CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion

Our course is titled Cyber One: Law in the Court of Public Opinion. The subject matter of the course is the creation and delivery of persuasive argument in the new integrated media space constituted by the Internet and other new technologies. Our premise is that “First World” and corporate domination of entertainment media, laws, and news can be balanced by the voices of individuals, groups and universities who use new media intelligently. We challenge students to attempt this themselves by choosing an issue of concern to them and using the media we study to make their case for change in the court of public opinion.

CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion is supported by the resources of the Harvard Law and Extension schools and by a grant from the Provost’s Fund for Innovation in Instructional Technology.

Classes/Audiences

A primary goal of this course/project is development of a strategy and model for bringing the content of courses offered by university faculty to a cascade of audiences, in our case from a law school classroom audience, to an extension school audience, to audiences comprised by members of the community and public who access pieces of our course through radio, television and internet. We seek a model that allows each audience to experience our program in a way that fosters community and intellectual engagement. We believe three aspects of our presentation necessary to this end. First, our message must be tailored for and addressed directly to each individual audience so that each audience is directly addressed. Second, the content of our message must be adapted appropriately for the academic sophistication of each audience. Third, the model must provide a mechanism for incorporating and reflecting the willing energy and response that comes back from each audience.

We offer our course this fall jointly through the Harvard Law School, the Harvard Extension School, Cambridge Community Television, and the web. We hope that our course will suggest a model for an expanded collaboration between the Harvard Extension School and the other schools of Harvard, an expanded vision of the role of Harvard as a contributor to public knowledge and discourse, and a model for other universities to emulate and expand.

Our course will address four audiences:

Law School Face to Face:

The course will be held live at Harvard Law School and will be open to Harvard Law students. These students will participate in this class and complete all course requirements in much the same way as in their other courses without any dilution from the inclusion of other audiences. They will also have the benefit of a substantial audience of students of the Extension School who will act as focus groups for several of the law students’ course projects.

Extension School in Second Life:

The course will be offered as a distance education course to students at the Harvard Extension School. The experience of the Harvard Extension School students will include videos of the live lectures at Harvard Law School as in previous Harvard courses offered through the Extension School.
The Extension School audience experience will be mediated by participation in a 3D virtual environment called Second Life. Even to many seasoned computer and Internet users, the idea of a 3D virtual environment may sound more like a thing of science fiction or a video game. In fact, it is a cutting edge development in teaching technology. The Second Life environment for Harvard Extension School participants permits us to foster a sense of community among students taking the course at a distance. It provides a rich medium for students to interact directly and satisfyingly with their instructors and their fellow students. With the aid of the Second Life environment, the Harvard Extension School students will participate in a semester long small group project in which they will develop an argument for presentation at a moot court with another group of students as their adversaries. We will hold the moot court arguments in the Second Life environment with Harvard Law School students acting as the judges.

Mediated Net Audience:

At the Harvard Law School we have the benefit of having a group of international students who have completed their legal education in their home countries and who attend Harvard for an additional one-year graduate degree. We invite these students to participate with us in the class as students and teachers by engaging people in their home countries who would like to share our class enterprise. Net audiences will be able to access the course videos, podcasts, readings, and other materials. We will not ourselves provide direct feedback, grades, or certification to this audience.

Cambridge Community through CCTV:

A selection of class meetings will be recorded at broadcast quality by CCTV and made available to the Cambridge community. These videos will be edited to include a hosted introduction as well as reporter-on-the-spot style interviews with members of the in-room audience. Each will stand as a coherent segment on its own.

We view our project as involving the great potential of universities to act as leaders in the Internet environment, and to see themselves as beneficiaries of it. We aim to energize our university to act on its own behalf to promote education, openness, civic responsibility, and social justice in an internet-mediated integrated communications environment. We wish to demonstrate a new means for bringing to the world the unrivaled content that universities possess, and to further open universities to interaction with and contribution from the myriad small worlds of our planet.

Staff

Instructional Staff

Charles Nesson

The primary instructor for our Harvard Law School class is Professor Charles Nesson. Professor Nesson is a student of evidence and argument in courtroom contexts. He is eager to extend his teaching to the cyber environment.

Rebecca Nesson

The project manager, co-producer and one instructor of our Harvard Extension classes is Rebecca Nesson. She is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Harvard. She has previously taught Extension School classes on Internet & Society: Technologies and Politics of Control, has served as the head teaching fellow for Principles of Programming Java (an introductory computer science class), and served as a consultant for Electronic Music: History and Aesthetics of Popular Music since 1960, also taught through the Extension School. The first two of these courses have included distance students who participated in the courses entirely online. The third included a significant online component in all student work.

Gene Koo

Gene Koo is an instructor for the Extension School class an a researcher on the potential of virtual worlds in Education. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and is currently the director of Legal Aid University’s online campus. Legal Aid University provides legal skills training for legal aid attorneys.

Technical Staff

In this course we will be asking students to engage a wide variety of technologies that they may not have used before. It is extremely important for the quality of their experience that they have substantial support available to them.

Two aspects of the course, the Second Life medium for Extension students and the Wiki/Web medium for all students, will be present throughout the course. Students at both schools will need to develop proficiency with them.

Rodica Buzescu will be our resident expert in Second Life. She is a highly experienced Second Live developer who has sucessfully created, managed and deployed the Berkman Center’s educational environment in Second Life. She will assist students in creating avatars and learning to move and interact in the Second Life environment. She will assist us in teaching, explaining and evaluating the many possibilities of the Second Life space.

Dean Jansen will be our resident expert in video production and distribution. He is a graduate of Harvard Extension School and currently works with the Participatory Culture Foundation to promote Internet distribution of video media.

Colin Rhinesmith will be our resident expert in audio production and distribution. He is a student at Emerson College in digital media production and an employee of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. He is integrally involved with the Berkman Center’s media library project.

Jason Crow will be our liason to CCTV (Cambridge Community Television). He will be leading student groups through the process of creating and distributing broadcast quality video through community media channels.

Kriss Barnhart will be our Harvard Extension School producer. She will be working behind the scenes to produce the videos of the law school lectures that will be made available to the public through this website.