At-Large
We invite the world to participate in our course through this website. We hope to make this an engaging experience by presenting our course material directly to an at-large audience in a way that we hope will make it both accessible and interesting for you. On this site you will be able to:
- join the at-large participant mailing list
- We have set up a Google Groups maling list for the at-large participants that we will use as an announcements only list. We will use this list to notify you of interesting course-related events, materials, and opportunities for participation. Only the course staff will be able to post to the list, but we encourage you to use the General Discussion Space in the open Moodle installation and the course wiki to communicate directly with each other and the students enrolled in the class.
- view and download all of the lectures for the course in QuickTime format
- We are licensing all of our course videos under a Creative Commons license. We encourage interested viewers to edit, remix or otherwise re-present the course material in any way you see fit. For instance, a particular course topic may interest you particularly. You may wish to cut the lecture video material into a shorter, snappier Internet video piece and try distributing it. You may wish to add to the raw materials by doing your own interviews or filming related to the idea from lecture that you are exploring. If that sounds good to you, it would be a great class project for you to undertake. See the bullet below about at-large participants doing class projects.
- view detailed discussions and summaries of all of the course readings.
- For those readings that are no longer subject to Copyright, you will also have access to the readings themselves. All of the discussions and summaries of readings will be generated initially by Harvard Law students with great skill in reading and analyzing texts. Once the initial discussions and summaries are available, they may be edited by students in the Harvard Extension School course or members of the at-large audience who have something to add.
- participate in certain class-related events in Second Life
- We will be having certain events in Second Life that we will be opening to the general public. They will be a good chance to engage in the course as well as a reason to get started using Second Life and exploring the potentials of a virtual world. We also encourage you to come hang out on Berkman Island during the course. There will be a lot of informal class-related activity happening on Berkman Island, so come and start participating! You can even organize your own activities.
- Because of the limitations of how many avatars can visit the island at one time, we cannot open the island to at-large participants during class meetings. However, at other times the island will be open to the public and you are welcome to come hang out on the island and use the media library. We expect that we and the enrolled students in the class will frequently be there at non-class times to talk with you as well.
- Do the homework assignments that the law students and/or extension students are doing
- The law student assignments will be posted directly on the course syllabus. You are welcome to do them as well. We will not grade them and may not have time to give you direct feedback, however. But we hope they will be interesting and enriching on their own.
- The extension student assignments, many of which will take place in second life, are available to you in the open part of the Moodle courseware. You will need to sign up for an account but then you’ll be able to access everything there. These assignments are a good place to start if you are unfamiliar with Second Life
- Participate in a law or extension student project in a supporting role
- The law and extension students will be undertaking ambitious projects of their own design and will certainly be looking for help from members of the at-large community. If you have particular skills to offer or just some time that you are willing to spend doing an interesting task for one of the project groups, they will be very grateful. Their projects have not yet gotten started, so we will update this page with information on how to get involved once there is something to get involved with!
- Do a class project collectively with the other at-large participants
- Students in both the Law School and Extension School segments of the class will be doing small group media production and distribution projects. We invite you to participate in this part of the class by doing a Wiki-mediated project of your own. We will be posting some good raw materials for some projects in the at-large participant pages of our Course Wiki. You are encouraged to do what you will with these materials. You may put lots of time and energy in seeing a project all the way from start to finish, you may wish to only participate in one piece of a project, you may wish to put your energy to work breaking a project down into small tasks that you invite others to do. The choice is yours, and so is the collaborative willing energy!
