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Simulations and the need for best practices

My third and last post (for now) on simulations, focusing on the need to identify best practices as a prerequisite for simulation teaching, at Law School Innovation.

2007 04 20 pedagogy: Legal Comments Off on Simulations and the need for best practices Permalink

E-Discovery hits the White House?

A little off-topic here, but I find it amusing how e-discovery is quite possibly about to hit Gonzalez et.al. Applied to private corporations, e-discovery is a major and expensive undertaking, and has repeatedly revealed embarrassing information about the seamy (or, perhaps, quite normal) underside of corporate life, but when leveled against the government, and the President no less, it suddenly raises issues of governmental transparency. An employee’s emails belong to her employer, so in what way does Gonzalez’s email belong to us? Must it belong to us, as Congressman Waxman seems to be suggesting?

Also mentioned in the NY Times coverage is a former email rentention policy of 30 days (far, far short of the 5 years required of SEC-regulated firms), which apparently was rescinded in favor of manual deletion. Besides the issues raised by the present controversy, what will policies like this do to future Presidential libraries and historians? We fret about our possible future inability to decode our own media, but what about even having any data at all?

I was particularly impressed and amused by Senator Leahy’s comment, quoted in the Globe, “You can’t erase e-mails, not today; they’ve gone through too many servers.” I like a politician who can talk technology.

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2007 04 13 Internet & Society
technology: Legal Comments (1) Permalink

Lawyers in the digital age

The letter was published after all, with fewer edits than it deserved (the last sentence, in particular, made no sense because of a last-minute edit I made). Link to Globe letters (it’s the 3rd one).

2007 04 01 pedagogy: Legal Comments Off on Lawyers in the digital age Permalink

More on new skills, new learning

My white paper picked up a small mention on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Wired Campus” blog, summarized as “Lawyers want technology training” (which ain’t quite right, but the writeup is better). Also, the Globe called and, with luck, the letter might be run sometime this weekend.

2007 03 30 pedagogy: Legal Comments Off on More on new skills, new learning Permalink

Digital doctoring

Right on the heels of my white paper, the Dean of Harvard Medical School publishes an op-ed in today’s Globe makes essentially the same argument as the paper, only more succinctly, coherently, and compellingly. As the pull-quote summarizes: “The revolution in medical technology requires a revolution in training.” From a general view, law and medicine (and their respective professional schools) share a lot in common.

Here’s a letter I sent to the Globe responding to this excellent and timely piece:

Joseph Martin raises the same concerns that lawyers have about the growing role of computers in our work (“Digital Doctoring,” Op-Ed, March 29). “Rip it out” is how many law professors react to laptops in the classroom. No surprise, then, that a recent study I authored found that law students and lawyers have scarce opportunity to learn new skills like how to manage complex global teams using technology.

As in medicine, the cost of ignoring technology is high. In a nation where fewer than 4 in 10 middle-class Americans facing legal problems have access to an attorney (3 in 10 for low-income individuals), technology can enable lawyers to meet the need by working smarter. For example, software developed at Chicago-Kent Law School helps clients fill out paperwork by translating legalese into plain English. Attorneys need more tools like this – and the skill to use them.

It’s easy to assume that “digital natives” will figure it all out with time. But best practice emerges when someone bothers to study what works – a role that medical schools have long played for doctors. Law schools today have a similar opportunity to partner with practicing attorneys to discover digital responses to the ancient call of justice.

As always, the challenge of keeping under 200 words pushes the question of what’s really at stake. To me it really is about addressing unmet legal needs through better leverage of scarce resources (aka lawyers).

2007 03 29 education: Professional Comments (1) Permalink

Legal Education + Technology

My whitepaper, New Skills, New Learning: Legal Education and the Promise of Technology is out, and I hope it hits some true notes despite its cursory nature. I’ve got a pretty succinct summary of it over on LSI. As an experiment, I’m also setting up a wiki version of the report that allows readers to correct, update, or extend the findings/conclusions/recommendations.

I would especially like to thank both the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and LexisNexis for sponsoring this important research.

This F Minus strip from Feb 24 rather sums up the general sentiment of the paper. (It’s a great strip for those of you who follow the funnies).

2007 03 27 pedagogy: Legal Comments (2) Permalink

(software) code is (administrative) code

My first job out of law school was helping the Massachusetts legal aid program set up a knowledge management website. As one of the technically-knowledgable employees of Mass. Law Reform Institute, a statewide poverty law organization, I found myself in many conversations with MLRI attorneys about various technology-related issues. Many of these involved problems with a computer system called Beacon used by the Department of Transitional Assistance (a/k/a “welfare”) to distribute various benefits to Massachusetts residents.

Code-1.JPG
In the Matrix, Code is Law

I began seeing the very mundane, but vitally important, ways in which software is increasingly becoming the mechanism whereby government executes laws. Lessig’s profound observation, Code is Law, has a corollary: law is code. That is to say, software code is one way in which laws enter our daily lives.

In every state I’ve surveyed, it is software that calculates the amount of money that a family receives in food stamps. But code is everywhere: the controversy over voting machines’ source code is another, highly-publicized, example of this idea.

If software code really is an embodiment of our laws, then I argue that the same principles, procedures, and safeguards that apply to the promulgation of (administrative) code should also apply to the implementation of (software) code. That is to say, the concepts of administrative law — and specifically, rulemaking — should guide how governmental software becomes, effectively, law.

Code-2.JPG
The Matrix, infiltrating the Real World.

I was privileged to give a short talk on this idea last Tuesday at the monthly Cyberscholars meeting here at Harvard; here is the PowerPoint. I’ll be adding a few more posts in the future about some of the specific ideas and cases in that presentation, as well as some of the very helpful feedback I’ve received.

2007 03 02 Code / Code Comments (1) Permalink

“Legal anthropology” in virtual worlds

About a week ago, Prof. Pete Fitzgerald of Stetson Law School dropped me a line inquiring about using Second Life to offer his first-year Contracts students to engage in what I might dub “legal anthropology.” The fact that Linden Labs was now processing millions of dollars of transactions caught Pete’s eye, and he realized that with all of these transactions occurring, surely there was a legal property/contracts regime emerging before our eyes. (Indeed there is, and denizens of Terra Nova would probably have some insight into that).

Briefly, Pete hopes to set up a “clinical” of sorts, allowing Second Life residents with contract-related issues or disputes to ask his students questions. (The students, of course, would not be offering “legal advice,” but I would leave the specifics of how that would work to legal ethicists to parse through). The purpose would be less about giving students an opportunity to practice and more to help them experience law as a malleable, organic, socially-constructed system.

If a virtual world is good for anything pedagogical, it would be to offer students an immersive experience, whether “real” (in the sense that real people would bring real problems) or simulated (scripted or otherwise pre-planned). I am hopeful that State of Play Academy would offer similar opportunities for exploration. In the context of legal education, being able to see and experience alternative legal regimes (Second Life, while governed by a EULA and California law, also presents a separate jurisdiction with its own rules and customs) can help students better understand law as a whole.

Our correspondence, which Pete graciously agreed to let me post to this blog, after the jump.

(My email to Pete, responding to his initial query, follows.)
Continue reading ›

2007 01 17 pedagogy: Legal
pedagogy: MUVE
platform: Second Life
project: State of Play Academy Comments Off on “Legal anthropology” in virtual worlds Permalink

Legal Ed in a Networked World: recordings and notes

As promised, we’ve made video of our event last Thursday, Legal Education in a Networked World, available on video. There’s a fun section right in the middle where we switch briefly over to Second Life and the panelists see how they’re being projected into cyberspace (screenshot below).

Forum video screenshot

To get a full sense of what was going on among the audience, I also recommend checking out the Question Tool where participants posted questions. Version 1.0 – no voting; Version 2.0 (choose LegalEducation2006) voting fixed.

The panel covered quite a bit in the span of a mere 90 minutes. I’ve got my own MP3 recordings and notes after the jump.
Continue reading ›

2006 12 10 pedagogy: Legal Comments (4) Permalink

When do online/computer simulations add the most value?

The ideas presented at the State of Play session on education this past Saturday triggered a realization that online/computer simulations add the most value as compared with traditional teaching methods when:

  1. The subject is best learned through role-playing
  2. The subject must be modeled using complex data and formulae
  3. The subject is amenable to learning through exploration

On top of this, using online simulation adds value when the participants are geographically dispersed, as in any distance situation. (Or perhaps it is better to say that putting the simulation online reduces the loss imposed when the participants are dispersed).

Why? Some thoughts:

  1. An online simulation, especially in a virtual world, almost automatically puts the participant in role. Without leveraging that possibility, the simulation becomes a “spreadsheet game” (see next point). I may be defining “role-playing” somewhat loosely here; for example, the classic prisoner’s dilemma game, which would benefit wonderfully from being online, is very marginally a “roleplay.”
  2. Without the need for an underlying data model (the “spreadsheet” part of a “spreadsheet game”), it’s debatable whether the simulation couldn’t be more easily and cheaply deployed as a face-to-face roleplay (assuming geography is no problem). For example, interviewing and counseling can be taught fairly effectively over telephone, and inserting a computer as mediator could seriously detract rather than add to the simulation’s versimilitude.
  3. GTA Vice CityThis perhaps delves most deeply into the nature of both games and constructivist learning. It seems that the key value of a simulation/game is the ability for the participant to make meaningful choices — that is, to explore. A simulation or game that has only one right path is not really a simulation but rather a disguised lecture or multiple-choice exam. The need to build in human agency into a computerized simulation is an incredibly difficult skill / artform. (It is this element that made Grand Theft Auto such a hit — not, in my opinion, its glorification of violence). The element of participant agency also fits in wonderfully with our current notion of constructivist learning.

(Also note that I’ve posted an MP3 recorded during the State of Play session to my prior, stream-of-text post).

2006 12 05 pedagogy: MUVE Comments (5) Permalink