picture: UC Berkeley Law School Quote, by ingridtaylar, used under CC-BY

The classes I used wikis for were different than Eric’s- he actually assigned students to create Wikipedia articles, whereas the four classes I ended up taking with wikis all used school-hosted wikis for a wide variety of purposes:

• Three designated note-takers taking notes into the wiki, allowing the banning of laptops for other students.
• Note-taking rotating among all students, with wiki gnoming being (if I recall correctly) an ill-defined grade component, but no non-note-taking articles assigned.
• Creation of articles in a class wiki being the primary grade for the class, and with some interaction with other student’s work expected, but with no significant intent that the articles written would become a permanent resource for the public. Essays were capped at 1,000 words- which drove many students nuts but led to some fine writing.
• Creation of articles in a class wiki being the primary grade, with the intent that the class website would build up over the course of repeated class offerings to become an authoritative web asset for the scholarly community working in that area.¹

(All of these classes except the last were in technology-related courses.)

Despite these widely different set of approaches, several pieces of Eric’s commentary rang very true for me.

First, basic wiki concepts were tough. Partially, this reflects poor technology- the average wiki is needlessly hard to use.² Eric saw this in his students (“it took students a substantial amount of time to format their entries into Wikipedia’s format”) and I think it was true in my classmates as well.

But it isn’t just about the technology. Eric says “[m]ost students did not intuitively understand how to approach writing an encyclopedic treatment of a topic.” That does not ring perfectly true for me- lots of my classmates read enough of wikipedia that the format was relatively familiar- but it isn’t insane, especially given the very wide variability in the treatment of legal topics in wikipedia. It would almost certainly help to provide a sort of ‘model’ article, much like the model memos used in writing classes. Since most of the cases will be about specific statutes or cases writing two model/template articles should suffice for many classes.

Other wiki concepts, like extensive linking, or publishing drafts to the world in wiki-style, were apparently even more strange to most of my classmates. None of the four class wikis were deeply interlinked or cross-referenced, outside of what was necessary to create a table of contents and occasional outlinks to wikipedia. Similarly, few students were willing to post works-in-progress to the wiki and refine them there- most students preferred to work privately and then put a final text into the wiki. I’m not sure that law school is the right place to teach wiki nature, and indeed Prof. Goldman seems nervous about publishing student work while it is still a work-in-progress³, but still- I was surprised so few of my classmates appeared to be into the wiki way of creating iteratively edited, interlinked content.⁴

Collaboration was another angle that was difficult. Prof. Goldman says “I gave students the option of working together on a topic, but none ended up pursuing that.” This is not surprising- law schools are essentially designed to teach anti-collaboration- but it is a shame, since collaboration is a (the?) crucial skill in legal practice. Some mandatory wiki collaboration (every student required to substantively edit and fact-check another student’s work, as well as their own writing?) might be a small step in the right direction- and might also help alleviate Eric’s concern about the amount of time he spent editing and fact-checking. As a bonus, the wiki nature of the project should make it easy to grade this student editing- the edits will all be right there⁵.

All these issues make it hard to write good informative wiki-articles in a class context, but surprisingly, they also made the class-notes-in-wiki strategy fall far short of its potential. I would have thought that the lower barrier to entry (no need for perfection) and the stronger incentive for students to delve into them (so that they’d be prepared for exams) would have encouraged these wikis to become ongoing demonstrations in improvement. But instead people just had other things to do, so they tended to languish, untended, until right before exams. I think some ‘live’ wiki technologies like Wave, Etherpad, etc., will help improve that in the future (by allowing more than one editor while the class is actually happening) but until them I’m afraid wiki class notes might not get very far.

In the one class I had that was truly article-oriented, the professor provided a set of suggested questions to research and address. Prof. Goldman seems to regret not doing this from the start, but unfortunately this seems like an inevitable requirement. At the time you want students to start researching and writing they just can’t know the subject area well enough to know what is ‘missing’ from the wiki, so you almost certainly have to provide pointers for all but the most driven students. Note here that this class was in a purely scholarly area (no one was going to treat our work on English property law of the 1300s as legal advice) so we did not have some of the constraints that he felt he had with regards to making sure it was right before it was published. It would be interesting to delve into this question more- given that articles do not identify their authors as lawyers, and given that people come to wikipedia with an expectation that it is imperfect, I wonder if students can be encouraged to publish more work in earlier forms than they might otherwise.

Prof. Goldman concludes that “[i]t is unrealistic to expect that most law students can produce useful entries without supervision.” I’m not sure I’d be so harsh; I think most of my classmates were capable of doing this if prodded to, and it seems like most of Eric’s were too (after more supervision than he expected, admittedly.) But if he is right, this is a pretty sad statement to make. We’re a profession which is necessarily grounded in our ability to communicate, and we should be a profession grounded in our ability to communicate clearly and concisely to a legally unsophisticated public- that is to say, to our clients. If our students can’t write a simple encyclopedia entry, we’re in trouble.

Despite this pessimism, I think the piece gets the most important part exactly right:

I think a wiki entry might be a useful alternative to the traditional seminar paper. I have never been a huge fan of requiring students to write law review-style seminar paper in a semester-long course. Ultimately I think it’s nearly impossible for a novice to come up with a good topic and write a coherent and well-researched paper in a 4 month semester from a cold start. (I expand on that point a little here). As a result, in practice, many student seminar papers devolve into quasi-encyclopedic treatments of a topic with a paragraph of student commentary tacked onto the end. Instead of going through that charade, the professor could channel the student’s research and writing effort into an expressly encyclopedic treatment. This would reduce the pressure students feel to come up with a novel topic, and it would allow the world at large to benefit from the student’s work rather than the effort going into a desk drawer (or worse, the circular file) at the semester’s end.

In my experience, wiki writing- whether the goal is inclusion in Wikipedia or not- really should be part of the law school curriculum. It is better than traditional papers for teaching basic research and scholarship, and if done well, can also teach collaboration, editing, and other writing skills. There is still a lot to learn about the ‘done well’ part, but I hope Prof. Goldman and others continue to experiment with it. They’re doing the right thing even if their students don’t realize it yet :)

1. This separate class wiki had a lot of benefits, most notably being that student articles are never targeted for deletion as irrelevant, but obviously the segregation from the main wiki community has drawbacks too. Maybe the equivalent of the class prize for best essay should be that the best article is ‘promoted’ to main wikipedia…
2. I think real-time wiki/wysiwyg tools like Wave and Etherpad will help fix this once they mature.
3. It might make sense to ‘incubate’ student posts in a separate wiki, so that their classmates can see and participate in each other’s work, before publishing it to Wikipedia.
4. Tangentially, focusing on linking may also provide the solution to Prof. Goldman’s problem that the school requires seminar papers to be 20 pages long- one article is unlikely to be of equivalent length, but an interlinked network of articles on related cases, statutes, and topics could easily grow to that size.
5. One could imagine giving 40% credit for the article and 10% credit for the quantity and quality of edits made to other students articles, if you had an incubator wiki

Two tools that are going to make that a little easier:

• As usual, leechblock. Truly excellent for defining your workday. (I know I was on semi-vacation the past two weeks because I turned off leechblock.)
• Anki- libre, multi-platform flashcards to help me memorize all the various stuff that I have to stuff into my head in the next two months. Includes sync and a web-based version so I can work on my phone or across multiple laptops.

The celebration, while it lasted, was pretty nice. Some things that got done this weekend with my parents in town:

• lots of good food: at Dizzy’s at Jazz at Lincoln Center; at Blue Hill; at the awesomely yummy yet fairly reasonable Kuma Inn; at the awesomely yummy yet totally cheap Caracas Arepa Bar.
• music: Dizzy’s had music too- Bill Charlap trio. I think the music critic-approved phrase is ‘spectacular display of piano virtuosity.’ Also saw In The Heights again (first musical I’ve ever seen twice); still spectacular.
• museums: went to the Museum of Art and Design to see their glass and industrial ceramics exhibitions, and to the Guggenheim to see their Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective. Both highly recommended.
• walks; the weather has been terrific and we’ve been able to walk quite a bit, including some time in a gorgeous Central Park yesterday.
• friends: shout out to the close friends who ended up at the impromptu hat party!

So really, I can’t complain too much… now back to the grindstone.

A degree or reasonable facsimile thereof.

Parents arriving as we speak; actual graduation tomorrow.

(1) say ‘really? we need to have a citation for that at all?’ and delete the cite, because, really, ‘the internet is faster than snail mail’ needs citation only slightly more than ‘humans breath air’.

(2) spend hours (well, maybe 30 minutes) trying to find a better cite.

(3) spend hours (well, maybe 30 minutes) trying to find a better cite- while option #1 never even crosses your mind.

If you answer ’2′, you May Be A Journal Editor. If you answer ’3′, you are definitely a journal editor. Damn this has messed with my mind..

The first is “Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy“by Duncan Kennedy. There are a lot of damning (and quite a few not-quite-as-damning-as-the-author-thinks) bits in the piece, but I think perhaps the most dead on was this one:

The point of the class discussion will be that your initial reaction of outrage is naive, non-legal, irrelevant to what you’re supposed to be learning, and maybe substantively wrong into the bargain. There are “good reasons” for the awful result, when you take a legal and logical “large” view, as opposed to the knee-jerk passionate view; and if you can’t muster those reasons, maybe you aren’t cut out to be a lawyer.

Of course, as the article points out, there are multiple ways you could teach this- you could teach it with context, pointing out that your instincts are valid and giving examples of how justice can still be done within the context of the law; or you could teach it in the most soul-crushing, status-quo-reinforcing manner possible. No cookie for guessing which one happens in law school. Even if not all of the author’s assumptions seem plausible¹ he’s dead on about how the law school experience is structured and the pernicious impact it has on how even well-meaning people react to the status quo.

The second set of papers is in the most recent Georgetown Law Journal, centered around a piece called ‘Spam Jurisprudence‘ by Pierre Schlag and a series of responses to it. Again, I recommend them to anyone entering law school. First, because they are not an easy read², so if you can wrap your head around them you’re probably ready for law school. More importantly, they discuss a serious problem in legal academia- the lack of impact on the real world, and the lack of intellectual challenge involved in most academic legal work. Again, the paper is almost a caricature of the reality – Posner’s response in particular does a good job of pointing out areas where there is real intellectual ferment in today’s legal scholarship – but Schlag does point out some serious structural issues that will frequently cause disappointment if you come in with the idea of challenging current thinking through legal research and writing.

Of course, neither of these articles come with practicable solutions attached, in large part because (as both authors point out) these problems reflect the problems of the profession³, and so can’t be solved in isolation. But interesting to think about anyway.

1. I do think that there are significant differences between both students and professors, even if our hierarchies brutally overvalue and usually mis-measure those differences
2. I’d go so far as to say ‘bizarre’ read, perhaps entertaining if you get the in-jokes
3. maybe part of the plan should be fixing the ABA?

good: I got to write the following very satisfying footnote: “Indeed, their work is valuable primarily for the thorough and exemplary historical research presented in it; the conclusions drawn about software development processes reflect a remarkable lack of insight about best practices in software development.” I almost turned that footnote into a paper itself, which would have been much easier to write but ultimately much less satisfying.

1. insert mandatory comments about it being a deeply flawed system but also the one we’ve got here

The formal reason I’ll be in Durham is to give a guest appearance at CompSci 82, Technical and Social Foundations of the Internet. I have been involved in academia previously (TAing a couple times, lecturing at the Sloan School of Business at MIT, and moderating a panel at Harvard Law School) but I’m pretty sure this is the first time anyone has been quizzed on the content of my blog. I am terrified at what this indicates for the future of our civilization. :)

Before anyone asks, I don’t know whether guests are welcome to sit in, and I also don’t actually know the time and location of the class. But if I figure those out, I’ll post here.

(Informally, I have tickets to blue/white and the football game and extensive eating plans. But really, the class appearance was scheduled first.)