The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is an “entrepreneurial nonprofit” whose mission is to “explore and understand cyberspace; to study its development, dynamics, norms, and standards; and to assess the need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.” Basically, they study the relationship between the Internet, law, and society through a number of fascinating initiatives, many of which involve some of the celebrated intellectuals and authors in fellowship at the center. Some of these initiatives involve tools that better enable educators to utilize, and be supported by, online and technology-based platforms. We invited Kendra Albert, research assistant at the Berkman Center and assistant to noted Berkman steward and Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain, to visit with us at Harvard Business Publishing and give an overview of some of the free tools and platforms they’ve developed for education.
Kendra outlined tools that the Berkman Center has developed in conjunction with Harvard Law School’s Library. She reviewed four tools with us from the suite of H20 Classroom Tools: the Question Tool, Rotisserie, Collage, and Playlists.
Question Tool
The Question Tool is designed as a feedback mechanism to be used during live lectures. It is essentially a “back channel” for the ancillary/complementary discussions that take place during a larger presentation. Think of the type of communication that might occur on Twitter during a conference presentation, except these discussions don’t require an account and the tool allows the conversations to thread in a way that’s more directed than Twitter. Plus posts can be anonymous, an important consideration when trying to leverage honest and open communication online. Users can subscribe to questions and responses via RSS feeds and there is an administrative interface where faculty can add questions, reveal answers, and enable voting.
Rotisserie
Rotisserie is a structured forum for online discussion of class content that encourages class members to interact with other students’ ideas. With ‘regular’ forums or discussion boards, a few participants can dominate the discussion and others can ‘lurk’ without ever really participating. Rotisserie directs posting and feedback in a manner that ensures consistency of participation across the discussion group.
Collage
Law school programs rely heavily on the use of ‘casebooks’, which form the basic content unit for 80% of the legal education market. These books contain court of appeals cases from the U.S. and U.K. The material itself is not copyrighted – it’s public domain – but legal publishers tend to add value by creating edited summaries and including questions and commentary for students (and hence charge $120 – 180/student). But many faculty would prefer the ability to just assign the subset of cases they want, and also the ability to add custom notes for instructions or context. Collage is a tool developed that allows faculty to selectively hide portions of the original public domain cases (students can always optionally view the hidden content) and also gives both faculty and student annotation and hi-lighting tools. When Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s students used Collage in a course, 82% preferred it (and 45% ‘strongly preferred’ it) to the traditional casebooks. The tool also allows ‘branching’ – the ability to take a collage or a part of a collage and add it to another custom casebook.
Playlists are the final piece in the toolkit – a platform for collections of online content that are easily shared and remixed. Think of it as an online course syllabus which could in fact be comprised of a series of Collages. There are also statistics available to administrators on usage.
The Berkman Center approaches these initiatives as entrepreneurial R&D experiments. They create them using open source licensing and hope that others will eventually take the tool platforms and augment and deploy them elsewhere. But they are also in the ‘pump priming’ phase for increasing utilization at Harvard Law School and across Harvard University as well.
Comments