CALI Executive Director John Mayer has interesting post over at CALIopolis about laptops and classroom distraction...

It is not that students with laptops are distracted, it's that before laptops, faculty could not really tell if students were distracted.[...]

So does that mean that in the past, students were not distracted? I doubt that. The issue is that laptops have brought to the surface the polite fiction that occurs in classrooms all the time. Faculty teach and students listen or pretend to listen. Now, that pretension is manifest in the student's averted gaze to the laptop screen and faculty cannot ignore that.

The impetus for John's post is a forthcoming study claiming that laptop use in the classroom hurts student grades.

Assuming only for the sake of argument that some students get lower grades because they become distracted by their computers, there are two reasons why I think professors should never ban student use of computers. First, many of today's students are far more efficient writers and note takers with a keyboard than with a pen. By forcing these students to handwrite their notes, instructors are putting them at an unfair disadvantage. (At this point, Josh would say, "But Tom, how many of those students do you honestly think are using their computers to take notes? This leads me to my second reason.) Second, if a professor really wants students to pay attention during class, shouldn't they make their class more interesting? I'm not trying to be a smart ass here. Honestly. Think about it: if every student in the class has his or her head buried in a laptop, maybe everyone has weighed the pros and cons of the situation and decided that nothing worthwhile will be missed by checking email or playing solitaire instead of listening to the professor.

Naturally, even in the world's most riveting class, a few students will still get distracted. But they do so at their own peril. If they can still ace the exam without paying attention, they don't need to listen to the professor anyway. Really, it's their own loss, because if they already know the subject matter that well, they're wasting thousands of dollars on a class they don't need. Perhaps next time they should enroll in a course in which they might actually learn something.

[CALIopolis] The Real Reason Faculty Dislike Laptops in the Classroom

David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller, the developers behind the educational social networking tool Elgg, will soon begin providing coverage of other educational technology products on their new blog, edufilter. From the blog's "About" page:

Edufilter has been set up as a resource for those wanting to find out more about the various educational projects going on around the world. As well as reviewing the projects we will be reviewing educational software.

(Read/Write Web has an excellent overview of Elgg and an interview with Tosh and Werdmuller here.)

A new online tool called stu.dicio.us could revolutionize the way law students manage and share their class notes. Here's how Chris Gilmer at Download Squad sums up stu.dicio.us:

stu.dicio.us has the potential to become a students dream. It's an online note taking site. Students can publicly save notes and manage class schedules.[...]

Schedules are easily entered, tracking class name, day, time, school, and professor. You can also input to-dos, which make it easy to remember things that you have to do for the day. The Notes section in stu.dicio.us is pretty powerful. Users can search for notes in the database based on their particular subject or class. Making it extremely useful if you forgot or missed something from a lecture. Notes in the system can be exported in HTML or DOC formats for viewing, storing and printing.

I know this would've made my law school life easier. Study group members will be able to easily share notes with one another, and the process of obtaining notes from a missed class period might be simplified considerably. Best of all, everything a student needs to stay organized all semester long can now be stored in one location-independent space.

E3: Invasion of the Podcast People: Podcasting for the Law Librarian

John Mayer, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction
Jim Milles, University of Buffalo Law School

The guys made this one easy on me. John already has his synchronized slides and audio up over at CALIopolis. And while Jim added a lot of new detail to his presentation to gear it more toward law librarians of all different types, the big picture was pretty much the same as his session at CALI, which I've already summarized.

God bless you both.

Over at CALIopolis, CALI Executive Director John Mayer has the end of semester survey results from the Legal Education Podcasting Project (LEPP). The project, conducted during the Winter/Spring 2006 semester, involved about 30 law professors who recorded their classroom lectures and/or created weekly audio summaries and disseminated the audio files via a podcast feed.

The surveys, completed by students enrolled in the affected classes, provide some interesting data. Despite the podcasting name (inspired by the Apple iPod), over three quarters of the participants used a personal computer to listen to the podcasts. Only a little over 16% used a portable MP3 player.

Perhaps most notably, there was no real indication that the availabilty of a class podcast resulted in more absences by students. 85.5% of students reported that they attended classes with podcasts as much or more often than their other classes.

I've been podcasting this summer for my online Advanced Legal Research class. The interesting thing about my experience is that the podcasts aren't a supplement to the classroom lecture. They ARE the classroom lecture. Most of my students probably don't even really know what podcasting is, but they seem to have embraced the format nonetheless. I recently posted a discussion question on the class blog soliciting suggestions for how law schools could improve legal research instruction. By and large, the responses seemed to indicate that an online research course was exactly what they wanted, both for its convenience and its reflection of an increasingly electronic dependent world.

And I'd say that bodes well for CALI's podcasting push. Mayer says plans are already under way for LEPP II.

Visit CALIopolis for more of Mayer's analysis of the survey results, or simply download the complete survey results in PDF format.

Automated Media
Tom Ryan, Rutgers University

Ryan and Rutgers have developed a (cheap) method for automating the production of classroom audio and video recording. The school's previous system had several problems: costly staffing for nights and weekends, poor audio, and no method for easily converting media from one format to another. When developing a new system, they needed an inexpensive solution because New Jersey was in the midst of a severe budget crisis.

They had the following hardware (network camera) requirements:
1) Data/Power over single cable
2) Internal microphone on camera BUT with external connection
3) High quality video
4) Lightweight
5) Reliable, leader in video hardware
6) Synchronized audio and video

Ryan chose: AXIS 230 MPEG-2 Camera

This camera (approximately $1500 each) is an all-in-one box that requires no other equipment (and thus eliminates additional hardware costs).

As for the project's software requirements:
1) Automated recording
2) Automated post processing
3) Including open/end credits
4) Ability to generate podcasts
5) Course management system integration
6) DVD generation

Ryan chose: Apple's free Darwin Streaming Server and a combination of other free tools he has collectively dubbed Completely Automated Media System (CAMS)

Darwin handles the web-streaming of the completed AV files, while CAMS is a four-part system for actually creating those AV files: Scheduling, Capturing, Processing, and Posting. Scheduling achieved solely through PHP and MySQL (using phpMyAdmin). Capturing, processing, and post is done all in one step using Wget, a free tool for retrieving files.

Ryan and his team still intend to develop a better scheduler interface, create a computer presenter interface (i.e., an interactive whiteboard, or something similar), and implement some method of Pan-Tilt-Zoom integration.