Last week’s LA Times reported on vigilante open-source textbook publishing. Economist R. Preston McAfee was so fed up with “idiotic books that are starting to break $200″ that he turned down $100K for his textbook and decided to let it go Free.
“I’m a right-wing economist, so they can’t call me a communist,” he is quoted [...]
Looks like someone in the publishing industry’s PR machine has been hard at work peddling this story:
Textbooks, free and illegal, online: Use of pirated works hurting publishers
I’m sure that piracy is cutting into sales, but as is typical, the story lacks any quantitative data substantiating its overall alarmist tone.
As far as eLangdell is concerned, this [...]
(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 [...]
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:
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Matthew Bodie (St. Louis University School of Law), Christian Turner (University of Georgia School of Law) and I will be presenting at this year’s International Conference on the Future of Legal Education about the future of the casebook, including the eLangdell initiative now underway between CALI and the Berkman Center.
The conference is taking place at [...]
Prof. Matthew Bodie’s article, “The Future of the Casebook: An Argument for an Open-Source Approach” [SSRN], has finally been published in the Journal of Legal Studies. (The electronic version, of course, has been out for some time). The article outlines the case for not merely digital or networked casebooks, but open source (or at least [...]
I’m seeking an RA or two for the spring on the eLangdell project. The project has taken on special urgency in light of the new attention being paid to law school reform spurred by the Carnegie report and last week’s AALS conference theme:
Shape the future of textbooks in legal education with eLangdell. We’re looking for [...]
The eLangdell initiative by CALI/Berkman seeks to enable law professors to create and remix educational materials into cost-effective coursepacks. Looks like Pearson is trying to launch the same idea in the college textbook market. The pilot seems to be running at Rio Salado, AZ: To Cut Textbook Costs, They’re Printing Their Own.
Interestingly, the cost savings [...]
