonderful spirit that the students bring to the island. At the top of this blog is a picture of me and Gene with 3 students. The two at-large participants, Chinadoll and Teresa, and I are wearing dragon t-shirts modeled on the t-shirt my father wears in our trailer video. They created this t-shirt for us. Yvette, the Extension School student who has become quite a clothing designer since she joined SL for this class, is wearing a Harvard t-shirt and produced the little penguin that is following the big penguin (Gene) around. It’s a great place to hang out. Come join us!

“I come from Colombia where we produce all these drugs that you don’t take, so for me what happens in Second Life [and World of Warcraft] where people kill each other at funerals seems more real in many ways than Harvard where everything is so nice and so beautiful. The sense of reality is so subjective in so many ways.”

That is a direct quote of the final comment from the in-person class today, from Nieman Fellow Juanita. If that doesn’t make you want to see the lecture for yourself, nothing will. Speaking seriously, today’s class was the best class we’ve had so far. Led by guests Gene Koo and Rodica Buzescu/Ansible Berkman, we had a fantastic discussion of all kinds of issues involving virtual worlds (immigration, law, (sur)-reality, governance) with colorful, insightful, and challenging contributions from many people.

We began class with a video introducting virtual worlds that you can find in the Lecture Videos section of the Week 3 page. (This video was designed by Gene and produced by Dean.) We then went directly to a FABULOUS segment from Rob Cordry and the Daily Show that, in only a few very funny minutes, brings up many of the most challenging and interesting questions about virtual worlds. It is a must see. The lecture itself is available on the Week 3 page too. But I recommend that you watch it using the Democracy player and keep the class notes from the Week Page in another window. If you haven’t checked it out yet, Democracy is an open source video viewer that has a channel especially for us! You can subscribe in 1-click on the side bar on the right side of this page. You’ll get every video from our class in a beautiful presentation. (A law student in our class reported a bug in the player and it has already been fixed–open source at its best!) I also recommend perusing the great contextual material on the rest of the Week 3 page, put together by a strong group of law students.

— Rebecca Nesson

In today’s class my father discussed the role of emotion in our perception. We began with a simple presentation of an idea from the psychologist Gibson: we remember the things that provoke us very well but we don’t remember the things we do to provoke others. What’s more, we feel that the provocations to us are more serious than our provocations and shots in return. The result is a cycle of escalation. Why is this so? According to my father’s analysis, it is because we react first in an emotional way and then take the combination of our emotional reaction and the original stimulus to our brains for cognitive response.

He brought it home to all of us with a vivid and painful example: the Rodney King beating. We watched the video with which we were already all too familiar. I, and I suspect basically everyone else, had a strong emotional reaction to the video. The beating was brutal. King was on the ground and the beating continued. We then watched pieces of a documentary produced by CourtTV about the case. The documentary takes the case and re-presents it from a point of view that makes it somewhat easier to understand the point of view of the police officers. The main points that are used to convince us are that there is action that precedes the clip of video that we’ve all seen that shows King’s aggressive behavior to the officers, that the officers were consistently telling him to get on the ground with his hands behind his back, and that they only continued to hit him when he started to move to get up rather than to lie down so he could be cuffed. We ran out of time in class today before we had a chance to process what we had seen. So what was the lesson? Was I supposed to be able to overcome my emotional reaction to see the police officers’ perspectives? This I could not do. I could see the point of view of the police officers that was presented at trial, but I could not truly be moved from my initial emotional reaction or from my conviction of the rightness of my cognitive assessment: excessive force was used. But maybe this was the point. I’m still feeling the emotion from watching the video now.

— Rebecca Nesson

Last night we had our first official class in Second Life. The 40 students enrolled in our class came to Berkman Island in two groups, half at 9pm and half at 10pm. When they arrived on the island they gathered in the outdoor meeting space in front of Austin Hall. We further split them into two groups and Gene took one group into Austin Hall and I took the other over to our Library. (By the way, our library is quite an amazing construction by Ansible. At our library you can view the videos of each of the lectures as well as all of our assignments!) After making sure that we all knew how to sit down and stand up, we started a simple introductory activity. I would say something like “Stand up if you became a resident of Second Life for this class” and they would stand if it was true for them and sit otherwise. A simple exercise, but with great results. Here’s an except of the conversation in our first group that says it better than I ever could:

[18:23] You: stand up if you’ve ever edited an entry on wikipedia.
[18:24] You: That’s a lot of you!
[18:24] You: great!
[18:24] You: stand up if you don’t think of yourself as a techie
[18:24] You: how about this one:
[18:24] Yvette Kumsung: that’s a hard one
[18:24] You: yeah, for me too.
[18:25] You: how about this one:
[18:25] You: stand up if you think this is real.
[18:25] Yoyo Mah: What’s real??
[18:25] USA Brody: In a limited manner this is real
[18:25] stylefeeder Newbold: still pondering that one
[18:25] Yvette Kumsung: hey, no standing up on second thought!
[18:25] Constanza Corleone: this time I stood up out of convinction and not for error
[18:25] You: this one sparked a lot of discussion!
[18:25] Hollywood Muldoon: it is as real as we are making it
[18:25] You: it is a very difficult question.
[18:25] USA Brody: Because if you fell from a cloud in life, you would more than likely die… 🙂
[18:26] You: sure, we’re all just watching screens.
[18:26] Yvette Kumsung: Of course it’s real, I’m talking and I’m real
[18:26] stylefeeder Newbold: USA, I’ve sky dived and fell through a cloud. Still alive 🙂
[18:26] You: in real life we all know how to stand up and sit down.
[18:26] You: but we are all real people having a real discussion.
[18:26] USA Brody: yes
(At this point USA Brody flies into the air to a great height and crashes to the ground. He is unharmed.)
[18:26] Yoyo Mah: lol
[18:26] USA Brody: yes
[18:26] Constanza Corleone: think of this.. as we get conectted daily on msn or Skype we feel it real
[18:26] USA Brody: this is a real medium
[18:26] Yvette Kumsung: It’s like a video teleconference only with avatars
[18:26] Yoyo Mah: I don’t think it’s more real than say a text chat room.
[18:27] Constanza Corleone: some people dont even write letters to each other,, just emails
[18:27] Constanza Corleone: some don´t even call each other , they just chat
[18:27] Marty Mehring: Yes, this seems more like IM with smileys than RL
[18:27] stylefeeder Newbold: yoyo, that is interesting in that you don’t consider reality a binary value. real or unreal.
[18:27] You: would you say IM with smileys is real or not?
[18:27] Yvette Kumsung: i think the surreality makes it more real, but not real like in real-life real
[18:27] Frappe Lapointe: but would you be able to see yourself move on IM
[18:27] Constanza Corleone: exactly!!! instead of emoticons but better, becaouse you are actually interacting and getting INTO
[18:27] Constanza Corleone: this
[18:27] Marty Mehring: IM with smileys is a proxy, which I dont feel is real.
[18:28] You: We’ll be exploring this question more this semester
[18:28] Hollywood Muldoon: well, as someone taking other online classes, i feel much more a “part” of the class here
[18:28] Marty Mehring: I would be willing to go as far as its “life like”
[18:28] You: Of course there isn’t an answer.
[18:28] You: But it is worth thinking about what aspects of it make it feel real and what things you think would have to be added to make it more real .
[18:29] USA Brody: hmmmm….

Following the stand up/sit down exercise, we did individual introductions. Each person learned to use the private conversation feature of SL by introducing him/her/itself to a partner. Then the partners introduced each other to the group. This simple exercise really brought home what I think is one of the greatest advantages of Harvard Extension School: the huge diversity of background and experience among the students. We had a journalist in Seoul, a high-school student in Houston, a Canadian professor, a political science student at Harvard, several entrepreneurs at interesting technology companies, and on and on and on.

In the midst of our introductions my father walked into the Harvard Extension School computer lab where I and one Extension School student had come in RL (real life) to participate in class. Although he’s very new to SL, he managed to get to Berkman Island and Ansible brought him to say hello to our group. I took the picture of us below after our group returned to the meeting area in front of Austin Hall. Although my father can sometimes be frustratingly unable to control the technologies he uses, he is brave and he is willing to give it a good try. He will not learn that he is stupid (see his brief comments on this phenomenon in last Tuesday’s lecture video) just because a technology is new and challenging to him. I think I got pretty lucky in the dad department!

When class was finished, Ansible made sure that everyone had received some Linden Dollars from us as well as the instructions for their assignment this week: they will be exploring interesting places in Second Life. Students will

• select from a group of shopping areas where they must go buy something of their own choosing,
• select from a group of popular meeting spots where they can go dancing or to listen to music,
• select from a group of architecturally or environmentally interesting spots to go see some impressive Second Life building and take a “vacation snapshot” of themselves, and
• go to a place or an event of their own choosing.

Do you want to try too? If you don’t have an avatar yet, you can create one for free. Follow our tutorial. You can read the assignment here or in the library on Berkman Island. If you IM Ansible in-world, she will give you a notecard with the whole assignment on it. Buy yourself something awesome!

— Rebecca Nesson

I just finished watching the Tuesday lecture video. It strikes me that these classes are, at least to me, like classical literature pieces. You need re-visit and re-read paragraphs in order to find each time a deeper meaning. The 9/19 lecture was definitely one of those.
“How you deal with being stupid is the key to how you learn”, says Prof. Nesson.

In a world spinning on how fast we think, how fast we react, how fast our business decisions are, Prof. Nesson reminds us that “it’s not how fast you get it, it’s not speed that counts. It’s [about] how deeply you understand…how deeply you come to understand [concepts] and how courageously you come to apply [them] in the situations that you live with in your life”.
On another note, I’m looking forward to the first Extension School meeting in Second Life tonight. This first one will be private in order to allow students to mingle and get comfortable in the environment. Please check out our flickr site for pictures later on and our Google groups page for future open events with Rebecca, Gene, and myself.

-Rodica/Ansible

This week in CyberOne was about self-governance and code. My father’s lecture yesterday was very strong. We began with the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson in particular. At the founding of our country, Jefferson advocated against the idea of intellectual property:

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody…(letter to Isaac McPherson, 1813 as cited in Kock & Peden, 1972).

We spent a few minutes considering this perspective and how it has been in large part erased by the seemingly inexorable progression of our copyright law toward locking up intellectual property in the hands of the rights holders for an indefinite amount of time. What might have once been seen as a healthy public domain is now branded as “theft” and “piracy” by those who have used their corporate power to extend their exclusive rights to forever minus one day.

But the main point of the Jefferson example was not advocacy for the public domain, but to focus us on the insight clarified so well by his words. Ideas are a special kind of thing: I can give my idea to you without losing it myself. Contrast this with, say, a sandwich. If I give you my sandwich, I don’t have it any more. Fast forward to 1995, when John Perry Barlow wrote his prescient and very optimistic article “The Economy of Ideas”. Now not only could one give away an idea without losing it, one could do it easily and at no cost because the idea could be expressed digitally, encoded in 0s and 1s and sent out over a network. By 1998 the college students of the world were happily using Napster to give away their music to any stranger who wanted it and the owners of the rights were helpless to stop it. The wine was out of the bottle and there seemed to be no way to put it back in.

The owners of the rights had two options in front of them: using the law (created to favor them by the strong arm of their money) and the strong arm of the state to bring people into line, or trying to implement some form of self-governance through technological means. If code could be used to allow open and free trade of ideas, perhaps code could be used to lock it back up. We are now in the midst of this battle. Property owners create ever more complex ways of locking up their data and hackers find ways to get around the the protections. Judging by the ease with which people can still gain access to copyrighted materials, neither the traditional legal methods nor the technological methods being employed by the copyright owners are working terribly well. The law is perhaps running a distant second to the technological methods.

In a (cyber-)world in which the coercive powers of the state are largely absent, we are left with the responsibility to govern ourselves. Governance in cyberspace is accomplished by code. Those who write the code, write the laws. So today we turned our attention to learning to write code. We are using a creation coming out of the MIT Media Lab called Scratch. Scratch is a graphical programming language in which you can drag and drop the components of your program, fitting them together like puzzle pieces. It has several huge advantages as a learning language. First, it prevents the most common mistakes by giving clear virtual cues in the shapes of the puzzle pieces. If two pieces of code cannot go together, they cannot fit together. In effect, Scratch enforces laws against type and syntax errors. Second, the language builds in many exciting primitive statements, making it easy to make interesting, engaging programs.

Unfortunately, my presentation of Scratch was not as smooth as I hoped. But the magnetism of Scratch came through and many students are already deep into writing games. Watch the wiki to see some of their creations! Fortunately, it gave an opportunity for some very interesting and open class discussion. Scratch has not yet been publicly released, though it will be released both freely and open-source, probably in February. We were granted permission to use it for this class but not to distribute the software freely. My father suggested that this might be a problem. How can we use a closed software when we’re basing our course on a principle of openness? For the first time, the class broke out of lecture mode and into discussion. Two main ideas were advanced.

First, one student eloquently spoke for his right not to adopt our causes just because he is taking our class. (See this seconding by a fellow student here). He was right to do so. We, as instructors, reserve the right to express our own vision and to use our power as instructors to make arguments in favor of our view. But we don’t expect that our students will adopt our views and we certainly don’t expect that they should be assumed to have done so just by virtue of having enrolled in the class. Our class is strengthened by a diversity of points of view. We expect engagement, participation, and independent thought.

Second, several students advocated for a more flexible view of openness. Openness need not begin before the creator is ready to release a creation. Openness need not be absolute. Openness need not result in the destruction of the concept of authorship. One student stood for the absolute version of openness. For me, I’m still waiting for a more practical answer. How can we incorporate openness into a functioning economy in such a way that people can thrive both in open for-profit enterprises and non-market enterprises.

This long post has been my way of sorting out this week. I wasn’t particularly happy with my own teaching today, but I am happy with where we are going. Legal thinkers writing code. Self-governance will emerge.

— Rebecca Nesson

Last night we held an informal meet-and-greet for Second Life residents (and newbies) who are interested in participating in our course in some capacity. We met at 6pm SL time in the open meeting area in front of Austin Hall on Berkman Island. Ansible had the presence of mind to take some pictures and upload them to our Flickr photostream, so you can see what it looked like. We probably had about 10 avatars there, and me, Ansible and Gene. None of the people who attended were enrolled in the class, but it turned out that quite a few had watched the lecture video from Monday already. They were particularly interested in the three hats riddle, so we decided to go over it and do it together. I posed the riddle and we got three volunteers to act it out, and we all worked it out together. Ansible even made us red and white hats on the fly to use as props! Check them out in the photo above.

It was my first time leading a class-like gathering in Second Life. One thing that worried me before we began the course was how it would be to lead class when people would be typing their comments and responses. It certainly is different than speaking, but I found that it has its advantages. It does take a long time for a person to say something because it has to by typed out. On the other hand, because there is some time when people are typing, many people can “talk at once” without causing confusion because the listeners have the time to read each of their comments and also parse out which conversation threads they pertain to. It also gives a better chance for people to compose their comments carefully and also choose precisely when to add them into the conversation. It will be even better once I gain more facility with gestures so that I can more fluidly use body language.

But what was truly amazing about last night was the genuine enthusiasm for learning among the group. Everyone was there because they were interested, not because they were required to be there, not because they were going to receive some kind of credit or reward. And they wanted to discuss the content of the course and the ideas raised in lecture. Having studied and taught at Harvard for over ten years now, I am all too familiar with students rushing through work, being resistant to engaging in conversation, and balking at spending too much time on a course. It is too easy for us to forget what an amazing privilege we have to be able to study and think about such interesting things. With that in mind, I wasn’t sure whether people really would want to engage in a class just because it interested them, even if it was at Harvard. Last night demonstrated to me that people really do want to, and on a Friday night no less. It is inspiring.

— Rebecca Nesson