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Harvard Releases Courseware
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posted by mpawlo
on Tuesday March 25, @03:04PM
from the open-course dept.
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Would you be interested in exploring software developed at Harvard Law School for two years with a 1 million USD investment? This is your shot. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society releases the H20 software. The software has been tested at the law school, but should be suitable for other disciplines than law.
Please find below professor Jonathan Zittrain's message to the Cyberprof list where he tells the story of the software and its development.
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Subject: Teaching cyberlaw with cyberspace
From: Jonathan Zittrain
To: cyberprof_list
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
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