CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion

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!