 Hello, hello. Welcome back. This feels much more like law school, doesn't it? This setting. Great to have you back. Thanks so much for your hard cluster work. I hope you submitted some ideas so that Rob has something to chew on. He's fired up, Rob, right? Great. So it's a real pleasure for me, actually for the first time in my career, to introduce Jonathan Citrain, who's not only my boss in many respects, but actually the co-founder of the Berkman Center and a member of the board, the co-director of the Berkman Center. He's a professor here at Harvard Law School, but also at the Kennedy School, and is a professor of computer science as well. Jonathan, in many respects, is combining many of the things we talked about over the past three days in a quite unique way. So he's a man with an educational vision. He has deep technological expertise and combines the two in a fantastic way. And most importantly, he has this gift as a teacher to create human connections. And we talked about the importance of exactly that skill as well. Frankly, it's been among the most inspiring teachers I've ever had, and I'm deeply grateful that you join us today for a session, and that I'm here to introduce you for once. Thank you. Thank you, Urs. Good afternoon. It was around 1998 in this kind of room, in fact in this very room, I started to see seas of laptops as well as seas of faces, and I knew what that basically meant. I would look out on those laptops, and if I could see what was going on on the other side, the chances are good that this is what I would be seeing. And this is a problem because I could try to kind of amp up the teaching to be more interesting than this, but it is depressingly difficult to do. So that's 1998. Fast forward to the introduction of wireless networking and respective cards in student laptops, and this became this. You had networked internet hearts, and now people were playing each other, which the tell was somebody in the middle of class would just be like, damn, there's an unrelated to what I was saying. That was sort of the advance of bringing networks into things. And then finally, you move into the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century, and you end up with this. There are actually people winning and losing substantial sums of money during class. Now, that is progress of a sort. I want to abstract a way to say, step one was basically a product. Solitaire came bundled with Windows. It was a product. It was yours to play as much as you wanted on the machine, and people took up that offer all too often. Then you get into something like this, which has a network mediating different people playing, and it's essentially a service, a service mutually offered among the players, but it moves from product to service. Then you see, wait a minute, if there's fun to be had, that means there's money to be made, and we go from product to service to commerce. And I say that is actually the trend line for the larger sets of issues that we're convened here to talk about during the week, and I want to sort of amend that trajectory a little bit so that the kinds of stuff we're talking about, namely conveying the flame of knowledge among people back and forth and actually apprenticing to the Western Enlightenment to see that as something different than this. It's not in the same category. It's not cash and carry, and now you know stuff that somehow might increase your ROI as a profit producing creature later. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but there might also be something more. Now we saw a kind of sense starting again, this is from 2000, an online knowledge alliance is going to be formed for which I love. They needed some kind of stock photo. It's like, how about the quad of the British Library? Like, okay, works for me. We have big institutions getting together to found fathom.com. Do people remember fathom? Anybody here fund fathom? Nobody wants to admit to that. Anybody a student of fathom? Those were good times, fathom.com. Well, not so much, but the idea was somehow we're going to take material and offer it for free. It was too soon, it was too confused, and there were lots of copyright questions and vision questions, and then you just ended up with this wonderful kind of swan song of the dot-coms that never quite took off. Founded by Columbia 1999, launched in 2000 with the goal of providing high quality resources to a global audience. Here are some statistics, and then in 2003, as part of a reorganization of Columbia University's digital media, who could have predicted that, we had to pull the plug. It's too bad, it was just about to succeed when they reorganized. So although visitors are no longer be able to purchase courses through fathom, including introduction to grammar, Columbia will provide this fathom archive so that it blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so that was sort of thinking of things in the kind of product mode, and there is still the idea, this is the revolutionary idea from MIT of open courseware, is also thinking in terms of free product. Now I don't know if you remember the first time you heard about open courseware, what I remember from it was, huh, all right, if anybody can get away with programming software to do education, I guess it'd be MIT, let's see the courseware. It turns out no, there is no courseware in the sense of where, that is a course, where is the where, it is nowhere. It is, the professor has a bunch of teaching notes and other stuff that he or she used to teach the course. We subtract from that like holes in Swiss cheese, anything covered by copyright. We then put it in a sack, ship it overseas where people bundle it into a digital archive and ship it back and it goes up on the website. Now the way I'm describing it does not sound that generous and my feelings about MIT open courseware remain that it is revolutionary, it is amazing, it is great, I am 100% behind it. I just want us to note that it's very modesty, what a small step it represents, the fact that that is revolutionary is worth noting. And the real contribution to me, the fundamental contribution of MIT open courseware is the idea that universities might want to make available what they have to the public at large without worrying about selling it instantly. That is the revolution that MIT open courseware really has set off and it was an invitation to other universities to do their own open coursewares, come up with your own sack of knowledge and figure out how to put that out. But it does have a sort of static quality to it. You can go and see a particular course at MIT as it was taught in 2009, take a look at all the materials and they might be helpful, they might not and then look at 2010 and see what has changed in the meantime. It's sort of alright folks, here's what I used, it looks like solitaire. It's a product, not a service and not really beyond that and it hasn't gotten the commercial aspect in. Then you see this, I love the guy up in the upper left or maybe it's a robot, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence from Stanford and this, by all accounts has been a brilliant offering. The proof is in the pudding. Lots and lots of people have taken this course. Has anybody in the room taken this course? Yeah, Victor, was it good? I did part of it, but it was great. You did part of it. You took up Joeychi's invitation to be a poll learner and kind of graze and then move along. You've taught it. So you were just taking it to make sure you knew it. You wanted to kind of... You were taking my class. That's a non sequitur, but I believe you. I remember you well, hence I know your name. Those were good times. Okay, so here is the movement from MIT OpenCourseWare product to thinking of it as service and service that is meant to scale with one hub. You're going to Stanford or Udacity or whatever it is and you know what, we're going to take 50,000. Next year, 500,000. Soon there will be more people taking this course than there are in the world. That's when we know we have succeeded because they will be artificially intelligent robots taking the course to program themselves for the coming bad years. So, alright, great. This is a service and to the extent that it's free, great, but notice that it anticipates still there will be a course taught by one group of people radiating outward to as many as possible and in that sense, I don't know how well it conceptually scales. If I'm in the business of teaching artificial intelligence, but not at Stanford, what do I see in this except my own doom? And that's worth noting about this model that just sees it as one to many. There's a broadcast model, a service, not a product, and then you start to say, alright, is it going to be a dot com? And here, as far as I can tell, Udacity and there's like some kind of already, some kind of like Mao versus Lenin split at Stanford. There's something else at Stanford. Some of you will know the details better than I, but there's money involved. Now we're into party poker zone. Not that there's much wrong with that, but as you can tell, I'm setting this up for some reflection about alternatives to the product model of just shoving free stuff out there and hoping people can make use of its solitaire style and the service model that says, I'm going to try to teach a course, not just to this room, but to everyone and if everyone takes it, we win, we're done. That creates a certain monoculture that I think we can do better than and that also represents what, when we again go back to the Enlightenment, what it's about. Now here's the starting point for me in my own classroom, including this very classroom where I teach torts. And this is my shelf in my office and you can see my worthless certificate that shows I'm allowed to present cases in front of the Supreme Court. And next to it, it does not get you on the subway unfortunately, next to it are case books. And case books are meant to look extremely austere. Here's the one I have traditionally taught from, tort law and alternatives. Like, you know, there are alternatives. You'll have to take the course to find out. And it's a book that is extremely boring looking and the book comprises mostly cases. And by a case, I mean a reported opinion, usually from a judge in the United States, federal or state courts. And there they are. They're lined up. And if you're going to take torts, 50% is already predestined by, I don't know, historical accident, no pun intended since it's torts. Accident law is what, anyway. If I have to explain the joke, it's not a good joke. Half of the course is already predestined because if you're going to take torts, you have to do Murphy versus Steeplechase, the case about the flopper, where Judge Cardozo says famously, the Timorous may stay at home on this amusement park ride that breaks down. Everybody wants to read that case in torts and I can name you ten others like it. Then maybe the author of the casebook throws in some others and sells the casebook for between $150 to $200 a pop. In what we call an agency problem, I just tell my class, go buy this casebook and it doesn't redound to my detriment that they have to spend the money. They spend the money, they carry around the book, they come into class, we read the cases. Those books are copyrighted, as well they can be because they have some other words in them as well as the cases and there's arrangement and stuff. But the raw materials, the cases themselves in America are not. They are public domain. So we saw this as a starting point to say, well, wait a minute. Could we imagine creating a lightweight system that would let me arrange cases the way that people spend time curating their music list in iTunes? A playlist of cases. So for Wednesday, here's your playlist. Play them in sequence and some of the cases will be long, some short, but if I did that and I could get my mits on the cases sort of immaculately conceived, not burdened by contract and already, as I said, not by copyright, I can come up with these playlists, assign them to students and charge them nothing and already we're ahead of the game. It's not exactly revolutionary, but it's cheaper and that was the first step we did when we created these things called H2O playlists. So here's a typical playlist now for the case book I and a team working with me, including Kendra, who is somewhere here in the room. There you are, Kendra. Came up with a playlist for the entire torts course online, both service and product. If you want to print everything out as a big old PDF, go to town, you've got it. The students, it turns out, didn't. To the extent they wanted to do their reading at all, they would do it online or on their iPad or be ready to read it as if it were kind of a service and it meant then that as they would read for a given day and go through the indented outline, so here's Vosberg versus Putney. That's a great one. Somebody kicks somebody else in the schoolhouse in Waukesha, Wisconsin in the late 19th century and that light tap ends up with the guy losing his leg. Somebody soothes, et cetera, et cetera. And here is the case. And by the way, if this were live, you can change the font size as much as you want. It's obviously way too small here. And the case is edited as if it were being edited in a case book. And where you see dot, dot, dots, you can actually end up expanding and seeing what you're missing. So I don't have to make a binary trade-off at all or nothing. The students, if they're lacking some context, because the cases are written to be read fully, they can expand or contract individual paragraphs that have been elided, something not possible in a regular case book. And there's a possibility in the first instance for me to annotate it. So we can say here, this is the famed case of USV Carol Toeing in which the bar G, who cares for the bar, wait, what's a bar G? And it turns out, well, we can add that in the annotation because we don't have bar Gs very much. It's not pictured here, but you can see other explanations in italics here describing what happens when this poor bar G sinks because the bar G got drunk and wasn't keeping an eye on it. And this then lets me add stuff. The students can read it great. Everybody's happy. But now's where we start to say, let's not just make this a product, a nicely bottled product for free, but start thinking about it beyond to service and beyond that to a community. So one of the cool things about iTunes is that there's a store and you can just drag and drop as long as you're willing to pay the $9.99, whatever you want to add to your playlists. So our conception here is that I can now go out to anybody else in the world teaching torts and say, if you want to teach torts from my materials, you can fork my list. You can immediately copy everything and have my torts class ready to go and it will cost your students nothing. In the meantime too, I teach Monday, Tuesday for two hours a day. You're teaching three days a week. You can go in and say, please rebalance the readings for three days a week. Any teacher who's had to go to a case book or textbook and upon a change in teaching schedule reallocate the readings. Talk about annoying. Here it's just redistribute and away you go and if they want, those other professors can tweak that forked copy in small ways. They can change the way the cases are edited. They can change add a case here, take out a case there and we have prepared extra modules on feminism and torts, on law and economics and torts so that somebody wanting to spin the class one way or the other or add extra materials can draw from that, make their own playlist in turn contribute that playlist back to the common wheel and then I can copy it from them and now my torts class has improved and instead of there being a universe of a handful of case book authors hoping to hit it big on the top end of Zip's law and be the 20% of the case books that 80% of the students read, now you have almost any professor able to be a little bit of a case book author, the way that is getting Morozov complains we can all be slactivists now, we don't have just activists, the crazy people that run around and the rest of us, we can be a little bit activist if there's a cause we like on Kickstarter or on Facebook or whatever it is. Now anybody can contribute a little bit and the wonderful experiment here is how will the case book evolve now that it can micro-evolve? Will it really be that a 19th century case involving one kid kicking another has to be the center point of the rule and tort of the egg shell plaintiff? You know, maybe, maybe not. There's some interesting stuff out there and there is a currency at work that isn't just money. This system can keep track of whose materials in syllabi were drawn upon by whom? Because I remember all too well for those of you who've heard of SSRN people, SSRN is familiar this is where you put your working papers and such people used to do it just to make their papers available and then one fine day SSRN came up with this wonderful innovation called the download count with the download count came trumpeted news stories including I dare say from this law school Harvard Law School boasts five of the top ten most downloaded authors on SSRN legal things and now everybody is falling all over themselves not only to put their papers into SSRN to rack up those download counts and therefore accolades but to break their books into chapters so they can put each chapter in as a separate thing and then get ten downloads for the prices one I remember at one point right before an exam an internet related class I was teaching my students all somehow through like wildfire not inspired by me they all thought that if they read one of my articles they'd be prepared for the exam so they all rushed to SSRN to download the article SSRN started refusing to give it to them saying this is an attempt to game the download count our download count defense has come into play you may not have the article I found out about this because the students were desperately writing me we can't get the article and your exam is tomorrow I'm like what are you talking about I tried to tell the SSRN people just don't increment the counter like still give them the article or subtract one I did you know this is crazy it is crazy but let's harness that craziness back here to have professors competing to come up with materials that other professors will draw upon and to watch that genealogy as it unfolds to me that's a way of starting to allow professors to get into this system using incentives that they recognize without having to reinvent everything all at once start simple it doesn't weigh as much and it's free and then move in to the more revolutionary stuff and let me give you one other quick example on that front so we've been talking about playlists which are the lists of cases and of course you can substitute any material here from cases it doesn't have to be legal cases and collage which is I used to call it Santa's workshop but there's an establishment problem with that under the First Amendment so collage is a way for people to edit a given piece of material in a playlist like editing a song to be louder in one part or have a different instrument that's where you're editing and adding the annotations and the dot dot dots and expanding then rotisserie is an idea that says what if I were to put a question out to this class around the material for the day a given reading and by a deadline each of you is to answer that question and at the deadline everybody has his or her answer routed randomly to another person in the room for a reaction so you will write your answer then you will be critiqued by someone and you will be asked to critique someone else and like elephants arranged from trunk to tail no matter how big the class you can always pair up somebody with somebody to critique and someone from whom they are going to be critiqued so it scales very nicely and now the students are interacting with one another okay that's fine we've used that before the next step is for this system to say since it knows the genealogies and it knows all the materials and it knows what's being assigned when to give me a note that says hey you guys are reading the flopper case for next Tuesday there happens to be a common law class in Singapore that is also reading the flopper case for next Tuesday would you like your kids' answer to the question to be routed to the Singaporeese students and vice versa for a critique hey that's not a bad idea as much diversity as I think I've got in this room there is so much more the minute you're crossing lines and doing so around a text which keeps it nicely anchored for people to be relating to one another understanding though that here it is not a broadcast model it's not like soon the Singaporeese will be listening to my class or we're going to have these materials out there and they won't be dead letter they will be alive they will be edited evolved they will be in use I'll see who's using them and have a chance to meaningfully interact professor to professor and then student to student for them so this is just an example of the rotisserie up in order there's a question being asked and people answer it I think that there are basically three types of teachers you have your innovators represented by the people self selected to be in this room who are like it's digital I'll try it we need you that's maybe 25% then you have what I call the orthodox and the orthodox say Christopher Columbus Langdell invented the case method in somebody from the library when did Christopher Columbus Langdell in 1432 number not guaranteed and it's worked since then that's what we're going to do I have what goes on in my classroom it's perfectly optimized there's a lot of people like that the only way I found to reach them is to just change one small variable like it's everything you have only cheaper and that's part of what we're trying to do to reach the orthodox then the third type of teacher is what I call the fundamentalist the fundamentalist is somebody who is orthodox who thinks that everyone else has to be orthodox too there's a difference in the Venn diagram everyone fundamentalist is orthodox but not everybody orthodox is fundamentalist so the fundamentalist are the toughest nuts to crack and I'm just hoping that generationally we can end up outnumbering them and the quality of what we produce be such and the network effect so strong that at some point they're like screw it I'm putting my paper into SSRN2 because otherwise I won't have any download counts and that's kind of the acceleration you get with a system that is networked where students are connected to other students and you feel more and more left out if you're not joining that's so different from just the product thing that says everybody's using these new kindles or iPads in class shouldn't you use them too so that's basically my thinking about it if you want to play with our playlist I was talking about the link is up at the top there for the torts playlist I've left aside the question tool which is a synchronous tool for environments like this but there's no need to demo that right now but I think we should open it up to questions at this point thank you very much yes sir feel free to use your UN style mic just to make it a more awkward exchange you have to press the button so help us pick another academic discipline not law maybe developmental education anything but a hard science I'm with you we have in community colleges thousands of people teaching developmental math developmental English so that students can take four credit classes when they complete that what you describe exists not at all in that universe how to start it well the best way I can think of to start it is to the extent that the curriculum you talk about has elements of standardization to it now the standardization in torts is as I said historical accident and kind of centripetal force it's not like it bears any relationship to what they actually get tested on in the bar exam they have to learn that all over again in bar review for which they pay a lot of money in something like developmental ed or in secondary school public education you're teaching to a test or a set of standards for which the students need to get certified for something that says to me wow common curriculum that teachers stray from at their peril and what I like here is the idea of being able to offer them a playlist perfectly tuned in the first instance to the test to which they are supposed to teach that then gives them the opportunity to improvise and vary a little bit here there where they can and that provides though an initial gravity well for everyone teaching developmental ed to want to be in touch with others and even to be sharing lesson plans with one another I'm amazed at the amount of time people in secondary education spend doing lesson plans that they may or may not execute upon when they're in the classroom but that's sort of the currency of that system in part so to the extent that a system like this there was an iTunes store an Amazon store of those materials cued to the standards that had to be met and they can drag and drop them into a shopping cart and the checkout is free that sounds like a pretty good deal to me rather than pulling out the dog-eared books that may now be outdated they've just changed the standard where we learn everything that's a great time for that person that teacher to want to switch to the digital environment does that make sense to you or tell me more if not in the example you provide in tort law you have these well-established cases that everybody agrees are the sort of corpus of what students need to learn about half of it that's right I need to first of all thank you for the brilliant and provocative thought-provoking presentation but I need to think more deeply about whether we really have analogs in the highest-need areas where we have the access and completion crisis in education both at the secondary and post-secondary level and I don't know that we have that consensus as to the core elements of the curriculum that would allow us to iterate off this model in enough of those disciplines to be able to replicate this the brilliant insights that you're sharing with us today there may be thoughts on this question yes wouldn't it be possible to substitute problem-solving scenarios with the case studies so problem sets but not just here's the problem but the Khan Academy stuff or various other things that are out there but the menu the playlist the playlist can have any elements exactly it could be a song those problem sets which can be graduated from I don't understand numeracy all the way through oh here's how we solve a very complex calculus project but the playlist concept can just be a list of these that a teacher then can pick and choose or a student or however it's organized so I think there is I guess my point of confusion on it is with the torts the greatest hits are already known at least are the oldest hits or the oldest hits or the most venerated golden oldies I don't know that we have that we might be able to develop it talk to any senior math educator or people who teach just how to teach mathematics we have that we have it in the community just in the way that the torts have been codified that's similarly open and public you'd have to pull people together but the problem sets are identifiable couple well positioned grants could help I see hands up and I just either a hook should come out at some point to stop us or somebody should signal me if we need to end immediately so I think I just want to do a translation here I went through many of these law test books and when we say case in law test books we are not talking about problems or questions that will appear later in the exam so I just want to make this clear because this is a translation that we need to do in areas here so when I see the playlist and I view this project in the copyright for librarians we use a lot of this infrastructure you can put any section of any book that is compatible to any curriculum I think that's what the training is trying to say within that playlist and then you use the other tools that are very interactive tools for example the HEO, rotisserie and the questions to set the interchange and questions and build your assessment part so I just wanted to be sure to do this translation yes sir with the flipped classroom I think we've already got this one of the visions that my team at flipped classroom has had for a long time is what if there was a playlist of all these videos and we had the best teachers and I've trained many of them all over the country in making these videos it's not tort law and there was a way for them for people to access these videos and use a tool like this in a playlist fashion yes my question is around language in the rotisserie does this all happen in English or is there a way to overcome language barriers well at the moment the examples all happen in English because that's my primary language but I am so excited at the prospect of machine translation getting good enough for government work we're just on the cusp of that and the idea I use Singapore as an example of course because there's no language barrier English is so commonly spoke there spoken Freudian slip right it's my primary language but I'm still a little wobbly but the prospect that my students could be answering a rotisserie question with Chinese law students on the other side and not expecting the grammar to be perfect Google bot in between or whoever is doing translation to me at least if I'm a student the first time that happens I'm like okay OMG like this is really cool and honestly I think it's what this is sort of a political moment it's what some regimes that don't fully embrace the rule of law fear the most they're counting on language as being a kind of default moat around their epistemic community bridging it student to student yes sir oh you don't have one we're in the cluster we're talking about pathways so in effect it's kind of how you put together your pathways for study in a sense we were coming up with the same sort of idea where once you've identified your pathway and it's common across whichever region whether it be US based or UK kind of base then you're able to kind of identify curriculum that OER materials that you can assign to your pathways and in a sense we have the same kind of view I'd kind of be wandering around the iTunes store I'd go into whatever pathway or course pathway that I was after I'd fill my basket up with my free kind of OER goods that you've aligned and you check out and go into a different environment where you've got your social kind of interactions with your students and so on as well as elsewhere so that's something we've just put in our cluster intervention idea and of course what I like here and this is an open question as to how it will shake out is our law the free software movement it might be that a system like this will lead to more and more common pathways that there gets to be sort of an orthodoxy around how to teach something or it may be that this facilitates many more flowers blooming because you can vary the path so easily and it's kind of like how many flavors of eunuchs and gnu linux are there and at forks and then there's this nopix and then it kind of folds back in again and I imagine we'd see things like that happening here I suppose if there came to be only one real pathway I'd be nervous about it but my guess is we're already stuck with that because of the power law that applies to the traditional proprietary teaching materials and that the real surplus to be gained is in having a pathway common enough that then it's trivial to divert from it and to bring others along if the diversion proves better than the original path I have a sign that even with my limited English skills says wrap up so in conclusion thank you all very much I hope this is the beginning of an ongoing and continuing really conversation about these things thank you so much Jonathan