Keynote: Rip Mix Learn
John Mayer, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction

The theme for this year's conference is "Rip Mix Learn." In his keynote address, Mayer discussed what this means, along the way presenting an exciting vision for the future of legal education that differs substantially from the status quo.

As the internet developed in the 1990s, lots of analog content was being adapted into digital form. Now, however, a great deal of information begins its life in digital form. All of this native digital content is perfect for incorporation into legal education.

"Rip" refers to finding these digital materials to incorporate.

"Mix" refers to the digital tools used to manipulate this digital information, particularly those that can be described by the word "automaticity" (i.e., tools that automate complex operations in a way that lowers the barriers to using technology).

According to Mayer, Christopher Columbus Langdell is the original "ripper mixer." What would Langdell do (WWLD?) if he were involved in legal education today? He'd have a website, of course. He select only those cases he wanted to use and rearrange them into whatever order he wanted. He'd also add his own supplemental material to it and self-publish all of this information on his website. In this scenario, freedom equals control, or at least control over how the information is presented. Langdell would also almost certainly centralize all faculty data into a single database from which an infinite number of resources could be generated.

This is the "Learn" of "Rip Mix Learn."

And he wouldn't just collect the information. He'd collect and assign information ABOUT the information so that everyone could find each other's information. Then, teachers could learn from each other. As is the case in libraries, freedom equals sharing.

Where do students fall in all of this? Well, today's law students are mostly digital natives. They expect everything to be digital. If casebooks were digital, they'd be lighter, they'd never get lost, and they'd be fully searchable.

Heck, many students might even prefer to listen to cases via podcasts. This isn't as hard to create as it might be seem, and Mayer even played a portion of a computer generated recording of Marbury v. Madison to demonstrate this.

These ideas are already taking hold in higher education. Some examples given by Mayer to illustrate this point were MIT's OpenCourseWare, Rice's Connexions, Creative Commons Education, and the Public Library of Science. Want examples in legal education? How about fourteen40, VitalSource, Duke's Faculty Scholarship Repository, the Science Commons' Open Access Law Program, and the LII's Wex.

Embracing native digital information opens up all kinds of possibilities. Law school faculty currently write complex articles which they give to corporate publishers who then turn around and sell the articles back to the very same law schools for corporate profit. Why can't law school's simply publish those articles themselves digitally at very little cost?

Other possibilities for digital information? The AmazonOnlineReader provides a platform for users to read e-books and create their own annotations -- which users can choose to share with all other users. Another cool innovation is the work of McKenzie Wark. He is working with the Institute for the Future of the Book to write his newest book entirely online, permitting users to comment and annotate his work in progress. Wark can then incorporate these suggestions into his final version.

What about users who prefer print? Why not use a tool like Lulu.com? They can publish a 500 page book from a digital source for $18.53.

And of course, class web pages. If legal education data is centralized, there's no limit on what can be done with it.

But this centralization doesn't mean that every creator would have to use the same tool for creation or learn how to add their content to the central database. Rather, a standard should be developed so that centralization can occur automatically behind the scenes, regardless of the creative tool used by that creator.

When it's centralized, all of this data can be dropped into a blog so that students can subscribe to its RSS feed and receive updates automatically. After all, there's little difference in the basic structures of a table of contents, a syllabus, a blog, and a student outline. Why not use the same data to create them all simultaneously?

According to Mayer, technology is not the big issue here. All of this can be done now. The big issue is convincing faculty to collaborate and cooperate. The sticking points right now include copyright, issues of prestige economics, and quality control of content.

So why should faculty do this? To be NIMBLE. If everything is digital, it can survive just about any catastrophe. What happens when another Katrina shuts down a law school at the tail end of a semester? If all the class information is digital, the students can complete the course from any location. The physical space (or lack thereof) becomes secondary.

To begin developing this idea of legal education, CALI has the following plans for Phase I of its project:
1) starting a syllabus commons
2) further development of CALIopolis.classcaster.org
3) creation of a wiki/social space
4) formation of an advisory board

A truly inspiring keynote from Mayer, proving that he's one of the people who sees where all this can lead and isn't afraid of it. In other words, he "gets it."

Update: As noted in John's comment below, the PowerPoint slides for his presentation are available at http://calicon06.classcaster.org/blog/thursday/2006/06/15/opening_keynote_rip_mix_learn