video vidi visum : virtual

(Cross posted at Law School Innovation)

Harvard Law School’s faculty unanimously last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available
online for free. The school’s announcement, issued today, notes that Harvard is the first law schol to make this commitment to open access. (Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences had also voted unanimously for open access in February.)

Joe asked what new innovations we might expect with the appointment of John Palfrey to Harvard’s newly created position of Associate Dean of Library and Information Resources. Here is what he had to say about this new development:

This exciting development is something in which the whole Harvard Law School community can take great pride… The acceptance of open
access ensures that our faculty’s world-class scholarship is accessible
today and into the future. I look forward to the work of implementing
this commitment.

Law schools, quite unlike almost every other academic institution in the United States, occupy an enviable position because we almost all have retained full rights and permissions to our own scholarship. For all the grumbling faculty occasionally evince about student- rather than peer-edited journals, this has also proven a tremendous advantage for schools, as there are no contracts and rights to negotiate with third-party publishers. Thus legal scholarship has the potential to leap forward by large bounds with policies like Harvard’s in place.

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I made a presentation and had a great discussion with the Information Futures group, an association of library and information scientists. The main points of my presentation:

1. From my experience in running a legal aid website for the general public, education is different than just putting information out there.
• A course textbook is a curated selection, not an open database.
• Education is knowledge that is highly mediated by culture, as is teaching itself.
2. Detour: Consider whether computers allow us a quantum leap from information to systems; that is, games illustrate how you can “publish” systems
3. eLangdell goes beyond e-books into networked knowledge — which is really more about creating a culture of knowledge.
4. (I went on to describe eLangdell as I’ve usually done in the past.)
5. What happens to publishers?
• The role of editors (= community managers?)
• Distribution (= user interface?)
• Marketing
• Validation
6. Aren’t these publisher functions what librarians do? Are they something that librarians can and should be doing in a new world of global commons publishing?

While I’ve been speaking of “communities of practice” often with reference to eLangdell, my recent thinking about postmodernism and knowledge has thoroughly permeated my current description of eLangdell. Understanding knowledge through the lens of culture is a thoroughly postmodern concept. I think it’s also a cornerstone of eLangdell’s multiple-paths view of the future of legal education.

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Like most students who dabbled in postmodern theory during college, I came away with a certain skepticism towards “truth,” yet managed to emerge with a belief — call it faith — that Truth was still out there. Stanley Fish offers a plot summary of the story so far in todays’ Times. As a practical matter, Fish observes, most of us did not dwell in the valley of doubt, but have tried to square postmodern analysis with our modernist commitments. He writes, “We can still do all the things we have always done; we can still say that some things are true and others false, and believe it; we can still use words like better and worse and offer justifications for doing so. All we lose (if we have been persuaded by the deconstructive critique, that is) is a certain rationalist faith that there will someday be a final word, a last description that takes the accurate measure of everything.”

Fish may as well be describing Wikipedia, for Wikipedia exemplifies the quest for truth in a deconstructed world. Wikipedia harnesses individuals’ faith in truth, yet ultimately tempers it within a fundamentally relativist framework. Wikipedia ultimately guarantees not so much the truth as the ability to argue for the truth by appealing to a common cultural understanding — the Neutral Point of View — as the final arbiter of truth. In short, Wikipedia resolves the postmodern dilemma of truth by ultimately relying on process. Through the give-and-take between many committed individuals who hold strong beliefs in what is true, as well as a common commitment to what truth means, a truer (or truthier) encyclopedia of knowledge emerges.

Wikipedia’s emphasis on process puts into action theories laid out by philosophers who have tried to slip the noose of relativism, from Rawls’s theory of justice to Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Taken to the extreme, a reliance on formal process leads to the kinds of absurdities we’ve seen newspapers engage in when they present “both sides” of a scientific controversy rather than emphasize empirical findings. But the blame for such pathologies lies not in postmodernism itself, which merely revealed to us that power shapes “truth,” but rather in journalism’s failure to evolve its cultural understanding of truth.

Thus, Wikipedia is best understood as a cultural practice (the NPOV) rather than mere technology (the wiki). What’s more, it’s a cultural practice that, by adopting a postmodern superstructure, puts into service the power and energy of modernist conflicts. Nothing can guarantee truth or accuracy — neither the wisdom of the crowds nor elite editors. But the key to Wikipedia’s thriving is that its process is both open and transparent. The levers of power are not destroyed (Foucault taught us that this is impossible) but simply visible. So long as Wikipedians feel they have access to those levers and a faith that “the process works,” a more perfect truth — but not a perfect Truth — will continue to emerge.

Update: Got an email from Jimmy Wales himself, in which he notes (after the jump)…
Read more »

Filed under: Internet & Society | 4 Comments »

Eric Gordon had an extensive interview with the public radio show Smart City last week to discuss Hub2 and “the new meaning of community.” Listen now.

We also had a very fun and productive chat with Tufts’ Civic Engagement Research Group on Friday. What interests me is that after so many years of Blizzard, Linden Labs, and everyone else pushing virtual worlds into the mainstream that most people we speak with nowadays “get it,” even if they’ve never experienced a virtual world firsthand. Many of the audience’s questions dealt with the nitty-gritty difficulties of grassroots organizing in general — for example, how to handle diverse communities with conflicting values. This is the reality we’re facing as we begin talking with real development projects in real neighborhoods: Hub2 will not help, for example, neighbors to figure out to balance the contradictory impulses towards helping each other out with selfish NIMBYism. But at least we might help knock out some of the design concerns — e.g. that public housing will be too dense — so that they can get to the values discussion with fewer distractions.

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Eric Gordon and I will be presenting on Hub2 tomorrow at Tufts’ Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG) tomorrow, 12:00-1:30 in the Rabb Room at Tisch College. The event is free and open to all. More details here.

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As a user of the Adblock Plus add-on for Firefox, every time I visit the Daily Kos I’m asked to Subscribe! since I’m not contributing to the site by viewing ads. While I feel a bit of a freeloader, and I’d be OK with paying some nominal amount per visit, I also don’t feel particularly inclined to charge my credit card in dribs and drabs all over the Web.

The problem of micropayments has plagued the Web since the late 1990s, and a combination of Adsense and iTunes has band-aided several aspects of the problem. But, as Doc Searls’ Project VRM asks, why are the vendors managing consumers rather than the other way around?

I think most of us now realize that good content is rarely free, but I am not content paying for it with my “eyeballs” (and mindshare). Imagine, instead, if a plug-in like Adblock Plus replaced all your ads with a tip jar — either one that passively paid the site $.01 from your kitty with each view, or that offered you the affirmative choice to throw a few coins in the hat. Why not cut out the middleman?

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Virtual tool puts residents in the planning process

Too often, the neighborhood planning process turns into an us-versus-them face-off between developers and residents.

But two local educators are hoping to change that by inviting Bostonians into the virtual world of HUB2, a 3-D online depiction of Boston in which the public can help design the neighborhoods where they live, work and play.

The Boston Redevelopment Authority is in talks with Emerson College assistant professor Eric Gordon and Gene Koo, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, to set up a pilot program to enable residents to help shape an aspect of Harvard University’s proposed massive development in Allston.

The HUB2 team is proposing bringing its virtual Boston to Allston, where residents would work with Harvard to develop a city park.

The rest of the article is available to subscribers.

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User interface specialists and aesthetes may love Mac chic, but coolness comes at a hot cost: increased power consumption. Before the Mac OS X made hipsters salivate over 3D effects, a typical home or business computer user was well satisfied with plain 2D graphics. Your typical word processor and spreadsheet, after all, is a 2D affair.

Inevitably, Microsoft followed Apple down the 3D maze. The beneficiaries would not just be Microsoft itself, trying to stay cool and relevant, but hardware manufacturers who would make a killing selling businesses and consumers “upgrades” to Vista-capable machines.

As it turns out these business benefits were illusory. Even worse, they will also suck enormous amounts of unneeded electricity off our overtaxed grid to power almost entirely unnecessary 3D graphics cards, purchased to bring computers up to “Vista capable” (or, more accurately, “Vista Premium capable”).

Moore’s Law gives us increasingly powerful chips, but rather than do more with less, we find new ways to do (very marginally more) with more. It’s a sick parallel to the automotive world, where hybrid vehicle technology gives cars more power with little or no mileage improvements. But as we’ve seen with SUVs, there’s little to stop rising consumption until a combination of high costs and cultural backlash take the edge off demand. Corporate purchasing officers wield vast power to stop this ecological calamity: may they find it in their economic and moral interests to do so.

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According to the New York Times’ The Caucus blog, Barack Obama was speaking with financially struggling students in in Edinburg, Texas, and had this surprising bit of advice:

“Books are a big scam” he said.

Say what? There were some slightly startled chuckles from the students.

“I taught law at the University of Chicago for 10 years,” he explained. “One of the biggest scams is law professors write their own textbooks and then assign it to their students, and they make a mint.

“It’s a huge racket,” he added.

I’ve spoken now to quite a few law professors who write casebooks, and very few are making a “mint.” But, while “big scam” and “huge racket” seem a bit strong, I do think that textbooks don’t need to be as expensive as they are. Obama’s attack on textbooks is more accurate in the K-12 and college markets than the one he specifically referred to (law); see, for example, the PIRG’s campaign to lower textbook costs.

Which is not to say that law school casebooks aren’t expensive or that they can’t be cheaper. We hope that the eLangdell project will not only produce better and more customized casebooks (our first priority) but also more affordable ones.

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Lewis Hyde outlined the “Encroachment on the Commons” now underway in the academy.

A basic dilemma facing educational fair use is that it’s stuck between too much specificity (cutting out potentially fair uses) and too much vagueness (leading teachers to avoid risk by stopping far short of fair use). To the extent that specific guidelines are available, they’ve been shaped by the publishing industry and drafted without serious input from users (input letters not published), lack legal standing (court in a coursepack case argued need to go back to the copyright statute itself), unclear if they are minimum or maximum allowed (NYU, under litigation threat, treated guidelines as max, now followed by 4 of 5 universities.

What can be done?

1. Give up on fair use altogether
2. Create guidelines: The status quo
3. Develop best practices: Get use communities to articulate their discipline’s norms around fair use. See the documentary filmmakers.

Lewis now advocates the third path, putting emphasis on the process of involving community rather than the legal requirements imposed by the law. The point would be that the community develops its own norms and establishes common-sense fairness before checking for legal acceptability. The next critical step would be winning buy-in from the entire community, especially those who might otherwise stand in the way.

John Wilbanks of Science Commons suggested reframing the issue as “The Right to Teach,” which strikes me as an incredibly powerful way to assert the positive value of fair use (which, after all, is a negative cutout of copyright).

I mentioned that for eLangdell, a legal education commons at CALI and backed by Berkman, would love to be part of a pilot project to identify best practices and be protected by any litigation defense system that can be set up in connection with these practices.

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